1909 Coca-Cola ad with six-day rider

When I first went into a six-day race I took a jug of Coca-Cola to New York with me and drank it all the time I was there. I won the championship and came out of that great contest ten pounds heavier than when I went in. After that experience I have never been without Coca-Cola, because it keeps me fresh, but does not stimulate and then leave me all broken up.

Influx Curated recap

If someone gave you 5 minutes to inspire a room of 200+ people, what would you say? That was the directive at the Influx Curated conference that I went to yesterday. Ed Cotton – the guy who organized the event, writes the Influx Insights blog, and interviewed me about bikes – picked 10 speakers. Each of them picked two additional speakers. There was a 5-minute time limit and a simple directive: to inspire.

Print advertising as sponsorship

Streetwear and sneaker design tastemaker Jeff Staple has launched a print magazine called Reed Pages (his store/gallery is called Reed Space). It’s a good-looking mag, although visually it doesn’t stand out from the rest of the modern design genre. That said, Reed Pages takes a fresh approach to content where all stories are given equal billing and organized alphabetically. But what’s most interesting about Reed Pages is its approach to advertising. According to Staple, there isn’t any.

Who rakes cycling’s muck?

Herman and Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’ of media posits that “the news” is simply a means by which to put advertising in front of people with buying power. The product is the audience, not the content, and the customers are the advertisers, not the readers. So stories that make people not want to buy stuff or that speak ill of advertisers may be subject to “filtering.” The problem of filtering affects all media but is compounded in cycling, where there’s basically nothing to write about except the products and sponsored athletes of current and potential advertisers.

RIP, pass-along rate

For PR firms - people whose job is to get editorial media coverage, as opposed paid advertising, by sending out press releases and the like - the demise of the newspaper carries with it the demise of one the industry’s most powerful tools: the pass-along rate.

Redesigns: ESPN.com vs. Cyclingnews

Within the last two days, the world’s #1 sports site and #1 cycling site both launched redesigns. ESPN.com’s was a complete rebuild with entirely new strategies for user experience and advertising options. Cyclingnews, on the other hand, accommodated a new ad display strategy with fairly small code tweak that significantly alters the user experience. A [...]

Kadisco Interview with Puma CMO Antonio Bertone

(A follow-up post about Puma’s 2010 bike  line is here.)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the increasing role that companies outside the bike industry have in shaping the way that people think about bicycles. I want to explore that trend and share what I find, so I’ll be posting a series of conversations with [...]

Post-Thanksgiving PPT

I came across this presentation on SlideShare while looking for some inspiration to finish up a proposal I’m working on. A lot of companies that I’m a customer of could learn a thing or two from this.

by Fabio Cipriani

Social media at the PSFK conference

I spent most of the PSFK’s San Francisco conference furiously typing on my phone about Riccardo Ricco, so I’m glad that they’re putting the sessions online. Here’s a panel talking about social media use for brands:

There was a lot of talking about how awesome social media is, but here are the two most useful [...]

MTV follows Sneakerplay

Well, sort of. MTV has a announced a new ad network based on “Tribes”, i.e. different subcultures within their audience. It’s a scaled-up version of the Hype Circle network that former Kadisco client Sneakerplay is a part of. They have a very specific look and get great CPMs, even if they don’t do a lot [...]

Buttons in stereo

Here’s a screenshot from Cyclingnews that I noticed while researching the next ROAD column.

(no, this does not mean that the bikes are put away.)

Credit Agricole is the first to go

There were a lot of teams on the market for title sponsors this year. Despite the new sponsorships announced before the Tour, it looks like the first team to fold will be Roger Legeay’s Credit Agricole, according to VeloNews.
To my knowledge, they’re the only current “ASOtour” program with roots in an actual cycling club: Velo [...]