Journalists love to break stories before their competition, so we’re proud of being the first to cover the Leatt neck brace. Getting a scoop about a big sponsor change is great, but it doesn’t compare with helping to put a truly life-saving product on the map.

Vital MX’s Content Director, Steve Giberson, has always had an interest in advancing motocross safety (maybe because he crashes so much?), so he was intrigued when he first came across the Leatt brace. With a handful of former pros now confined to wheelchairs due to riding accidents, Steve was hopeful about what the Leatt brace could mean for current riders. His review back in November, 2006, was the first time most people heard about it. Then in February, Steve filmed and posted to Vital MX a video with motocross legend David Bailey in which Bailey implored other riders to try out the Leatt brace. For those who don’t know Bailey’s background, he has spent the last twenty years in a wheelchair after suffering a career-ending riding accident.

That video set off a landslide. In an editorial he wrote about the video, Racer X Editor Davey Coombs said that it “pretty much stopped the busy supercross world in its tracks.” Motocross Action transcribed the video and printed the text in their magazine. Message boards were on fire with discussion about the video and the Leatt brace. Less than one week after we posted the video, top pros and amateurs who had never before worn neck braces were using the Leatt brace in competition.

The effect on Leatt, a small South African startup, was huge. On February 8, the day before we posted the Bailey video, their stock price was at $.14 per share. By February 20, their stock had more than quadrupled to $.60. Their stock has since settled in around $.45, giving the company a market value of around $50 million (US). Show this stock chart to your CFO if you need more budget for online marketing!

Perhaps most significant is how quickly and effectively consumers were able to learn about this groundbreaking product, and the positive impact this has had. Consider the post I saw on a regional motocross message board. It’s from a father writing about his son who crashed while using the Leatt brace:

“This video is the reason #475 and his brother #473 started wearing the Leatt Neck Brace.”¦ Due to the severe fracture on Garet’s L7, his neurologist could not believe he did not have neck injuries, knowing that he had to land on the top of his head to sustain the fractures that he did. I took the brace to the hospital last night and Georgeann showed it to the doctor and he confirmed the fact AGAIN that if Garet had not had the Leatt Neck Brace on he would have definitely broken his neck, no question.”

Being able to hear and see Bailey’s plea on video the day it was filmed gave it an urgency and impact that would not have been possible with traditional print media. We’re proud to have broken this story and put the spotlight on a product that makes motocross a safer sport.

Mike posted a Jeremy Reeves interview and photo gallery on Vital Skate today.

When asked about skateboarding web sites, Jeremy had a great quote: “It’s great, it keeps skating alive. It gets people hooked because of the constant updates and news. It’s way more efficient than magazines in that department.”

Take a look at the interview and the photo gallery.

Since the dawn of Internet advertising, click-throughs have been the standard metric by which marketers gauge their ads’ effectiveness. Driving people to their website was often the goal of their ad campaign, so click-throughs were the logical measure. Now, as high-speed Internet connections have become mainstream, rich media ads are emerging as the standard and the objective is often not click-throughs.

“Rich media” is a broad term, but it typically refers to ads that allow for user interaction and have advanced features, such as video, sound, the ability to expand in size, games, etc. Rich media ads allow you to bring a small part of your site directly to the consumer. The idea is to engage users within your ad, rather than just using the ad as a hook to get them to your site.

This makes perfect sense if you think about how people surf the Internet. There is a certain commitment level — however small — to clicking an ad and being taken to a new site. Even if an ad looks interesting, many people will not want to get sidetracked by clicking on it. Ads that can expand or play video are very effective because they allow interaction with minimal commitment or delay. Not surprisingly, the user interaction rates on rich media ads blow away click-through rates on conventional ads — 5% compared to 1%. That’s a whopping 500% difference in measurable response!

Whether it’s because it’s fun for users to interact, or because it’s less of a commitment than clicking, it’s undeniable that rich media ads are more effective at engaging consumers and driving higher response rates.

Check out these great examples of rich media ads:

As soon as you rollover this Sin City video ad, the sounds comes on. This ad is simple and hugely effective.

Movie studios know more people will see a trailer if they’re played within a banner, rather than expect users to click-through to a different web site.

We’re stoked to have Birdhouse running on Vital Skate. With all the talk recently about how blanks and skateboards are marketed, it’s great to see Birdhouse leading the charge in a couple of areas. First, they’re marketing where the majority of their customers are – online. Secondly, they’re marketing the benefits of their product. Their well-built Flash ads are effective at grabbing your attention and conveying their brand message.

