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A
Technological Story From Sims
Marketing Director Dave
Wray talks about better ads and product coming from Sims Snowboards.
Edited by John Stouffer
(6-27-98)
Dave
Wray recently took over the job of marketing director at Sims Snowboards.
Since then, he's spent a lot of time with riders working on a new marketing
campaign for the company.
Because he was already down in San
Diego for the X-Games to cheer on team rider Tina Basich in the big-air
competition, he decided to drop by the SNOWboarding Business offices to
say "hi." He didn't realize we were going to stick a microphone
in his face and make him promise to come up with better ads. Here's what
he had to say:
Okay, I want this for the record,
on the tape, your promise that the Sims advertising campaign will be better
this year. Can you give me that?
I can guarantee that. The agency
that did last year's ads is no longer affiliated with Sims. The whole campaign
comes from me. We're working with a new design firm called Horsepower Design.
They're really just two guys, Jeff and Chris, in Seattle. They're awesome.
How did Horsepower get the job?
They took a snowboard box, spray-painted all over it, and mailed it to us. In it there was this big, round
piece of paper with a horse in the middle. Around the outside following
around the circle they wrote: Horsepower designs ads for Sims. Sims likes
horsepower's ads. Horsepower gets Sims product. Then there was a smiley
face. Horsepower gets to ride more and has more fun. Sims does more ads
with Horsepower.
Then there were pictures of both
Jeff and Chris. The first was of Jeff from 1977, with no shirt on, riding
an old Sims board, and doing the oldest-school grab you can. The picture
of Chris shows him in a corn field in Iowa, also riding and jumping.
Then the note said that they just need
enough money to buy a couple of lattés, some gas, and some lift
tickets at Steven's Pass, and some peanut butter and jelly for the ride
home.
That's why they're stoked and flattered
to do ads for Sims.
Will the team have some input
this year?
The team will have a lot of input.
I've been working with the team recently and we went through five different
magazines and asked them to open to each page and speak their mind. If
it's a Reef ad, they'd say, "This is great. Nice ass." I just
wanted to see what they liked.
We'll run the best shots of our
riders, but we'll be pushing the technology, the high-end stuff, and looking
for the trickle down. If someone thinks of Sims, I want them to think that
we make the best performing, highest-quality, and most technologically
advanced product out there.
We're not going to advertise the
lower end. We'll leave that to the majors who do their weekly newspaper
ads in the major metropolitan areas.
What is Sims most technologically
advanced product?
It would be the Project Hex with
the aluminum honeycomb crosscut woodcore. The woodcore has two different
grains of wood.
It's an all-mountain board?
We've coined a new term for the
board. It's called a full-ride board. That's something that we should get
recognition for.
To explain what full-ride is, if
you look in everyone else's catalog, they'll have a freestyle category,
a freeride category, and then they'll have a freeride, freestyle board.
That's what a full-ride is.
If you look at most of the pros
out there, are they freestylers? In the summer, they're freestylers, doing
big kickers, quaterpipes, and halfpipes. They're not riding the lanes,
that's for sure.
In the winter, they're riding powder
and trees. But when the snow settles, they're doing switch jumps off of
cliffs, powder quarterpipes, and just mixing it up. That's progressive
freeriding. Progressive all-mountain freeriding is the full-ride category.
We hit it, but I don't think we've
done a good job marketing it.
What boards are in that category?
The Enduro, Max, Project Hex, and
Decender series, which is a Noah Salasnek designed board.
Our younger, progressive riders
are going to be pushing into this category. But we'll still have our powder
riders. Take Mark Fawcett for example. We'll be working with him in the
Snowboard Life category doing a split ad where he's on his Burner winning
events and we'll also show a freeriding shot from Alaska. He goes up there
every year, but nobody knows.
I guess Noah Salasnek killed it
up there this year.
We'll see who scored when the
videos come out this year.
That's a whole different story.
We've talked to our Japanese and European distributors about which videos
are most popular. They tell us that everyone wants to see blurred spins
and freestyle stuff. Which is full riding.
They don't want to see a huge mountain
and a little dot coming down. It just doesn't stoke out the kids, especially
the Japanese.
They think it's too big?
Yeah. They say, "Berry, berry
big."
I asked my riders who they film
with and nobody was filming with Mack Dawg, so that's one of my missions.
The other is getting Sims more editorial coverage.
You're off to a good start today.
Thanks for coming by.
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