*appeared in Concrete Wave magazine, 2004
Corporate outsiders leeching off skateboarding is nothing new to the art, and skateboard companies pandering to the mainstream is old hat. As far back as the late seventies, magazines were decrying the impure motives of those who would merely jump on the bandwagon to turn a profit. “All of a sudden, businessmen with no knowledge of skateboarding or the skateboard market saw a lot of money to be made, and to be made fast. Cheap boards from Taiwan and elsewhere appeared, selling for approximately eight dollars per board. Manufacturers sprang up overnight. Retail outfits opened up in every area, parks were built by people who figured all skaters wanted was a concrete surface with a few slopes or undulations to skate on. Everybody wanted to be in on the craze…there were too many manufacturers and distributors for too small a cake and a lot of people in the sport for a quick buck.”
An ad appearing in Skateboarder from Campo Construction Company read: “20,000,000 skateboarders are looking for a place to try their skills; fill their needs and roll in profits…be among the first to get in on the skateboard boom…You’ll see your investment dollars turned into profit…capitalize on this growing sport.”
More recently, the headlines of the North County Times, San Diego read: “High flying riders catch air in O’side…competition brings top talent…the money and advertising of antiperspirant and soft drink companies are clear and present at the bustling event…endorsement deals and cash prizes mean six-figure salaries for riders who are as young as fifteen…”
I skateboard because I love it and I do not value
lubricating the gears of society over developing my creative interests and
abilities. That is what skateboarding is about to me. Skating gives me a chance
to check out of the rat race for a while and visit the world of development and
discovery of character. Yet far too often I feel like I’m jumping from one rat
race to another, just with different surroundings.
The skateboard industry as a
whole grew from 510 million to 1.2 billion retail dollars in the years from
1996 to 2000. Nike bought Hurley, K2 bought
Planet Earth, Billabong acquired Element and later inquired about purchasing
DC. Unfortunately, the growth of skating has an overlooked side effect: the
more popular something becomes, the more coveted it becomes, therefore the more
money there is to be made off of the industry that surrounds it. If unchecked,
this can and will lead to the corruption of the art by profit hungry
businessmen, status seeking socialites and other such distractions. As is the
norm whenever there is a boom in popularity, skateboarding has once again
attracted the attention of corporations and outside business players such as
ESPN, Reebok, Mountain Dew, the Air Force, Slim Jim, cell phone companies,
Ford, Juicy Fruit, Pepsi, 1-800-COLLECT, Corona, Right Guard and countless
others.
Do such corporations have our best interests in mind or are they merely using us and exploiting our natural appeal to promote themselves? Is it not likely that their interests are fronts to sell product to an otherwise uninterested group? If traditional corporations continue to gain clout as power centers of skateboarding, how will that change things? Who suffers when skate companies adopt corporate policies of marketing and distribution? Is there a future for the small, hardcore skater owned and operated specialty shop? Is this recent upsurge a sign of overdue acceptance or an ingeniously constructed attempt to gain control of a market that has long went unnoticed as potentially lucrative? Could the creatively sterile, statistic oriented and marketing centered shallowness of mainstream sports replace the heart and soul feeling of skating, leaving an artistic and intellectual void, a mere shell of trends and tricks? Are there not an abundance of products and an absence of ideas? These are questions industry players need to consider; yet few will as they are busy creating the next ‘revolutionary design’ or promotional strategy.
What happened? Well, somewhere along the line some market research dudes realized that interest in traditional sports was dropping and interest in individual, participant type activities such as skateboarding was on the rise. Further market research confirmed these suspicions, and it was just a matter of time before mainstream America found its vein of re-entrance into the souls and wallets of the younger generations.
