I know you probably found them useless and thought you’d never have to interact with them again past the 8^th grade, but I have a math story problem for you to ponder. Two trains are headed toward each other. One train is leaving Santa Monica, California carrying Reggie Bush, Devin Hester, and Rajon Rondo. It is stocked completely full of Red Bull. The other train is leaving Chicago, Illinois carrying Chaz Ortiz, Ellery Hollingsworth, Nigel Sylvester, and The Gatorade Free Flow Tour. It is stocked completely full of Gatorade. How fast are these trains going; when will they meet; and who will be on top when they do meet?

There is a marketing trend starting in both action sports and mainstream sports. Brands that have typically been involved in sponsorship of mainstream sports (basketball, football, baseball) are sneaking into sponsorship of action sports, and brands that typically focus on action sports are putting marketing dollars behind mainstream sports. The two main “first movers” of this soon to be trend are Gatorade and Red Bull. Gatorade is sponsoring a peppering of athletes and events across the action sports world at the same time that Red Bull is picking up the sponsorship of athletes such as Reggie Bush and Rajon Rondo.    

My first stab at the answer to this story problem would be no solution. Isn’t that how it goes…if you can’t figure out the problem, make some scribbles on your paper and slap a no solution on it and hope everyone else gets the same thing? Well, that kind of applies in this case. Nobody really knows how these marketing efforts will all meet and what the landscape of each industry will look like when it does. Will Reggie Bush be dropping out of a heli and strapping in somewhere in the back country of AK? Will Shaun White be invited to training camp as an outside linebacker with the Denver Broncos? No (although I would pay to watch both). These newly explored branding efforts are too infant to know exactly how it will all pan out, but it is exciting to think that the popularity of action sports is worth large companies spending money to market them, and it is exciting to know that folks who made their money marketing to action sports have enough cash to sign mainstream athletes. It would be sick to watch an event that has a big air contest followed by a dunk contest. I’ll watch an episode of Fantasy Factory where Rob Dyrdek plays H-O-R-S-E against Lamar Odom. Companies like Red Bull and Gatorade are the ones who will be able to blur the lines between all sports and do it in a way that people will show up. So, although we don’t know exactly what it will look like right now, think about these two trains and know that they are heading toward each other and something special will happen when they meet.