Sand Dollars

Ian Cairns has surfed many of the world’s toughest beaches. But helping to transform the sport of surfing into a marketable commodity could be the 46-year-old surfer’s biggest challenge.

At a time when edge sells, surfing is saddled with a well-worn image shaped by decades of surf songs and late-night television rebroadcasts of bland beach party movies. Surfers know that the less-than-X Games image isn’t helping when it comes to attracting corporate partners that want to pitch their wares to trend-conscious young consumers.

“If surfing can position itself alongside other extreme sports, then it can ride this wave of interest in individual sports,” said Cairns, whose San Clemente-based company has produced surf contests for two decades. “But we need to come up with some fresh ways of presenting and marketing the sport.”

Although ESPN’s annual X Games--held earlier this summer within a stone’s throw of the Pacific Ocean--snubbed them, surfers argue that board riders provide sports marketers with a pipeline to young consumers who pay close attention to what surfers are wearing, the music they’re listening to and the products they buy.

For the last three weekends in Huntington Beach, the surfing industry did its best to court sponsors with a spectator-friendly lifestyle festival.

Rather than focusing solely on surfers, organizers diversified the festival by adding women’s beach volleyball and skateboarding, live music and fashion. And an attractive beachfront sponsor village was designed to keep spectators engaged when they’d seen enough surfing.

Advertising in national publications such as Rolling Stone described the 17-day affair as “Part Woodstock. Part Baywatch. Part Clambake.”

The Dana Point-based Surf Industry Manufacturers Assn. estimates the number of active surfers in the U.S. in 1997 at 1.75 million, up from 1.1 million in 1992. SIMA estimates that surfing’s core group is males ages 16 to 25--but that 15% of all surfers are young women.

The Assn. of Surfing Professionals readily admitted that the sport’s business side has to become more sophisticated if surfers are to keep pace with the television-driven success of landlocked board sports such as snowboarding and skateboarding.

But ASP also acknowledges that surfing has always had an uneasy alliance. Many surfers recoil at the thought of inviting corporate sponsors, television cameras and surfing wannabes to share their waves.

Today, surfing doesn’t show up on most sports marketers’ radar screens. Chicago-based IEG Sponsorship Report, an industry newsletter, estimates ASP’s revenue from marketing deals at less than $2 million.

The most prominent corporate names linked to surfing are apparel companies such as Quiksilver and Billabong. Last year, ASP’s international arm lost Coca-Cola as a marketing partner, and the organization is now looking for an umbrella sponsor to provide funding needed to keep star surfers on tour.

Coke, a worldwide sponsor since 1995, opted out last year after determining that surfing wasn’t making enough marketing waves in inland areas.

“Surfing in this country is a niche sport,” said Ben Deutsch, Coke’s public relations manager for worldwide sports marketing projects. “We’re still involved with surfing, but at the local level where it has relevance to consumers.”

Deutsch noted that, like soccer, surfing tends to be more popular overseas in places such as Australia and South Africa than in the U.S.

The relative dearth of corporate sponsorships is evident in surf contest prize money. When the first OP Pro was held 17 years ago, the winner won $7,000 and a pickup truck. This year, 44 professionals invited to the OP Pro in Huntington Beach will be going after $150,600 in total prize money--but the winner will still pocket just $15,000.

A handful of top athletes enjoy lucrative contracts with surf apparel and equipment endorsements. But contest prizes remain relatively low: ASP reports that just 21 surfers earned more than $50,000 in prize money during 1997.

The uneasy alliance between surfers and corporate marketing partners was evident last year when surfers came close to moving the popular U.S. Open of Surfing from Huntington Beach to Trestles, a celebrated but hard-to-reach beach in northern San Diego County.

Purists argued that competition would benefit from better waves at Trestles. But the secluded beach lacks infrastructure needed to host the U.S. Open, an event that last year drew more than 50,000 spectators.

This year, the U.S. Open--with G-Shock, the watch company, as its major sponsor--was anchored firmly at Huntington Beach. That contest was followed by last weekend’s 17th annual OP Pro Surfing Championship, which concluded the Beach Festival.

Nearly 220,000 people crowded the city’s beaches for the U.S. Open during the weekend of July 25-26. That’s 40,000 more beach-goers than during the U.S. Open in 1997. Attendance figures for the final weekend aren’t yet available. The event was broadened with the addition of live bands, women’s volleyball, a lifeguard competition featuring “Baywatch” TV show and sports celebrities and the corporate sponsor village.

The commercial nature of the festival irked purists, but as Ron Hagan, community services director for Huntington Beach, noted: “If surfing wants to have a tour and wants to offer prize money, it has to have corporate sponsors.”

Corporate sponsors involved with the festival include the major one, Ocean Pacific, a surf apparel company that presented the overall festival. But the festival also expanded beyond pure surf categories to include Ruby’s (the ‘50s-style diner chain), Niagara Water, Sprint PCS, Paul Mitchell Professional Salon Products and Clarion.

Content-hungry networks such as ESPN, ESPN2 and Fox Sports broadcast snippets of the Beach Festival. And International Management Group, the sports and entertainment marketing company, recently acquired Event Source, a company that specializes in producing youth-oriented events--including this year’s Beach Festival.

There’s a strong rumor in the surf industry that high-powered IMG is going to ally itself with ASP. IMG declined to comment.

“Surfing will always have its contests in far-off places that have great surfing,” said Cary Allington, marketing director for Santa Fe Springs-based Vans Inc., the shoe company that sponsors three surf contests on Hawaii. “But it’s also good to have competitions that give surfing more exposure to the mainstream audience.”

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Surfing’s Ripples

Corporate sponsorships are the lifeblood of any professional sport because they help cover costs and provide prize money for athletes. But support for surfing pales compared with more popular sports. Sponsorship dollars:

* Motor sports

(including sanctioning bodies, teams, drivers)

$1.1 billion in 1997

*

* Tennis

(North American events only)

$287 million in 1997

*

* Assn. of Volleyball Professionals

(includes corporate sponsorships and broadcast support)

$9 million in 1998 season

*

* Assn. of Surfing Professionals

(North America only)

Less than $2 million in 1998 seasno

Sources: IEG Sponsorship Group, Assn. of Volleyball Professionals