My roommate is getting his MBA at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. For a while he's been asking me to do a presentation on Sports Marketing for the MBA Marketing Association students. I finally obliged and gave an hour long presentation at the new PACCAR Hall.

First I have to mention how nice PACCAR Hall is. It's a state of the art building with pretty cool architecture, a soaring atrium and is equipped with the latest presentation technology. A huge step up from what I experienced at Montana State University. Granted I was in college some time ago.

It was fun to get up and give a presentation. It had been a few years, probably since my days at K2 Sports and some sales meeting. This may sound weird, but I actually enjoy laying out presentations, making custom slide backgrounds, inserting images and linking up videos. I used to do everything with Powerpoint, but since the switch to Mac, I'm all about Keynote these days.

I found the biggest challenge was what aspects of Sports Marketing to talk about in just an hour. I could talk for weeks on end about Sports Marketing. Actually it wasn't on mainstream sports like football, basketball, golf or soccer; but action sports like snowboarding, skiing, skateboarding, surfing and mountain biking.

So I decided to focus on: sport vs. business, communication tools, creative briefs, athletes, photo shoots, movie sponsorships and product development. Even that was a lot to go over in just an hour, but I ended right on time with about five minutes for questions. It was fun. I'd like to do the presentation more, switch it up a little and touch on other subjects. Who knows, maybe I'll be called on again sometime in the future?

Posted by Gary at 11:11 PM | Permalink

My old ski buddy, Conrad Snover, came to Seattle over the holidays and we went skiing at Crystal a couple days. He tried out his new GoPro Hero POV camera and I tried out my Contour HD POV camera. The difference was he had his camera mounted to a helmet and I didn't. His footage turned out pretty well while mine was complete shaky cam. Having a POV camera on your goggle strap just doesn't cut it. Looks like I'm finally going to have to wear a helmet.

So I wanted to edit a little something and get it out there. The following video will be the first of many as the season goes on. It's been a pretty good early season with one dump after the other and some untracked BC powder runs. I gotta say that skiing with Conrad was a lot of fun. We are about the same ability level and like to charge. Felt like we were in high school again. The footage is from two different days. So here we go...

I have one more video I have to share. A friend of mine who I used to work with at PBP, Jeff Thomas, put together this cool tilt-shift video for Whistler/Blackcomb. Tilt-shift is when you make images look miniature. Jeff recently started working for Switchback Entertainment with Mike Douglas. Look for more cool stuff from Switchback. Enjoy.

Posted by Gary at 10:27 PM | Permalink