Within hours of Garrett Reynolds winning gold at the X Games, Nike had a great-looking “Congrats Garrett” ad running on Vital BMX. Win ads like this one are popular on Vital because they allow brands to quickly capitalize on the buzz and excitement of a rider’s win while it’s still fresh.

We can help make the process of creating win ads as easy as possible. Win ads can be booked individually or we can do a standing order for the whole season. We might even be able to help with a photo and ad creation.

Drop me a line if you are interested in getting some win ads started for your riders.

We recently finished the first Vital MX audience survey. The goal of the survey was to help the motocross industry better understand our audience. We found some interesting information about our visitors:

• Median age is 39: Everyone knows that young people are online, but with a median age of 39 Vital MX reaches motocross fans of all ages.
• They’re online daily: Over 94% go online at least once a day.
• The internet is their leading source of information: 86% cite the internet as one of their main sources of motocross information.
• They’re educated: 36% have graduated from college. If you exclude those under 23-years-old, the figure rises to 50%.
• They have a high household income: 56% earn $75,000 or more.

In addition to reporting the full survey results (link below), we have the ability to cross-tabulate the data. For example, let’s take a look at the brands of riding gear that Vital MX visitors plan to purchase. The summarized survey results will quickly tell you that Thor was the top choice (after “undecided”).

Undecided: 22.6%
Thor: 18.1%
Fox: 16.3%
Troy Lee: 8.7%
MSR: 5.7%

By cross-tabulating just the Thor results by age, we can see that Thor is especially strong with younger Vital MX visitors:

Under 17: 39.1%
18-20: 31.0%
21-24: 26.8%
25-34: 25.6%
35-44: 16.8%
Over 45: 22.1%

The options for cross-tabulating are virtually endless. For example, we could drill down and look at pick-up truck ownership against ownership of a particular brand of motorcycle. Please let me know if you’d like more information on cross-tabulation results of your brand.

Complete Vital MX audience survey.

The Levi’s BMX program is a good example of a big company doing it right in action sports. They put together a team of amazing pros who are genuinely stoked on Levi’s, they let those pros assemble a flow team, and they promote their team and products through consistent video content and advertising. Vital has been a partner of Levi’s since their program was launched, so it’s great to see their success.

The Levi’s team did demos at Tilly’s stores in Irvine and Tustin this past weekend. That’s pretty much my backyard, so I wasn’t going to miss it. Here’s a link to a video on Vital BMX.

Levi’s brought in almost everyone from their Pro and Flow teams - Dakota Roche, Zack Warden, Brett Walker, Jamie Bestwick, Ron Thomas, Nathan Williams, Corey Martinez, and Morgan Wade.

With his X Games win the prior weekend, Jamie Bestwick was a crowd favorite.

The mandatory post-demo autograph session.

Kathy McGrath of Bird Marketing is the mastermind behind the Levi’s BMX program.

No big surprise here - Slap skateboard magazine has gone web-only. As they say in their press release, with an online audience ten-times the size of their print magazine, it’s a logical move.

Here’s an excerpt from their press release:

2008 finds us in the midst of a crossroads, as the future of how people get their news, entertainment, and even skateboarding transitions into the digital age. SLAP has decided to step up and be the first in skateboarding to make a clean break with the old, and with that sentiment and excitement we announce SLAP will now channel its efforts and creativity 100% into slapmagazine.com. So long paper!

Read the whole release here.

I’ve been to nearly every summer X Games since it debuted back in 1995. Over the years, I’ve been consistently impressed with how well ESPN has grown and managed the franchise. I don’t think too many people at the inaugural event would have predicted that ESPN would have stuck with it this long, and helped take action sports to the current level.

Here are some random photos from this year’s event.

ESPN took a lot of heat for this new Super Park course, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Ryan Nyquist is sure a good sport. Schick ran a big online promo that let people vote on how he would shave his facial hair for X Games. Boneless took the crown.

Guess which one of us is the producer of Jackass? Way before he became a Hollywood mogul, Jeff Tremaine was the art director for Go magazine (where he hired me as the staff photographer way back in 1991). More random trivia: It was only used for one issue, but Jeff designed the original Ride BMX magazine logo for me.

Darkmane and Losey became friends through their profiles on Vital, so they were both stoked to finally meet in person.

This photo doesn’t do it justice, but the line for Dave Mirra’s autograph was seriously about 100 yards long.

I spotted this camera next to the vert ramp. Red is a video camera brand started by Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley. I have no idea how a guy who made grips and sunglasses was able to drastically improve video camera technology, but I hear they’ve done it.

It was great to see former BMX and MTB racer Tara Llanes in attendance at BMX vert.

I’m not sure who has more nerve, the athletes or this camera operator. ESPN does not skimp on putting together a great TV show.

I was stoked to see my old friend Dennis McCoy get fourth place in vert.

BMXunion.com did a nice interview with me about Vital. Check it out here.

Last Saturday was the release party for the Freestylin’ magazine’s retrospective book. To say that Freestylin’ was an influential part of my life as a BMXer growing up in the 1980s would be a huge understatement. Its amazing photography inspired me to start shooting; an interview they did with Bob Haro opened my eyes the idea of starting a business (I previously assumed that all “business people” were middle-aged and wore suits and ties); the overall vibe of the magazine made you feel like you were part of something cool and compelled me to get further into the scene; and riders like Mat Hoffman and Ron Wilkerson made me realize early on that if I were to have any occupational future in BMX, it would not be as a rider. The convergence of all these factors led to me getting hired at Go magazine (the successor to Freestylin’), starting Ride BMX magazine when Go went bust, and finally starting Vital as the web evolved.

