2.1

August 18, 1995

A whole new year of snowboard advertising just waiting to be shagged. This year we'll be focusing on advertising and behind the scenes snowboard media schlock from Blunt, Times-Mirror's Snowboarding and Snowboard Life, Snowboarder, Snoboard, and any other magazines we can get our little grubbies on.

The New Fall Line Up

TeaWorld's first issue is huge: a whopping 448 pages (502 if you count the posters and the separate Buyer's Guide). Yeah, you heard it right. It's about the size of a fall issue of Vogue magazine. Some are calling it the Spiegel issue. It features 411 different advertisements. We tried to count the number of ad pages, but we kept losing track.

Snowboarder, who claims to have limited the number of ads they're going to sell, weights in at a hefty 284 pages with something like 114 advertisers. Doug Palladini's plan is apparently to set a limit on the number of advertisers in the magazine. So Snowboarder is 284 because they decided not to get bigger than that. They're happy making the money they're making. It kind of makes sense, we guess. Then when the market crashes (sometime in the next two years) they won't have to fire everyone like our friends at Times-Mirror have been doing lately (say good-bye Newsday and Times-Mirror New Media).

Word on Blunt is that mad-about-town artist guy Sean Cliver is heading up Big Brother's snowboard magazine. So far no word on their dirty snow groove.

flake media hits

We got a hit in TeaWorld. Yep, a little mention in the Zones section. They said we were a "sometimes funny, often biting critique of snowboarding in general." Then they said our pages were "pretty boring by Web standards and offer no links to other pages." Obviously they haven't seen our new pages.

Snow Country the ski/real estate magazine put out by New York Times Leisure Magazine mentioned us in their Guide to Cyberskiing saying that our zine is obviously created by "someone on the inside." The best part of the coverage was that both magazines got our URL correct. Which is great compared to all the other mistakes that were made with people like Burton, Sims, and Palmer. Both stories were by "snowboard journalist" Lee Crane. So we're publically thanking him. Thanks. We're also reminding him to double check all the URL's next time he does a story on the Web.

Things We Noticed

The action sports industry has definitely stepped up to the snowboard plate. Newbie surf/skate snowboard marketeers include: Town & Country, Dog Town, World Industries, Alva, Hang Ten, Rusty, and Local Motion. G&S is back after being gone since 1990. Pipeline surf legend Gerry Lopez is even cashing in on the groove with a board called the "Jerry Lopez Surf Music 149." Yeah, the soul of snowboarding has finally arrived. What have we done without it all this time? Which reminds us, no one can make more out of less than surfers. They're better at it than Beverly Hills plastic surgeons. Believe it.

It's also interesting to see that the majority of the companies are beginning to understand the more subtle aspects of advertising in a Buyer's Guide issue. Apparently they've finally figured out that snowboarders use the first issues of the magazine to help them choose a new board for the season. Thus, Morrow, Business, Airwalk, Santa Cruz, Avalanche, PBS, N Boots, Vans (VANS: NASDAQ), Preston, and others actually included product shots in their advertising, rather than the old photo+logo mentality. Thought that didn't stop the rest of the clones from throwing down ugly stuff.

We wanted to preface our advertising segment by saying that while writing this we were reminded of a song by Neneh Cherry. It comes off her 1989 release Raw Like Sushi. "Now I look at you with tears in my eyes, the good, the bad, the ugly." So, here it comes.

The Good

Bonfire, under the direction of Brad Steward, has taken the whole image advertising thing to the extreme in Tea-World's first issue. The Portland, Oregon based clothing company throws down a four page bind-in ad on card stock that features Bonfire's teamriders. The paper is so stiff that it makes the magazine fall open to his pages. It's like a big old hook that grabs your fingers.

Jackson Hole captures the essence of their badass cowboy town with their ad in TeaWorld. It says, "Range" in big letters across the top, then in smaller letters it says, "If the next word that popped into your mind was Rover, come on up. We don't get to see that many pompous asses this far from Vail." Phew. Talking about lettin' the rich pansy folk have it.

