Yesterday, I attended an interesting event for action-sports website push.ca. It was called a media lab, and was intended to explain to agencies and companies that might be interested in advertising on the site how the world of action sports works, and how best to market to it. It is a rather necessary exercise, because mainstream marketing and action sports are wary foes, due mainly to the legions of terrible marketing ventures that have tried to co-opt “extreme sports” and failed miserably in doing so. Action sports — skateboarding, snowboarding, etc. — are communities based on cool and cool, as most in the business know, is an ever-elusive thing to capture. After a day of discussion and excercise (planned and executed by mar-comm agency Hypenotic) much of the discussions boiled down to several key ideas: mainly that in order to impress an audience, you have to respect it first. And for these communities, it’s all about legitimacy and authenticity. There are many non-endemic brands that have done this well — Gatorade’s new G campaign was cited as one of them — but there are many terrible examples too. It’s a theme I revisit often when I do my annual “Best of” review of resort ads in snowboard publications for SAM magazine, which was just released in their May issue. Resorts, out of anyone, should “get it,” but so often they just don’t, and end up looking like a dad who just gave his kid knucks and said “That’s just how I roll.” Do your research, folks, and take a look at how this community interacts with one another. Social media sites have made this very easy. You’ll notice that images are key, and people are extremely critical of them. So if you’re going to use action-sports images in your campaign, make sure they’re legit. Becuase skimping out and being lazy with an ad campaign to this community is much worse than not advertising to it at all.