Both the book and the party were great. Here’s an excerpt from Mark Losey’s coverage on Vital BMX:

On June 28, 2008, the ultimate Freestylin’ reunion went down at Brooklyn Projects in West Hollywood, CA. Nike’s John Martin, the same person who helped facilitate the Lightning Bolts show in Beijing, China, was the catalyst behind the event, and the shop was packed with legends like Eddie Fiola, Mike Dominguez, Todd Anderson, Woody Itson, Mat Hoffman, Mark Lewman, Spike Jonze, and more. While everyone was there to celebrate BMX history, there was another agenda on everyone’s mind: a 154-page Freestylin’ retrospective book complete with vintage photos and new interviews with the guys who made freestyle BMX what it is. At the end of the night, a U-haul truck backed into the parking lot and Brooklyn Projects’ Dominic DeLuca handed out boxes containing the prized masterpiece.

Only 2,500 of the Freestylin’ books are in existence, but Mark Lewman said there are plans to get the entire content, plus more that wouldn’t fit, online for everyone to see.

See all of Losey’s coverage and photo gallery here.

Below are my paparazzi photos (it was Hollywood, after all).

Two of the most influential guys in BMX in the 1980’s - Ron Wilkerson and Mark Lewman.

John Martin is Nike’s action sports Creative Director. He’s also an old-school BMXer and was one of the drivers of this book and Nike’s Beijing BMX art show.

Woody Itson’s gold-plated Hutch Trick Star was quintessential 80’s bling. Nike SB is releasing a limited-edition shoe that pays homage to it.

Former Skyway teammates Mat Hoffman and Eddie Roman collaborated around 1991 to make one of the most groundbreaking BMX videos of all time - Head First.

Vert legends Mike Dominguez and Eddie Fiola.

Eddie Fiola autographs his section of the book for Spike Jonze.

Everyone was an autograph-seeker at this party. Brooklyn Projects owner Dom DeLuca and Ron Wilkerson.

One of the best riders of all time, Brian Blyther, autographs a book for Kevin McAvoy, former editor of TransWorld BMX

Of the countless articles I’ve read that theorize about the future of online and print, this is one of the more interesting ones. Although it’s written by a magazine publishing consultant and it’s in Publishing Executive magazine, it still manages to be pretty objective. The article never mentions web video, which is sort of odd considering television is what crushed general-interest magazines forty years ago. Nonetheless, it’s a good read if you like this sort of thing. Here are some edited excerpts:

There have been a lot of funerals for printed magazines lately, but I keep waiting for a eulogy that describes what exactly is being buried. There are three elements that are showing signs of mortality: the physical printed magazine, the role of editor as mediator, and the core magazine business model. The business model will have to wait for a future column, but now let’s look at the prognosis for the first two. On which grave should we leave the flowers?

The Physical Object
For the reading experience itself, no one prefers a screen to a magazine. What pulls us away from a printed magazine to a screen is the immediacy of the information transfer and the wastefulness of making and moving printed copies. But is it enough to put printing out of business?

Delivering information to a screen is spectacularly more efficient than making printed copies. Even better, the flow never ceases, the page boundaries dissolve, and the data can be searched, copied and moved. The experience is almost perfect, if you can just get over the rank clumsiness of the screen device and, it must be noted, the sheer uselessness of much information that’s shot out too hastily. (Speed in and of itself is not the prize-it’s the ongoing updating that’s the true boon.)

Print’s fatal flaw is that it is wasteful by any environmental measure. The gravest problem is the newsstand, but even subscriber copies carry a carbon burden. We’ve cut trees and released greenhouse gases to print them, while screen displays require far fewer resources. Shouldn’t print be permitted to croak to save the planet?

To a degree, the honest answer is yes. Just as there’s no reason to print phone directories, there’s no reason to print certain magazines. If it can be done better on screen, it shouldn’t be in print. This doesn’t mean that all magazines need to disappear, only that publications must justify their use of printing.

The Membership
Are magazines objects or memberships? Great magazines give readers a sense of community and a sense of self. They are sources of identity. When it works, editor and reader connect. But that connection is changing today, and fewer people are defining themselves through the magazines they read. They’re veering away because other media are beckoning, and because other media treat the very idea of mediation differently.

With the tools in hand to make passable pages and pictures, many of us are prepared to subvert editorial judgment in favor of posting our own blog comments and videos. Getting our snapshots on Flickr is, to many of us, more satisfying than viewing a professional photographer’s photos. Fewer of us use magazines as memberships, where an editor focuses our collective interest, because we prefer to make our own decisions about what’s interesting. And what’s most interesting is what we make and say ourselves.

The obituary here is for the paid journalist and editor. It’s not the printed page we reject, but the idea that a third party comes between us and the subject matter, to structure the engagement, direct our attention, scale the subject up or down, and control our impressions. At worst, the mediator is a propagandist who crushes our critical thinking. At best, the mediator helps us apply critical thinking by introducing us to information we never would have uncovered on our own.

Read the whole story here

Catalog Choice is a great site that I started using back in January. Here’s how they describe themselves: “Catalog Choice is a free service that lets you decline paper catalogs you no longer wish to receive. Reduce the amount of unsolicited mail in your mailbox, while helping to preserve the environment.”

It seems to work well, the only weakness being that Catalog Choice is at the mercy of the catalogers to actually honor the requests. My request to cancel Pottery Barn is listed as “unconfirmed,” and Performance Bicycle is listed as “refused.” Performance has a shop near my house, but I definitely won’t be shopping there any time soon!

Our man Steve Giberson is one of the best shooters in the business. He’s also at virtually every Supercross and motocross national. With that combination, Vital has become the photo supplier for a handful manufacturers and ad agencies. If you need motocross photos on a regular or one-time basis, drop us a line.