The companies whose profits came from the sports, entertainment and music industries watched them drop as American kids tuned out to football and Nintendo and tuned in to renegade skate videos and underground music genres such as true punk rock, hip hop and electronica. The youth who bought into the old value systems of baseball, mega-stars and New Kids on the Block started taking their business elsewhere. Like a blip that falls off the radar, companies such as Nike watched in confusion as their own supporters disappeared. Where did they go? They got into skateboarding. They went and bought skateboards from the dedicated individuals brave enough to sell them in spite of public disdain and unconstitutional legislature. They went out and had fun on streets and homemade ramps for no reason other than that they wanted to. At demos and contests today, most of the participants seem driven by forces other than personal satisfaction or enjoyment of skating. They seem driven by a quest to do the gnarliest thing, to get the freshest gear or to bump elbows with the right industry giants, all rungs in the ladder of self-interest.
A January 1997 press release from IASC read, “…only one event on the calendar was actually a skateboard contest for skaters, Brian Schaeffer’s SPOT contest…other events were intended to highlight skating to the non-skateboard audience through media exposure on ESPN or similar television programming. This is further highlighted by the ever-developing interest of FOX and MTV sports.”
Advertising, marketing, corporate sponsored competitive skateboarding…true skaters resent the motives of network executives who would lump them together with rollerbladers, rock climbers, sky surfers and poppy, would-be punk rockers under some giant circus tent replete with soft drinks, hair products, cell phones and deodorants, all under the intention of increasing product marketability to a broad audience or ‘target,’ as they call it. This is not what skateboarding is about. Why would a hardcore skater want to drink Sprite? It’s full of sugar that will quickly dehydrate you and loaded with a beautiful preservative called sodium benzoate. It is suggested that we should consider more events like Schaefer’s, the Powell Quartermaster Cup or Jim Thiebaud’s Ramp Jam event designed for skaters and limited to skater only audiences. This can be done at a shop or local level.
Are we so creatively sterile as an industry that we allow multinationals the responsibility of promoting our art? Look closely at their interpretation of skateboarding. It is wrong. It is untrue to the culture. These programs deal solely with the shallow sport and competition approach to skateboarding. They are akin to the westernized forms of martial arts that present empty forms of violence void of any real method for self-discovery. How many of these corporations are actually giving back to skating on a root level? Yes, they may kick the money to set up the extreme circus tent, toss the goods and pay the pros, but after the pros are gone and everything else, are they still interested in skateboarding? Are they going to do anything for the local skaters of that town? For the 1999 X-games in San Francisco, close to one million dollars was put up as prize money for the entrants. ESPN was sure to brag about that. But what they didn’t brag about was the fact that the combined advertising revenue soared to $22 million dollars. This is from just one year. They’ve been running that freak sideshow for almost a decade now.
Furthermore, the X-games is much to blame for the exaggerated concerns over skateboarding safety, as are the myriad skate slams played on shows like Real TV. In an effort to increase ratings by enhancing dramatic content, network executives overplay the existing dangers in the art. Shows like these get the general public thinking that skating a three stair is extreme and dangerous.
Not only that, but kids watch the X-games and they see all the hype and fame in the magazines. Their impressionable minds realize that there is much to be taken from professional skateboarding. Everyone covets a piece, so everyone’s busting out. Then you show up to the park or spot and sometimes it feels like football practice or a fashion show, at least in southern California and most major cities where the species has evolved into mere stair counting mannequins that simply parrot what they see in magazines and videos.
The so-called benefit of such involvement is the increase in exposure. This theory holds that the corporate presentations like the X-games or Gravity Games increase exposure, therefore getting more kids hooked into skateboarding than before. It is true that the more new people come into the skateboard scene, the wider the variety of outlooks and styles will grow. The evolution is preserved; skating needs a constant influx of new ideas and experimentation to push the envelopes of tricks and forms. Each new generation can add to the existing form. In theory, more skaters amounts to more parks, more accessibility and bigger and better sessions.
As sad as it is, there are many people in the world whose main input of information is the television, and largely televised competitions and commercials may be the only exposure to skateboarding some will ever get. If they were down they would’ve sought it out like the rest of us have been doing for decades. Unfortunately, the true gains from this type of exposure fall in the hands of advertisers. The hardcore skate shop may get a bit of overflow, but it pales in comparison to what the advertisers and corporations gain. The valid counter argument can be made that every kid in America has heard of skateboarding by now, and there is by no means a deficiency in exposure. Can we not invent our own ways of showing the general public what we’re all about?
