ESPN has decided that what they need to sell X Games sponsorship is someone from their NBA sales team, according to a story in the Sports Business Journal.
ESPN has reorganized its X Games sales staff, putting ESPN’s NBA sales executive Michele Krumper in charge of X Games sponsorships and bringing X Games general manager Chris Stiepock to more sales meetings. . . . The move is part of an effort to bolster X Games sponsorship sales in an economic period when finding corporate partners willing to align with sports properties has become more challenging.
As if the X Games weren’t rad enough, they’re now going to be rad times 3-D, thanks to a new ESPN/Disney joint.
Directed by award-winning filmmaker Steve Lawrence (Down the Barrel), the film will use groundbreaking digital 3D techniques to immerse sports fans into the world of action sports and its top stars. Iconic action sports personalities chronicled in the film are: Shaun White, Travis Pastrana, Danny Way, Ricky Carmichael and Bob Burnquist.
Luckily for us our interest in 3-D totally overshadows or dread of the X Games so we’re actually looking forward to having Bob Burnquist, Danny Way, and Shawn White thrust their boards right into our faces.
X Games 3D the Movie will be released August 21, 2009 with a limited one-week theatrical release. [click to continue…]
We hung out with Tim Humphreys at the Flow booth at the SIA Show last week and the kid definitely has his shit straight. We didn’t watch the Winter X 13, but got to see his runs right here thanks to Sessions.
X Games Senior Vice President Rick Alessandri, is pretty happy with the “cross-platform” ratings of the Winter X 13. “The continued growth across all our multi-media properties is a testament to the passion, athleticism and drama the X Games athletes deliver each event.”
But according to a story on TVbythenumbers.com the TV ratings really weren’t all that strong, though it’s hard to tell with all this “best ever” lingo:
Television: Winter X Games 13 was ESPN’s highest-rated and most-viewed Winter X Games in history. The eight telecasts averaged 942,000 homes, up nine percent from 2008. Young male and people demos were up double digits from last year. Three of ESPN’s eight Winter X Games telecasts, delivered over a 1.0 rating this year –Friday prime time, Sunday afternoon and Sunday prime time. Sunday night’s 1.3 rating and 1,242,210 homes makes it the highest-rated and most-viewed Winter X Games telecast ever. ABC’s Winter X Games 13 telecast on Saturday averaged a 1.2 household rating and 1,376,481 households.
Just for comparison sake nearly seven times as many people watch Extreme Makeover on ABC TV and 14 times as many people regularly watch American Idol. The Portland Summer Dew Tour event that aired live in August (albeit with the Olympics for a lead-in) got a 2.7 rating.
This is apparently the eighth time Shaun White has one the top golden prize on this TV show. They’re saying it’s some kind of record. He looks damn good in this clip. Flawless even.
We know we said we weren’t going to discuss the X Games, but then we saw this on You Will Soon regarding Tony Trujillo’s bronze medal in Super Park.
Personally I’d like to congratulate Tony not so much for a bronze medal in X Games Super Park, but just for being so fucking awesome. You got the rest of the guys in there sucking their energy drink’s sponsors dicks with full print Monster shirts and Red Bull new era hats, and then you got this fucking skid slashing the park in a spray painted t-shirt. Not just that, but he may not have done the sickest tricks of the day, but he was schralping the hardest.
It’s refreshing to hear the simple truth everyone once in a while, isn’t it?
The new ad campaign for the Summer X Games features an evil overlord named Darkmane (a featured member at Vitalskate.com, way to go Brad) who wants to destroy the X Games and convince people not to watch them. His plan, ironically, is to kill all the creativity involved with the X Games athletes by creating rules and regulations and forcing all athletes to wear uniforms.
The X Games universe it about to get the proverbial beat down Darkmane style. I will crush originality at the X games with conformity and these new heavily starch heather gray athletic uniforms.
Aside from the fact that ESPN already did Darkmane’s job for him years ago and the reality that the athletes are wearing uniforms more corporately emblazoned than a NASCAR racecar, we don’t really get what The Martin Agency was going after with this campaign.
Maybe being based in the action sports mecca of Richmond, Virginia has a little something to do with their misguided sense of pseudo insider irony, but they seem to have forgotten that this event is one of the least creative, most corporately controlled sporting events this side of the WWE. And to point that out to kids in advertising messages seems, well, almost retarded.
Then again, if the whole point of the Darkmane ads is to discredit and make fun of any form of credible judging or authentic competition in the minds of the audience and just let the event producers choose winners based on which athletes have the highest Q score, then maybe, just maybe Darkmane is genius advertising.
Either way, the guy’s got us convinced: we’re not watching.
The X Games are so totally irrelevant to us that even following this recent vert debacle is getting boring. Apparently, X Games General Manager Chris Stiepock is now saying that vert is back in the TV show, but it isn’t because anyone complained, or because skaters threatened to boycott the mondo, super kicker, or because readers voted to keep vert. No, no, no. It’s because of the planning process.
“We were trying to put enough vert features in the park course to satisfy the vert skateboarders,” said X Games General Manager Chris Stiepock. “In the process, the skaters realized there was no way we were going to be able to do that.”
While we all know that the X Games have been a TV show (and nothing else) since the beginning, there are a pretty big crew of skateboarders who have gotten rich by playing along with ESPN. Most notably the vert skaters. Now when ESPN announces that they are going to pull Vert Skate and BMX from the show, some (like Andy McDonald) aren’t happy about it.
Macdonald accused the X Games of seeking the sensational, as when Encinitas’ Jake Brown tumbled 46 feet to the plywood deck last year, landing on his tailbone during the Big Air competition. Brown underwent surgery on his wrist, and suffered a bruised lung and cracked vertebrae.
“It’s just a show now. A circus,” Macdonald said. “How are we going to try to one-up Jake Brown falling from the ceiling at the Staples Center?”
There’s more, but it’s mostly about people being upset that someone moved their cheese.
ESPN has decided that what they need to sell X Games sponsorship is someone from their NBA sales team, according to a story in the Sports Business Journal.