The Hottie-chicks-licking-each-other's-tongues award goes to Black Flys for getting not one but two shots of tattooed, pierced, blondies getting it on. Sexism aside, those small photos shot by Jack Martinez are definitely worth looking at with a magnifying glass. You know, if you want to see the "dope shit." Plus, they make the ad look pretty cool.

Anyone who wants to see how product, action, and logos can be blended together in a damn fine ad should memorize Avalanche's new ad. Created by .verb communications, the ad gets straight to the point and does it a elegant, core fashion. No, we're turning into foo-foos.

In the Shorty's Team House ad one of the windows is blocked out. Sorry kids, but what you'll never see is. . . well, let's just say it involves skin. TeaWorld obviously would rather allow photos of oily green bud (top window) than a little human flesh. We'd also like to know who's going to win the $100 for identifying the photo of Divine, star of movies like Hairspray, Out of the Dark, Lust in the Dust, Trouble in Mind, Polyester, Female Trouble, and the classic Pink Flamingos.

We haven't said it before, but Solid is pulling some solid ads. Good logo treatment, nice photo work, and pleasant design. They almost make it look too, easy. The following ads, however, prove that isn't exactly the case.

The Bad

Industrial design award goes to Switch manufacturing for making a cool step-in binding look like an ad for machine parts in a lift maintenance trade magazine. Apparently all their creativity went in to producing that neat pneumatic machine to demonstrate just how strong their binders are.

Now we understand Rossignol's problem. They've been stealing all their ideas from the ragged bourgeois skin mag Playboy (we work this link every issue). This time they've done the famous Playboard Magazine Interview with new Extreme World Champion Steve "Me-Me-Me-I-I-I" Klassen. Mr. Klassen is also the second snowboarder after Kevin Delaney to believe that his name has some intrinsic marketing value, hence his new on-line venture "Steve Klassen's Boardernet"

Are we the only ones that just don't get Spry? You spin it. What, Wheel of Fortune? The dial on our TV? They had cool superballs at the trade show, but what exactly is this company about. There must be more to it than just lame ads. And, on a side note: don't chew the Spry superballs. They break up into microscopically tiny pieces that you can never get out of your mouth. Of course, we were probably the only one's stupid enough to put them in our mouths in the first place.

Hello, Vision? Anyone home? Didn't think so.

Dakine arrives about a year late with their comic book catalogue. As a reminder to the marketing minds at Dakine, everyone did that thing last year. Remember? Or weren't you paying attention to the market?

Apparently Goddess doesn't have any snowboards yet. Why else would they keep running black and white photos of girls doing silly stuff like sitting on kids toys and grabbing a guy's ass. The logo looks good, however.

World Industries enters the snowboard fracas with a Boozy the Clown ad. The big questions is: so what? World is bringing up what will hopefully be the last wave of skate companies glomming onto the snowboard thing.

The Ugly (a.k.a Short Cuts)

Ever wonder what happens to a snowboard company after they're purchased by a ski company who thinks metal skis are a great idea? Just, take a look at Aggression. Isn't it sad?

Nidecker one word: FOCUS!

What happened Atlantis? Couldn't find a photo with the action in the frame?

Kemper apparently things 70s wall paper makes a good top sheet and if it makes a good top sheet, why not use it for an ad. Martin Gallant deserves much more. The man is hard.

Stryke's marketing people send team rider Ross Peterson crawling around in a cave with a flash light looking for the smallest clue on how to market snowboard clothing. Apparently, he hasn't found anything yet.

Levi's Top 501 Reasons. Reason No. 096.5 Zippers Freeze and so will you if you ride in Levi's 501s.

Banned In TWS

Glissade, the snowboard manufacturers from Chico, California had to come up with another ad after Tea-World's staff canned their first Crap Snowboards ad. The ad featured a big hairy guy in a bikini and a logo that read "Crappel." The dead-on, hilarious spoof of the overtly sexist Cappel (Ride's clothing company) ad series was deemed "inappropriate" for TeaWorld because it could cause problems with other advertisers (meaning Cappel). What the mag's management meant to say was, "We don't want to piss off Ride because they get mad when people make fun of them, and then start demanding things."