For those of you unfamiliar with Flash, it’s a design application that allows for animation and interactivity. Over the last few years Flash has become the standard that most online designers use. If you’d like to contact some good Flash designers to make your ads more compelling, let me know.[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.vitalskate.com/ads/video/Black6Banner300.swf" height="300" width="300" /]

Check out Ad Age’s “Digital Marketing & Media Fact Pack.” The 52-page PDF has tons of easy-to-digest lists and statistics that show what both consumers and advertisers are doing online.

For anyone in advertising or marketing, all the clichés about the difficulty of change and the need to never stop learning have never been more accurate than they are now. The San Francisco Chronicle has a great look inside the “wrenching shift” Goodby, Silverstein & Partners went through to be able to effectively address digital media.

Excerpt:

It was close to two years ago that Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, co-founders of the storied San Francisco advertising agency that bears their names, began to worry that their best days were behind them.

The business was changing. The shift was on to new media, particularly the Web, and the Goodby shop, in the top tier of U.S. agencies, was devoted largely to television and print advertising, such as the memorable “Got Milk?” campaign.

A meeting for the agency’s creative directors was arranged at a photographer’s studio. There, Jeff Goodby delivered the news:

“I told them, ‘If you want to work here, you have to be able to do all these things,’ ” referring to a broad swath of new media. “I told them, ‘You have to be our eyes and ears into the new world. You have to learn about it. You have to be trading ideas and be excited about them here every day at work.’ ”

(Read the whole article)

From my conversations with people in our industry, it’s clear that nearly all of them face this same challenge. They know they need to follow their customers into new media, but they often aren’t sure how, and they don’t think they have the staff to pull it off effectively. They have catalogs and print ads down to a science, but they don’t have the infrastructure and experienced staff for online marketing.

The lesson from Goodby is to embrace change and the future, rather than just clinging to what you know how to do; and to make sure you have people on board who are capable and excited about making these changes happen.

If you need help finding people with online experience, give Todd or me a call. We’re happy to connect you with an agency or person that’s within your budget.

This video might be too inside, but whatever. I’ve watched it five times now and it still makes me laugh. Mike (content director for Vital Skate) made a hidden camera video of Aaron, our senior web developer.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.vitalskate.com/video/themes/test-theme2/vitalplayer_external.swf?myvideovar=http://www.vitalskate.com/video/albums/userpics/10003/aaroncraze.flv&myvideoplay=play" height="380" width="450" /]

In my last entry, I talked about how wide Vital’s global reach has already become. While most marketers want as large and broad of an audience as possible, there are often good reasons to target a narrower audience. We can help you do this easily through a technique called “geo-targeting.” Using the IP address of a visitor to one of our sites, we know with good accuracy where they are located.

Through geo-targeting, we can display specific ads to a person based on location criteria – city, area code, zip code, designated market area (DMA), state, or country. For example, you could give us an ad featuring a local Australian pro you sponsor and have this ad only seen by people in Australia. Everyone else in the world would see the primary ads in your campaign. Or if your team will be signing autographs at a shop in a particular area, there’s probably no point in advertising that to the whole world.

Another scenario would be an importer who has a limited sales territory for a brand and doesn’t want to pay to advertise it worldwide. If you can’t sell in North America, why bother paying for our entire audience? Just select your relevant area.

While there is a cost-per-impression premium to consider with geo-targeting, its ability to accurately match your ad creative to the intended audience, as well its elimination of irrelevant impressions can make it a very cost-effective tool.

Vital sites have been live for only eight months, and already we’ve attracted users from 151 of the world’s 193 countries. As someone just old enough to be impressed by such things, it’s amazing to me that people in Argentina or Zambia can now be just as up to date on the latest news as someone living in the industry’s backyard of southern California. No more paying $12 for a copy of an imported magazine with old information (that is, if you can even find one). And to make things really interesting, now anyone can create a profile, or upload their photos and videos and get in the mix.

Here are the top-ten countries for each of our sites.

Vital BMX

Vital Skate

Vital MX

The Wall Street Journal has a great interview with Jack Kliger, the CEO of Hachette USA. He discusses why his company went web-only with some of their magazines, the economics of print versus online publishing, and how the editorial approach differs between print and online.

Excerpt:

The Wall Street Journal: What factors have prompted Hachette to end the print editions of these magazines?

Mr. Kliger: Looking at the ELLEgirl and Premiere categories, the consumers in the teen market and the movie market want fast information. We saw trend lines for both ELLEgirl.com and Premiere.com moving in very positive, healthy directions, and we didn’t necessarily feel that the print versions, which were not trending in a reasonable timeline toward profitability, enhanced what the digital versions were providing.