A New Scene Unfolds for Ski Media
The media line-up in the ski world looks a lot different this year with the demise of Miller Publishing’s Mountain Sports & Living (MS&L) (née Snow Country). With the exception of Powder and its relatively small, but devoted, cult following, it leaves the 800-lb gorilla in the form of Times Mirror Magazines (TMM), whose The Skiing Company publishes some five consumer titles in the skiing/boarding field, including Ski, Skiing, Freeze and Transworld Snowboarding.
The mystery is how Miller Publishing, which had bought Snow Country and some other sports magazines from the New York Times Magazine Co. in late 1997, managed to kill it off in under 18 months. It took some doing.
And now a daring new quarterly has arrived: Elevation, billed as a “modern sports and culture” magazine. A product of Sun Valley-based Active Publications, it appears to be a mountain lifestyle publication, self-consciously environmental and with a somewhat edgier tack than the old MS&L. Distribution of the first issue is shown as an ambitious 250,000, the page rate an even more ambitious $12K. Last season’s two-issue start-up, Freeskier, is now on a four-issue schedule, with circulation up to 60K.
Meanwhile, back at The Skiing Company, Ski’s editor, Andy Bigford, snapped up Snow Country’s founding editor, John Fry, as a columnist. It’s a real homecoming for Fry, who was Ski’s editorial leader from 1964 to 1980 before becoming a major competitive thorn in TMM’s side with his Snow Country start-up. In his new role, Fry has reinvented himself as ski industry curmudgeon. In the first of his “In My View” columns for Ski, iconoclast Fry took aim at the Ski Hall of Fame; in his November issue column, he takes off on the music blaring out of ski resort loudspeakers into every nook and valley of a mountain resort. “What’s wrong with quiet?” he asks.
Boarders Probe Defenses of No-Ride Resorts
That forbidden territory of Alta, Aspen Mountain and Taos, all on Forest Service land, is Holy Grail to snowboarders. Recently, a tiny light appeared when a FS official suggested Aspen would have to justify the snowboard ban if their operating plan for the coming season was to be approved. Nah. Not. The threat self-destructed.
But riders took perverse delight in the Forest Service’s insistence that Snowmass could not exclude brownbaggers. Not, heaven forbid, because of any correlation between riding and brownbagging, but rather on the issue of discrimination.
NSAA Seeks to Launch Environmental Charter
Ultimately, it’s all probably validation of America’s great free market economy that there’s competition even in providing mediation services for environmental harmony. In 1995, the golf industry, facilitated by the Colorado-based Center for Resource Management (CRM), started a process that eventually resulted in a document called Environmental Principles for Golf Courses in the United States. Involved in the process were some of their critics in the environmental community.
In March of this year, Vail staged the Sustainable Summits Conference, organized and facilitated by the same CRM, whose president, Terry Minger, was once mayor of Vail. The 65 conferees included top officials from ski towns and counties, the Forest Service, NSAA, the EPA, ski areas and historic opponents of ski area expansion—environmental advocacy groups like High Country Citizens Alliance and the Conservation Law Foundation. In coverage in May SAM (“Talking, Not Fighting”), John Fry wrote, “The wastefulness of litigation and the advantages of collaboration formed a central theme [of the conference].” Plans for follow-up conferences were announced by CRM (Vail in 2000, Park City, Utah, in 2001 on the eve of the Olympics).
Minger also proposed a charter of principles for sustainable mountain resort communities, similar to the principles CRM had helped create for the golf world.
But NSAA had other ideas. If environmental principles for ski areas were to be developed, NSAA should be the prime-mover, they felt. So they contracted with the Keystone Center, another non-profit facilitator and consensus-builder in the environmental field. NSAA’s president, Michael Berry, and director of public policy, Geraldine Hughes, explain further that CRM, originally a Robert Redford creation, is more focused on community growth and sustainability issues. Though obviously significant, such issues bespeak a bigger mandate than NSAA wants. Rather, NSAA wants to develop its environmental charter involving ski area design, construction, maintenance and operations. It also wants to play a leadership role in getting its skier/boarder clientele to sign on to its principles.
Says CRM’s Minger, “We wish NSAA well with its program. I like to think our programs will be complementary to what NSAA is doing.” In the meantime, NSAA’s plans call for four full-day working sessions—two this fall and two at the January NSAA meetings—at which Keystone will facilitate. NSAA Environmental Committee chairman, Jerry Blann, thinks it will take more than this if the target of completion by the 2000 NSAA convention is to be met. “They’re complex issues involved,” he says, “and that’s not much time.”
For general background on the whole NSAA initiative, see the Issues piece on Page 14 by Sarah Stokes, of the Keystone Center.
Distinctive Marketing Hustle From MOD
Remember “The Initiative?” That was when we were going to come together as an industry, led by our IPO-flush conglomerates, and raise a gidgillion bucks and get our sport moving again by tapping into the huge lapsed skier market. Then, well, er, it all sorta, you know, like it went limp.
Just when you thought not even Viagra could save it, along comes Mountains of Distinction (MOD), lead by Jiminy Peak’s “leaps-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound” Brian Fairbank, who is also NSAA’s vice chair. At a mid-August summit, the leadership of MOD’s 18 independent areas (up from 7 last year) signed on to a dynamic action plan built around attracting new and especially lapsed skiers with a “GETSkiing” rallying cry. GET being an acronym for Guaranteed Easy Turns. (Last year it was GLM, or Guaranteed Learning Method, but who’s fussy?) These easy turns will come from the use of short skis, which were credited with helping areas get a 50 percent return rate for additional lessons last year. The come-on is a $25 offer to “Come back (or try) skiing” for 90 minutes, with short ski equipment, lift use and coaching included. A MOD website is being developed to serve as the centerpiece for the promotional messages.
Bad Break for Absolut
You’ve surely seen that ingenious magazine advertising campaign using the Absolut vodka bottle shape in various incarnations. But the campaign took a boneheaded turn last season with “Absolut Vail,” which portrayed the bottle shape in a plaster cast. Ouch! Vail took exception and complained in court. As a result, Absolut pulled the ads and agreed to contribute an undisclosed sum to Vail Resorts’ skier safety programs.
One interesting sidenote: If you happen to have one of the ads, it might be worth keeping in a dry, safe place. While researching the advertisement, we turned up an amazing array of Absolut ad collectors online as well as an entire collectors’ society.
New Research, Exciting Messages on the Way
SIA’s president, David Ingemie, liked what he heard when former Coca Cola marketing executive, Sergio Zyman, spoke at Ski Industry Week last December. “I reviewed all the past industry marketing and research efforts,” Ingemie told SAM, citing Glendenning, Brand, Ski-It-To-Believe-It, More People on Skis, last year’s “Initiative,” Snowblast and others. “We haven’t been wrong,” he concludes, but he feels the industry has lacked effectiveness in translating its efforts to the marketplace.
SIA has retained the sports marketing consulting firm, Z-Sport, founded by Zyman, to facilitate an industry marketing research program that will “help identify today’s market segments interested in snow sports and provide information on each segment’s intrinsic value to the industry.” The program also calls for developing “powerful messages and tactics” to bring to bear effectively on these market segments. That is, the research, messages and tactics will be the goal of the effort, with their implementation coming from all industry segments.
Short Turns
Adding to its Pennsylvania operations (Ski Liberty and Ski Roundtop), Irv Naylor’s Snowtime, Inc. picked up Whitetail Resort at auction in late August. Three earlier attempts to sell to county bonding authorities had failed. . . Tim Cohee is leaving the presidency of Kirkwood, Calif., to take the top sales and marketing position at Killington.
