There have been very few niche sports that have been able to crack through the big money and big challenges of the New York market. Beach volleyball, arena football, Olympic sports, indoor soccer, arm wrestling, tae kwon do, non-NFL branded football, MMA (outside of the still-banned UFC), indoor lacrosse, outdoor lacrosse, non-US Open tennis all have come and gone with some visibility but with great financial loss. Some, like the PBR and to some extent World Team Tennis, have found a nice and some staying power with cost-controlled and better timed success, but the battle is not an easy one. It is expensive to stage, even more expensive to market and difficult to maintain and grab attention of a consumer who has little time and different degrees of discretionary income.
So with that as the challenge, today the power of Madison Square Garden rolled out a huge display of Action Sports events in the Crossroads of the World, Times Square. Huge jumps and flips captivated passersby, and certainly played well on the jumbotrons, which made for a great platform to launch a new partnership division that will look to bring a younger demo connected by the brands’ sports-related TV network (MSG Network), its music outlet (Fuse) and other Cablevision-related and MSG connected assets (Newsday, MSG Varsity etc.) into one cohesive content driven arena. It is the latest attempt to find ways to link the large offerings that MSG has in a cost-efficient way that will diversify and draw new dollars, partners and consumers to a brand that is largely known for the Knicks and the Rangers and their other pro hockey offerings these days. Will it work?
Sitting in the near future is a surfing event with large dollars (and hopefully large waves) sponsored by the apparel and lifestyle brand Quiksilkver, which will be held in Cablevision-dominated Long Island in September. Two weeks ago a mega-combination pro and amateur skateboard event was held in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, also a heavy Cablevision area. Other action events marketed by sports entities at the grassroots level have done well, most notably Maloof Sports work with skateboarding competitions. And unlike many other properties, MSG controls the most valuable pieces of such a co-promotion…TV time across a set of networks that can draw not just from sports, but from a music and action culture as well. Now the production cost as well as the marketing costs in New York are still high but the ability to build a following and then grow that platform in a summer season when there is a need to fill programming is a good step forward. It also opens up all areas of MSG’s assets to a new market, and may be able to help lure in some extra eyes who may not be interested in Henrik Lundquist or Carmelo Anthony most of the time, but will be more interested through a different connection. Another area of growth is in digital and social media. Event and media companies are still struggling to find the right mix of digital and social engagement with their core demo, and can probably learn a great deal through the field training and experience of being around the attendees and participants in the action sports category. Yes there is risk. At the end of the day, MSG and other properties make money on their core business, professional hoops and hockey and other large ticketed events. Attempts at branching out into secondary businesses have failed before, which has resulted in MSG becoming much more of a rental building for other events than an active partner. That actually is the reason for the failure of other niche sports in recent years…too much to stage, too much to produce media, which led to too high a loss. With MSG having a stake in the sport, there are economies of scale and inventory that others never had the opportunity to bring to the table.
That gives action sports as a platform a chance in the Apple, and probably gives MSG a new, sellable commodity for an audience which may not think twice for hoops or hockey.
