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Life’s A Beach…AVP Maximizes East Coast Opportunity

The success of the AVP Crocs Tour in Southern California is well documented…a year round lifestyle sport with some of the greatest athletes on the planet.  However taking that brand and making it a national one is always a challenge, but the beach volleyballers took the past few weeks to build brand equity and market share in a very crowded weekend by maximizing every opportunity while making a rare Northeast Stop…on the sands of Coney Island in Brooklyn.  The tour used their athletes, their brand partnerships and CEO Leonard Armato in a multi-week strategy leading up to the event, garnering features on the sport’s business in Brandweek, wsj.com, the New York Post, Forbes.com and Bloomberg TV and radio, while also using their partnerships with brands like Cuervo and Banana Boat to expose the athletes to some key television time away from the event.  Pull in some lifestyle pieces with the New York Times, the New York Daily News and others, and the result was a well run experiental bonanza for the brand and the sport, at a criticial time leading into the Olympics with partner NBC.  Well hit, great placements.

More warning signs about the economy and discretionary spending on sports marketing programs continue to arise, the latest being the USA Today piece on GM’s cutback on sports spending, especially around NASCAR…at the same time, the New York Times has a solid piece on the effective western messaging ads being portrayed in China for the Olympics…Media Post has a good piece today on ESPN’s broadband growth with golf and soccer,   while Marketing Daily has an interesting piece that can be applied to sports on how churn in staff is negatively effecting the way marketing plans are being implemented…the New York Daily News’ Jesse Spector has a good piece on Yankees prospect Pat Venditte, who can throw righty or lefty…and lastly, with two mega MMA events over the weekend and CBS second live event coming this Saturday, foxsports.com’s Mark Kriegel has a column on the real star of MMA who emerged Saturday night, Affliction’s Fedor Emelianenko…