Action sports perform well, extremely so
VB in DEPTH: Audience is either 'core' or mass market, suppliers say.
By David S. Cohen -- Video Business, 3/4/2004
MARCH 4 | Fans of extreme sports know how exciting surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding and BMX can be, and now video suppliers and retailers involved with the genre are experiencing a rush as well.
The industry is fast discovering that an extreme sports film, properly marketed, does its best business on video, sometimes performing much better than its theatrical gross would predict. Skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z Boys was a great overachiever on video, and the upcoming Step Into Liquid, about surfing, looks likely to do the same.
Extreme sports on video "is the purest representation of the lifestyle that these people participate in," said Scot Burns, marketing manager for VAS Entertainment, which distributes more than 3,500 sports videos, hundreds in the extreme sports genre.
"It's not about fiction or a story line but about finding the best individuals the producer could get to show off their abilities and do their tricks. It lends to the hero worship factor and has an instructional quality. People watch them over and over again. They're watching to dissect it, to learn the trick."
Burns said that when VHS ruled, fans would wear out their tapes running them back and forth.
"DVD makes it possible to jump around," he said. "The multidimensional angles you can get are so much greater than you can get with the linear playback of VHS."
VAS sells many of its sports titles to mini-chains and mom-and-pop operations, which cater to participants, or "the core," as Burns calls them.
"The core prepromotes and prequalifies what's cool," he said.
Other titles, Burns noted, cater to the mass market, including Imax film ESPN's Ultimate X: The Movie, which did better in the big chains.
"The core kids shunned it," Burns said.
To illustrate the difference between a mass market consumer and a core consumer, a spokeswoman for Musicland Stores said customers visiting her chain will move around from sport to sport. They might come in looking for skateboarding and buy a surfing video instead, for example.
Paul De Gooyer, VP of Rhino Home Video--which signed with ESPN to do 12 X Games videos during the next 2½ years--compared the marketing of action sports videos to the way record labels break bands.
"You get the product to their core constituency and [the fans] become agents for the band," De Gooyer said. "They will vote with their pocketbooks."
Dogtown and Z-Boys earned only about $1.3 million at the U.S. box office despite heavy promotion, but Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment pumped up the video release in the summer of 2002. The studio hired a company known for guerilla marketing campaigns that enlists young "tastemakers" to spread the word, and sales surpassed more than 100,000 units, according to sources.
"Who bought the DVD? It was all the core enthusiasts and current skateboarders who wanted to see what the old school used to do," Burns said.
Step Into Liquid is headed for video on April 20 after earning $3.9 million in theaters. Steve Beeks, president of Lions Gate Entertainment, expects the title's video to bring in at least four times the amount that a standard documentary with comparable box-office receipts would in stores.
"I think it'll do 400% to 1,000% more over a two-year period," he said. "There are very few things that can do that. Look at [surfing movies] Endless Summer and Endless Summer 2 [from Monterey Media]. They have stayed active in our consciousness."
Another company entering the action sports marketplace is new label Powered by B1 from DVD specialist B1 Productions. B1 co-owner and executive producer Brian Johnson saw reason to get into action sports videos just by visiting the local video store.
"I saw parents buying these DVDs for their kids," he said. "Today, action sports is thrown right in there with football, soccer and baseball."
B1 is repackaging the Fox Sports Net series Bluetorch into five DVDs due out this year, the first of which arrives from Ventura Distribution in May. It's a risk, said Johnson, because the shows cover multiple sports and includes lifestyle pieces as well. On the other hand, Bluetorch is well known.
"Fox Sports Net has already built the brand," he said.
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