Others may have noticed that Third Rail's nipple logo has a hat on it. Yep, the crew at TeaWorld won't want to offend anyone with an illustration of an exposed nipple, but two pages later they don't seem to have a problem with a pouty, wet, naked, young girl cupping her breasts (Montoya), or a hairy, sweaty butt-hole in the top right corner of the Equilibrium mail order ad on page 333. Hmm, strange policies indeed.

MIA's ad was also pulled. It featured a skeleton pointing a gun with the words "Cap Killer." The obvious play on Ice-T's Cop Killer song and cap construction snowboards was clever and funny, however, it must have clashed TeaWorld's "no guns" policy. For those who don't remember back in 1990 it was a banned gun ad that got World Industries owner Steve Rocco so pissed off at TWS that he pulled all his skate advertising and started Big Brother magazine with intentions of "putting TransWorld out of business." Now with his acquisition of Blunt Snowboard Magazine he may be coming closer to realizing his dream.

Speaking of caps: Anyone who thinks that Salomon will become a major force in the snowboard industry just needs to check out this ad for Salomon cross country skis: "Dude, name the wintersport where sales are phat, gnarly, savage, radical, awesome. Nope. It's cross country skiing. And it's growing twice as fast as snowboarding." A note to Mike Bizner, "Please take your own advice and stick to cross country. We don't need Salomon in the snowboard industry."

Kinko's Copy Cat Corner

Screamin' memes must be at work in the art departments of Burton and Silence, because both came out with the same groove. A guy on a chair lift during a storm. See if you can tell which is which?

Santa Cruz and Ride (RIDE: NASDAQ) are both prancing along with the same rounded-corner line/box pony. Ride pointed everyone out (except photographer Jon Foster) and Santa Cruz just pointed out Jason Morvay and the Chugach Mountains. The song remains the same.

The new bear skin rug thing is really catching on with Westbeach and the boys and girls at the publicly traded company Quiksilver (QUIK: NASDAQ). Westbeach went the tribal mode and Quik (using Neil Drake) went for the gay porn star route. They even threw in a cheetah skin for good measure.

Taking a nice nod from Mondrian (like Joyride did a year ago) Ton a wawa and Type A both throw down ads with colored boxes and heavy black outlines. In TeaWorld they were only two pages apart. Ouch!

Identity snowboards and Concept clothing both have a thing for close up face shots with weird colors projected on them. Face to face to face. . .

In the name game how's this: Circle O and Square One both located in Costa Mesa and no relation. What's next Triangle Two, Rectangle three, and Sphere one cubed?

Comfort Snowboard's logo is what the Liquid logo looks like after he's done urinating. Damn, where's Keith Haring when you really need him.

Ads from the Outside

Here's an Newport Cigarettes ad we dug up out of the March 1995 issue of Elle magazine (we forgot it for last issue). Oh, don't those snowboarders look cool with their stained yellow teeth and rotten lungs. Yeah, they're sitting against their snowboards because that's the only thing they can do at this altitude with lung cancer and heart disease. Here's our suggested Surgeon General's Warning: Hey, dumb ass. What the fuck are you thinking? These things will kill you, they stink, and they make everyone else hate you. Get a clue, stinko. Buy some Big League Chew and call it a day.

The Dumbest Ad Yet, Hands Down

From the minds of inbred Floridians who've made gas huffing a family tradition comes the Powerboard, "the world's first motorized snowboard." "Cross country snowboarding has arrived @ 35 mph!!" The Powerboard, which is really a Stihl chainsaw mounted on the back of a snowboard, weights 35 pounds and has a "belt and chain" drive. Boy howdy. We're told to "ask for Powerboard at your local board, ski or outdoor shop." Yeah, it'll be in the corner right next to the lawnmowers.

Even we can't top that so consider us down for the count (just like Tyson) until next month when we'll have the run down on everyone's Web sites. Yes, there's some ugly snowboard stuff out there.

Go to the flakezine homestead.