Surfpolitik Kelly Slater and Dane Reynolds: Branding in a Brave New World

In: Surfpolitik by Stu Nettle 19 Comments Wed 12th Oct '11

Tags: kelly slater , dane reynolds , ry craike , simon macgregor , monster , luke wallace , ryan hipwood , marketing , Quiksilver

In the minutes between the semi-final and final of the Quiksilver Pro New York, with $300,000 - surfing's biggest payday - on the line, Kelly Slater was typing furiously into his Twitter feed. Twitter addiction is a relatively new malady, the symptoms not clearly defined, yet Slater's behaviour must surely fit the diagnosis.

In the last six months Slater has been a prolific Twitter user. At last look he'd sent 3,570 Tweets and had 104,582 people following him. Slater uses Twitter as his primary form of fan interaction, yet despite the enormous potential for company branding there isn't a single logo on his Twitter page.

The same is true for Dane Reynolds, who's incredibly popular blog, Marine Layer, is another piece of unbranded digital real estate. If you were new to surfing and weren't aware of each surfer's primary sponsor you'd have to look elsewhere to find out.

For two of the most highly paid surfers in the world I found this incredible. Refreshing, yes, but very different from the way that marketing and branding has previously existed in the surfing industry.

In the past - at least up to the advent of online blogs around five years ago - the main sources of material for fans of pro surfing were movies and magazines. For the last twenty years the movie medium has been controlled by surf companies, the branded surf film being the dominant form. Each major company puts out at least a film a year and distribute them freely, often mounted on the covers of surfing magazines.

The free issue of surf movies underlines their intent; funded by marketing budgets, branded surf films are promotional vehicles for the companies in question. The surfers surf and the soundtrack rocks out - it's entertaining, no doubt - but it doesn't take much to realise that the whole package is simply an elaborate advertisement.

With commercial constraints there's little room for surfers in a movie to express themselves in ways beyond a surfboard. Insights are rare and often only articulated through the filter of a campaign ('I surf because'). Any scope the surfers have for a unique depiction is left in the hands of others, namely art directors or marketing folk.

Surf magazines, for their part, had their own particular relationship with surf companies, usually dictated by advertising dollars spent and then manifested in the magazines content: Which surfers are to go on the boat trip? Who is to get profiled? And, who shall appear on the cover?

Some magazines work more independently than others (or at least they camouflage their advertorial better) but, once again, the surfers have little control in how they are portrayed. Sponsors light the path, writers choose the words, theme and context, the editors have the final say.

Dion Agius was the first surfer of note to have their own blog and begin uploading unfiltered personal content directly to the internet. At the time it was new, exciting and an immediate hit. Yet even his blog, TV/Dion, was branded by Globe, their logo appearing in multiple places on the blog and even present in the URL (www.globe.tv/dion).

Since the popularity of TV/Dion surfers have begun to fill the digital space via blogs, websites and now Twitter. Professional surfers have realised the huge image-making potential of creating unique blogs and filling them with fresh video content, or of engaging with fans directly through Twitter. In the process they have begun to circumvent the traditional company-controlled paths of promotion.

As an interested observer it appeared to me that the surfing companies were beginning to lose control of the narrative; their sponsor-endorsed athletes had begun to operate outside the bounds of company campaigns and were roaming far beyond their usual niches. As much as it is possible fans were, for the first time, observing the surfers in their natural state.

Which brings us to Kelly and Dane and their respective white label spaces. It's an indication of how far we've come, or perhaps how we now view the world, when a person such as myself, with a cynics eye to the dark art of marketing, wonders what sort of 'value' Quiksilver get from their highly paid athletes running unbranded sites. I'll admit to being disconcerted thinking in those terms, so I'll rephrase the premise: Surfing companies once did all they could to extract branding potential from their surfers, but in the digital age that no longer seems the case.

The question therefore begs: What has changed?

Luke Wallace is the Digital Marketing Manager at Monster Energy. Digital marketing requires a whole new approach and Wallace says he's fortunate to work for Monster as they are are a company that "get it". For one, they don't do any traditional advertising: no print, TV, billboards or radio. I was surprised to hear this. Not because it's a new approach, but because I'm well aware of Monster. They aren't an unknown entity to me. In marketing speak they had cut through, and they had done so using a new, digitally-inclined, marketing strategy.

According to Wallace, Monster give their athletes 100% freedom to do what they want, "We give them financial backing to go and achieve their dreams and goals." The freedom however, comes with a greater responsibility and surfers operating in the digital space have to be cautious about what they say and do. "It's not something you do after a few drinks," Wallace says of Tweeting. "Like any responsible parent, we keep an eye on them," he adds.

Of greater bearing is the responsibility of the surfers to build their own image. Where once the companies oversaw the direction a surfer would take – finding a niche and building an image to suit – the onus now falls upon the surfer. The decisions and the actions that follow are theirs alone.

Wallace nominates Ryan Hipwood as a good example of this. In recent years Hipwood has shunned competition and built an image by chasing big waves, filming them, and uploading them to the net. To be honest, I wasn't aware that Hipwood was sponsored by Monster, yet I'm well aware of his exploits in big waves and, as I mentioned above, I'm well aware of Monster - such is the fuzzy, often intangible relationship between brand and athlete.

Fuzzy is not a term that could be used to describe the relationship between Kelly Slater and Quiksilver. Slater is inextricably linked to Quiksilver having been sponsored since 1990 and sporting the mountain and the wave logo during all 10 world title campaigns. Following his 9th world title win Slater famously took shares in the company and now owns 3% of it.

Simon MacGregor is the Marketing Director for Quiksilver Asia Pacific and also sits on the Quiksilver global marketing committee. Like Wallace, MacGregor says Quiksilver fully encourage their surfers to enter the digital sphere. He sees their online presence, "as essentially an extension of their personal voices," and says the best value – both for the company and, he stresses, for the surfer – is when they present themselves honestly and openly. 

But what does Quiksilver get out of it? I put it to MacGregor that only high profile surfers such as Slater and Reynolds could run white label sites, where the link between surfer and company is clear. Not true, says MacGregor. "Look at Ry Craike's site as an example." And so I did. Craike, an aerial specialist with a limited following, has his own white label, unbranded website creating content independently of the Quiksilver marketing team.

"In the end," MacGregor says, "this is about them and how they can better expose themselves and drive their own marketability. In the end it's a win-win situation for both parties involved." It's not clear to me how an unbranded site belonging to a second-string surfer would benefit Quiksilver but MacGregor says that it, "has positive effects back our way in most cases".

Roughly five years after Agius' blog first appeared it's become clear that the burgeoning digital realm has shaken up and changed the traditional job roles. "It is a partnership between us as a brand and them being able to market themselves," was how MacGregor summed up the new relationship between surf companies and their sponsored surfers. The companies, for their part, don't appear threatened by the shift in power. The marketing was less intrusive but more sophisticated, and those I spoke to in the industry were enthused by the new possibilities it presented.

Most importantly however, is that professional surfers - at least those willing to embrace an online future - have never had more freedom to express themselves on their own terms. As Kelly Slater said when asked about his Twitter addiction, "I like that I can interact with people all around the world at once. It's like you're having a conversation with the world."