Marketers in Motion

With Vancouver 2010 in view, Russell Reimer and Colin Young are redefining how sports are sold

by Chris Johns

Appropriately enough, Russell Reimer and Colin Young met on a volleyball court. It was at Alberta Beach, 20 years ago, the first time the Alberta Volleyball Association, where Young was a 25-year-old marketing director, was staging its beach volleyball pro tour on real sand at locations around the province. Reimer was a particularly energetic competitor with a flair for providing running commentary on the action he was part of. That was one reason Young decided to hire him onto the tour as an announcer. Another: “He’d usually play and then unfortunately he’d be out of the contest early enough where he could do the mike as well,” says Young with a subtle, good-natured chuckle.

That wouldn’t be the last time Young would coax his soon-to-become friend and business partner into joining him on his career path. While Reimer was taking a graduate degree in communications at the University of Calgary, Young moved through the higher echelons of the sports industry, honing a global perspective on the world of sport and business, mostly south of the border. A marketing job with Nike led to work with NBC as a senior producer for its Sydney Olympics website in 2000, a project on which he asked Reimer to apply his communications skills as a writer and researcher. And though he’d help with the lead-up to online coverage of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City (and later do similar stints in Athens and Torino), Young headed back to Calgary to join the Canadian Sport Centre as vice-president of sponsorship and marketing. There he developed vital revenue-generating programs for consistently underfunded training regimens for Canadian Olympians. He also arrived at the conclusion that would reunite him with Reimer. “I thought there was a business opportunity, but I also thought someone had to help the athletes,” says Young.

Agenda Sport Marketing, opened in Calgary in 2005, is a reaction to everything the pair sees wrong with the relationship between athletes and the agents responsible for mediating their sponsorship deals. And now, bucking the province-wide trend towards quietly waiting out the recession, they’re expanding with a small office in Vancouver, just in time to apply their take on sports marketing to the 2010 Winter Olympics. “Athletes aren’t just inventory that you buy and sell,” says Reimer. Young agrees, even likens the old-school agent to little more than a “weasel” after the biggest paycheque possible.

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to work against,” he says. “Our view is if we can find the right fit for an athlete and help a company utilize that athlete to make an impact – whether it’s on their consumer brand side to help them sell their product or help them make an impact on their corporate culture – then everybody’s won.”

Reimer, who’s 37 now, believes the key to that win lies in storytelling. “I think the best thing that I learned during my time with NBC Sports was the importance of telling really powerful stories. Storytelling is in everything that we do now from a marketing perspective.”

Agenda’s galvanizing moment was a direct result of this. In its first summer, the firm bid on a contract with ING Insurance Company of Canada, which saw potential in aligning itself with the speedskating community. Despite being up against seasoned Toronto agencies, Young and Reimer sealed the deal by proposing the ING Speed Skating Challenge, which continues today as a contest in which skaters across Canada share their passion for the sport in an online forum. Entries are judged by a team that includes Catriona Le May Doan, who later attends, with the Canadian speedskating team, a Calgary gala for those with the best stories. Winning the contract had a validating effect, says Young. The Agenda approach ran counter to the usual pasting of corporate logos across sporting events, but still satisfied the corporate marketing mandate by positioning ING as having played an instrumental role in fostering a sense of community around sport. “It was good for us to know as a duo that we were in the same mix as the guys in Ontario doing this,” he says. “It was a shot in the arm.”

Current Issue