To the uninitiated, bar spins, grinds and half pipes may sound like the wilder elements of a night on the town. For ASA Events, the lingo of skateboarding, inline skating and bicycle motocross is the lexicon of success.
The Marina del Rey firm, the largest action event and television production company in the United States, has grown along with the burgeoning popularity of the sports.
It employs about 60, who each year stage 250 action sports events in 21 countries and produce more than 100 television shows. The company even manufactures and sells the ramps that are used as launching pads for the athletes in many of the events.
From their humble “grunge” beginnings, youth-oriented “extreme sports” have established a foothold in mediums once devoted to traditional sports, such as cable TV’s ESPN and daily newspapers, and are the focus of myriad Web sites. Even the Olympics feature skiing events with “extreme” roots.
Also becoming extreme is the interest of sponsors in the sports, largely because they are the domain of the ever-popular young male demographic. ASA has sponsorship deals with LG Electronics Inc., Procter & Gamble and Warner Bros.
To pull off their business moves, founders Mark Shays, Todd Shays and Rick Bratman had to be more than creative.
“If you want to slap your logo on the half pipe and say, ‘I’m here, I’m cool,’ that approach will never work with our consumers.” Bratman said. “You have to be perceived as supportive as opposed to exploitative.”
The feather in the company’s cap is the LG-sponsored Action Sports World Tour, a series of large-scale action sports festivals and events throughout Europe, Asia and United States that feature top professional competitors in skateboarding, BMX and inline skating. Playing to its young audience, the events include such elements as live concerts and other Gen Y-oriented activities. All of the tour events qualify both professional and amateur athletes from the three sports into the season-ending LG Action Sports Championships.
“It’s our largest sponsorship,” said Demetra Kavadeles, a spokeswoman for the cell phone division of LG Electronics, which signed a six-year multimillion-dollar deal in 2003.
These action sports events are all over the world. We’re getting into an arena that we’ve never touched on but it was such wide exposure as to make it worth the money.”
Ramping up
ASA’s genesis three guys with big dreams and a computer in a cramped Venice Beach basement is right in line with the counter-culture nature of the sports it promotes.
In 1996, Bratman was 30 years old and had established a successful career in sports and brand marketing. He represented the professional tennis circuit and players from the National Basketball Association and National Football League. Then the 20-something Shays brothers walked in the door.
They had an idea for an action sports circuit, and needed branding and marketing help. They could only afford to hire Bratman two hours a week, but before long the marketing pro was dedicating much of his days to the project. Within a year, the Shays brothers brought Bratman on board as partner in exchange for one-third of the company stock.
The key to getting the ASA off the ground was creating a tour that included television. To do that, Bratman and the Shays realized they would have to produce their own broadcasts and bring them to the networks.
“Without television, sponsors won’t pay,” said Bratman. “We had to create a television plan and an event plan for the future.”
In 1996, Bratman and the brothers got to work crafting an actual coordinated tour from the ground up, starting with a 12-event schedule that led to world championships in 1997.
Showing foresight, the trio realized they’d need a reliable pipeline of athletes for the tour, so ASA launched a series of 50 amateur events that created a feeder system. Once the framework was in place in 1997, Bratman negotiated a four-year TV contract with ESPN, the premiere cable sports outlet and a unit of the Walt Disney Co. Today, ASA has five broadcast partners CBS, Outdoor Life Network, Fox Sports Net, SportsNet and iNDemand and 17 others internationally.
ASA shoots, edits and ships out all the footage for about 100 programs per year that air 30 to 35 weeks out of the year on the various networks.
The company’s takeoff was further aided by its 1998 decision to begin building the ramps needed for its competitions.
ASA is now the largest ramp company in the world.
“When you outsource things, you are relying on other people to control your destiny,” Bratman said. “We wanted control. It’s our name, our sponsors and our clients.”
The company makes more than $1 million a year by leasing the equipment out for events and other uses. Though Bratman wouldn’t disclose company revenues, he said the revenue stream has grown 12 to 15 fold since the ASA started the pro tour in 1997, and the company is growing at about 20 to 25 percent per year.
Because ASA has no outside investors, the founding trio get to call all the shots but also take the hits when things don’t work out. The ASA was left holding a nearly $2 million bag two years ago when two major sponsors went bankrupt.
“You suck it up, shed a tear, grab a beer there’s not much you can do with the way that bankruptcy works,” Bratman said. “It was unfortunate because it happened within a six-month period and they both owed us about $1 million.”
Sponsorships evolve
Landing sponsors wasn’t easy in the earlier days of the sports. The events had a rowdy image and had not yet captured a niche in the mainstream media.
“Our biggest break was looking at things from a consultative perspective,” Bratman said. “Instead of trying to sell packaged sponsorships like, ‘Here’s our platinum, gold, silver or bronze package’ we looked at companies that wanted to build proprietary sponsorships together with us, and we would build events around their brand.”
Bratman and the Shays said that approach to sponsors made it possible for the small company to get major sponsors like LG, Warner Bros. and Procter & Gamble.
With camera-friendly athletes like Tony Hawk leading the way, the popularity of extreme sports began to grow rapidly. As it moved into the mainstream, skateboarding, inline skating and BMX began to develop a female fan base that has helped ASA events become family entertainment something most sponsors found unthinkable a decade ago.
Robert Cornilles, founder of Tualatin, Ore.-based sports marketing management firm Game Face Inc., said that a dramatic increase in participation in so-called extreme sports has helped attract the attention of large corporate sponsors.
“It’s somewhat representative of how the typical sports fan and participant has gotten out of their stadium seat and become part of the action themselves,” Cornilles said. “Consequently, the corporate world is very interested and wants to tap into that market, because those people may not be as reachable in front of the TV. It’s the logical evolution of where sport is going that it’s becoming more participatory.”
Bratman said the tour, and the sports represented by ASA Events, have two defined audiences. There are the 16-24 year-olds typically identified with skater culture, who make up about 55 percent of the audience, and another 35 percent made up of females and youngsters.
“We have become a family entertainment business,” Bratman said. “The nice thing is that we have the cool, cutting-edge image that every sponsor wants to associate with, but at the same time our programming is mainstream and mom-approved. Today, there are as many skate moms as soccer moms.”
