Jay Riggio: Broadband sponsorship
A look at the role of technology in getting a skate hook up.
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There was a time, way back when, when the concept of sponsorship was a completely alien notion. At least it was to me. It was so unbelievable that someone could get paid to ride a skateboard, the concept actually had to be carefully explained to me.
“If you get good enough, a company will sponsor you and pay you to ride a skateboard,” some older fat kid once told me in slow, repetitive intervals.
"What? Get paid to skate? Get free boards?"
When I had finally internalised things, it seemed simple enough. Get good, get seen by the big dogs, get free product, turn pro and start stacking cheques. Easy. Well, not quite that easy.
When I was a kid, it was the dawn of the 'Sponsor Me Tape'. Once you thought you might be able to hang with the dudes in the spotlight, you took your dad's enormous VHS camcorder and had your buddies tape you. After a few sessions, you’d rush together a crappy fourth generation edit and send it off to your favourite companies. This standard protocol to getting hooked up would result in the eventual bombardment of team managers with stacks upon stacks of unsolicited VHS tapes. One could only imagine the hours of watching, fast-forwarding and criticism/ridicule that would go down in those offices and viewing suites.
Today, the internet has flipped the script on everything one can imagine, including the way new jacks get to 'come up' in the skate scene. Send a sponsor tape? Nope. More like I’ll e-mail you my URL.
“Have you peeped my YouTube page?” “I’ve got a Vimeo link too for better quality.” “Is a Quicktime file cool?” “YouSendIt?” “You on Facebook? I’ll post my footy on your wall?” “Whatever, I’ll just do it all so you don’t overlook my footage.”
Recently I started thinking about how it all worked before the days of accessible video camcorders, when the only documentation regular folk could afford existed via point-and-shoot photography. Not long ago Shut Skateboards and Zoo York founder, Rodney Smith, told me his first sponsor came as a result of sending in photos of himself. A crazy thought, but that’s how it was done back then. Nobody had video cameras. If you were extremely lucky, you were in the right place at the right time at a demo or contest or local spot. And this way meant transforming from average skate rat to hometown hero (AKA 'the demo dog') and basically skating your best without getting in the way and/or pissing everyone off. A tall order for any human being, not to mention an overzealous kid.
It probably goes without saying that the new way of doing things has made team managers everywhere happier people. At the very least, it’s cleaned up their offices a bit, trading actual clutter for inbox clutter. But perhaps the job has gotten even more difficult and team managers actually have their work cut out for them. When you think about it, it’s the job of the team manager to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. And along with technological advances, the children are advancing too…on their skateboards.
These days, seemingly every little grommet skates good and skill alone isn’t enough to make or break a career like it used to. It’s personality, marketability, style and more. Then there’s the flow program, the shop sponsored program, A team, B team, C team and other ways of filtering out the truly worthy.
It’s all become sort of complicated, at least for the uninitiated. But at the same time, it’s gotten simplified in a way. It’s the world of technology that’s allowing for an easier, more careful selection of the best of the best in skateboarding. And in a culture that’s overflowing with talent, wouldn’t you prefer to have the kooks weeded out?
The game has changed dramatically but the desire for progression in skateboarding hasn’t. Kids will continue to skate better and the competition will become even heavier. And as skateboarding moves forward, serious talent will continue to blow minds time and time again.
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Broadband sponsorship (text) by Jay Riggio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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