Arby's Gets Into The Action

I never would equated roast beef sandwhiches with action sports, but according to this press release, Arby's is sponsoring the first Arby’s Action Sports Awards presented by FUEL TV, which will air on FOX December 10. According to the press release:

“This was a fantastic opportunity for us to partner with a brand new awards program that recognizes young athletes for extraordinary talents,” said Debra Mager, Senior Vice President of National Advertising, Arby’s Restaurant Group, Inc. “These kids take risks and excel at being different, which is something we at Arby’s have always prided ourselves on.”

What kind of risks are they taking with their roast beef sandwhiches? Yikes. I'm really curious to see how this event is embraced by the various communities that make up the action sports world (which is kind of an artificial way to group these very different subcultures together for marketing purposes).

On a related note, AdAge.com (reg. required) reports that Transworld is launching an action sports channel on Heavy.com sometime this week. This feels more right to me than AOL's effort and even Yahoo! Current's Action channel. Transworld and Heavy just feel like they will be more accepted than AOL and Yahoo! by this crowd…

In the snow space, Ypulse reader Sally sent me some interesting research her company did on girls and snowboarding:

"We crunched the numbers from demographic data for ski/snowboard participation, and found that during the pre-teen years, gender participation is essentially equal – right up through the age of 13 or so, boys and girls are equally likely to ski/snowboard. However, starting with the mid-teen years, when the first big spike in overall participation happens, teen girls are only half as likely to be increasing their skier/snowboarder visits as boys….

The girls we interviewed in the follow-up qualitative interviews were pretty consistent with their thoughts on why girls weren’t increasing their visits at the rate boys were, even though the survey showed that skiing/snowboarding was ranked very cool at equal rates by both genders. The girls’ feedback: one, not enough girls represented in the resort’s ads, literature, websites (she sent this example of someone doing it right); two, no great hang-outs that they could populate with their friends but without parents and little kids, and three, not enough other teen girls for them to spend time with."

This seems like valuable research for anyone in the hospitality space….

And now for the Ypulse event plug: If you are interested in the action sports space or just want to learn about how the experts in this space are able to create really authentic marketing that reflects and is embraced by folks in the skate/snow/surf communities, RSVP now to the Ypulse San Diego Teen Media Mashup. All of the details are here (scroll down past the NYC event). These events are FREE, you just need to RSVP with your name(s) and company/organization.

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