Adrenaline athletes sponsoring...water?

The parallels between adrenaline sports such as snowboarding, freestyle skiing, surfing, skateboarding, and dirt biking seem like an energy drink marketer’s dream. Not only does sponsorship of such activities target teenage viewers, but also the shrapnel of exposure extends into more mainstream realms—products like Red Bull, Monster and Rockstar are now mainstays at little league baseball, high school soccer matches, and varsity football games. Very little emphasis is placed on the actual product itself.

Despite energy drinks’ popularity with the younger set, they are wholly vilified by in-the-know parents and pediatricians due to their high sugar and caffeine content. It is both surprising and encouraging that professional snowboarders Austin Smith and Bryan Fox started the Drink Water campaign, first with an insignia on the bottom of their boards (a prime spot for visibility in the half-pipe) and now with T-shirts, sweatshirts and stickers emblazoned with a clearly identifiable faucet logo and sold through their website,wedrinkwater.com.

According to Smith and Fox: “If you love snowboarding or some other healthy activity that defines many decisions in your life, you are likely a choice target-consumer for companies that sell ‘energy drinks.’ Maybe you, like us, started to feel uncomfortable about how effective these companies have become at encouraging young people to consume their product: beverages of caffeine, sodium, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and even some mystery chemicals about which little is known … We're out to spread the Drink Water word. We don’t sell water, we just drink it.”

Smith and Fox rely on energy drink companies to support both adrenaline sports and themselves, yet they so vehemently disagree with the energy drink sponsorship message (which is essentially that consuming energy drinks will make you a better extreme sport athlete) that they actively encourage their fans and peers to simply drink water. In reality, extreme sports do not require energy drinks. Rather, the opposite is true. In order to perform at such elite levels, athletes want to avoid the crash (or ‘bonk’ in snowboarder speak) that occurs after drinking a high-sugar beverage.

Corporate sponsorship is a vital aspect of extreme sports. However, there has to be a responsibility factor. As we have seen with marketing junk food, children are sponges to advertising. Once they absorb a message, often times you have a customer for life.