VANCOUVER 2010: ONE YEAR OUT: CAMERA READY: SHAUN WHITE
U.S. snowboarder at top of fame mountain
DAVID EBNER
February 12, 2009
Forget about downhill skiers, hockey players and figure skaters. The most famous - and marketable - athlete expected to go for gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is a snowboarder.
It's much more likely you know him, and his mop of long, curly red hair, from magazine covers or Hewlett-Packard Co. commercials than for his seemingly impossible 1260s - 3½ full rotations, picture a spinning top - as he explodes from the steep walls of a snowboard halfpipe at the X Games.
Shaun White, already a star before gold at the Turin Games in 2006 launched him to mass-market fame, is a rare athlete. Fiercely competitive, yes, but bursting with personality, unlike golf's Tiger Woods (selling luxury watches and Nike products) or swimming's Michael Phelps (who hung out with Tony the Tiger on cereal boxes until his "regrettable" bong hit).
Consider White as version 4.0 of what's become Snowboard Inc. - fun, yes, still raw and a bit reckless, certainly, but big money, without doubt. Endorsements bring him an estimated $10-million (U.S.) a year.
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"Take away the trappings of fame. Do you want to be Shaun White or Michael Phelps?" asks Max Valiquette, president of Y Syndicate, a group of youth-marketing companies in Toronto. "Who's more fun, who has cooler friends, who do you want to hang out with? It's all Shaun White."
White, 22, the dude you'd expect to be smoking weed, never comes off awkward or weird.
Whether it's on the cover of business magazine Fast Company, or Rolling Stone, or in a new film about his visit to the remote Hokkaido backcountry in Japan for sponsor Red Bull, the energy drink, White is casual and never stiff, a relaxed Southern California style, where he grew up and lives, a guy you'd actually like to hang out with. Never mind that he's a ridiculously amazing halfpipe rider, and is a double threat - a top-tier skateboarder in his spare time, with an eye on the 2012 Summer Olympics in London if skateboarding, as speculated, enters the Olympics.
It's marketing gold, harder to find than the metal itself.
Skip the superficial equation of snowboarding equalling cool, and jump to why, Valiquette says. It's creative. It's kind of wild. It's fun. Most of all, it's not just about being really, really good at something.
Valiquette hardly needs to add, alluding to the new Shaun White Snowboarding video game by Ubisoft: "No one's playing a swimming video game."
If White is the fourth wave of snowboarding, the first iteration was certainly Jake Burton Carpenter, who had an instinct, a dream and an economics degree in hand. He hacked together the earliest commercial snowboards in a barn in Vermont in the late 1970s, when the sport was in outlaw territory, not allowed on any ski mountains.
The second emerged in the 1980s with the sport's first hero, Craig Kelly, sponsored by Burton Snowboards Inc.
The third starred Terje Haakonsen, another Burton rider, perhaps the best in the sport's history and the gold-medal favourite in 1998 in snowboarding's first appearance at the Olympics. But he spurned the event, likening the International Olympic Committee to the mafia.
White, a Burton rider since he was a kid, is at once ingrained by, and freed from, the past.
"He's become a superstar and plays that role better than anybody ever has," says Carpenter, owner of privately-held Burton. "Craig was big, Terje was huge, but Shaun's on a whole other level. Those guys were never on the cover of Rolling Stone. And a lot of that is attributable to Shaun."
Like the smartest of business people, White is careful to keep his commodity valuable by limiting its supply - and choosing partners with caution. He has a tight coterie of corporate sponsors and, after his gold in 2006, didn't blurt yes to the hundreds of offers as they poured in.
"Every week," his agent says, "we get presented with a big opportunity from someone. Shaun turns down a lot of money."
The way sponsors such as computer maker HP use White in commercials and campaigns - and how they use him sparingly - is another telling marketing tale.
HP, in 2005, was getting pounded, as usual, by Dell Inc., on the assembly-line side of computer selling, and by Apple Inc., on the creative side. In a slow but sure corporate reimagination, HP did what it barely ever did, sponsor an athlete, White, then not even 20 and mostly unknown outside snowboarding.
Not long thereafter, two things happened. White won gold - and was on magazine covers and television talk shows. Famous. Around the same time, David Roman, former Apple marketing executive, after some in-between work, joined HP. He coined the phrase: "The computer is personal again."
Another idea came up: hands. How a computer is used. Take marketing photos of celebrities - "achievers" in HP marketing parlance - without using their faces. First up, White, a lover of technology, games, photos, videos, music, a MySpace.com page. He loved the idea. And even after subsequent achievers such as rapper Jay-Z, tennis star Serena Williams and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, White's was still the biggest hit.
And, yes, HP sold more computers, and reused the spot last summer - two years after it first aired, almost unheard of - for a back-to-school campaign. But it doesn't use White much.
HP learned it wasn't about wallpapering a star on a billboard on every interstate in the United States. It was about something much deeper, and thus something potentially much more valuable.
"HP is an old brand, we've been around forever, and our weakest area was the youth space," says Roman, an HP marketing vice-president. "Shaun is such a great ambassador, the way he connects with kids, but at the same time, the way he uses technology."
It's all about real personality.
"Shaun has a much tighter link with his generation than I would suspect Michael Phelps has," Roman says. "We know Phelps for eight gold medals. You don't know him."
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The hit chart
Snowboarding, in a single decade, has gone from Olympic oddity to marquee event - and it boasts the Winter Olympics' most famous competitor. Shaun White of the United States looks to defend his gold medal in the men's halfpipe in Vancouver in 2010. Here, based on google.com hits, is a list of athletes ranked by online popularity:
6.58 million Shaun White, U.S. snowboarder
5.05 million Lindsey Vonn, U.S. alpine skier
2.66 million Kim Yu-Na, South Korean figure skater
1.92 million Jenny Wolf, German speed skater
1.74 million Nicole Hosp, Austrian alpine skier
1.62 million Sidney Crosby, Canadian hockey player
1.47 million Brian Joubert, French figure skater871,000 Bode Miller, U.S. alpine skier
632,000 Alexander Ovechkin, Russian hockey player
623,000 Jennifer Heil, Canadian freestyle skier
390,000 Eric Guay, Canadian alpine skier
64,300 Cindy Klassen, Canadian speed skater
25,100 Pierre Lueders, Canadian bobsledder
Beyond sports, for comparison:
293 million U.S. President Barack Obama
92.5 million U.S. singer Britney Spears
4.05 million Prime Minister Stephen Harper
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