Does the AMA Hate Supercross?
January 28th, 2009 • Breaking Into the Mainstream, My Thoughts
This post was not planned, it didn’t go through draft after draft until absolutely perfect. While researching for another post, the troubles I had while doing the research led to the following conclusions.
What the heck is the AMA doing with professional Supercross? Truthfully, I doubt they even know. Our sport has incredible potential. The riders are talented, the bikes trick and the tracks technical. However, it seems like the AMA is doing everything they can in order to mess it up and ensure that our sport does not succeed.
Branding
I understand that the AMA is not a marketing company, but a promoter, but still, they should know how to brand a series. But it is apparent that they don’t. The “Supercross” logo looks nothing like the motocross one. If I didn’t race and didn’t know a lot about the sport, I’d never know they were ran by the same company and were essentially part of the same series.
Furthermore, the AMA has branded the entire Supercross series so heavily towards Monster, that it seems as if the series is “owned” by Monster. I respect what Monster does and I love that they support the sport, but there needs to be separation between the event and the sponsors. In no condition should the sponsors become the series. Yet this is exactly what has happened. What do we do when Monster folds or pulls their sponsorship? Completely rebrand the sport with another sponsor? Awesome idea. Then the kid who watched “Monster Energy Supercross” last year will have no idea what “{Insert New Sponsor Here} Supercross” is next year.
Feld Motorsports
Don’t even get me started, their awesome website shows exactly why they should be promoting Supercross.
Websites
The AMA is missing a huge opportunity in their web presence. There’s a lot to talk about here, so let me start with Supercross Online site.
Let’s start right at the top. Oh look, an ad for Motorcycle Mechanics Institute. Once again putting sponsors in front of the series, ingenious. Then the header image. Large, ugly and ridiculously branded with Monster. The cheesy cut-outs of Reed, Stewart, Short, and Villopoto are awful because some are in the air, some going through whoops and some cornering. They’re all from different angles which makes them make the header look even worse. Then throughout the site the whole color scheme is classic Monster black and green. Brand the entire sport to a sponsor, the AMA loves to embrace this terrible marketing strategy. The schedule on the left hand side of the site is not a correctly styled list of links but instead a JPG image. Blurry as heck and the links have no hover effect. Very user friendly…not. The drop down menus on the navigation bar go behind the annoying and constantly changing information box at the top left of the sight, making those links compltely unusable.
Let’s take a look at the bottom of the site. A great collection of YouTube videos, very professional, and then a list of sponsors. No order, no styling, just a bunch of JPG images shoved together. At the very bottom of the site is another advertisement. Glad to see the designer decided to center it. Great job.
So, to the visitor, the site is awful, lets take a loot at the code. I threw the source code through the W3C Markup Validation Service and got 544 Errors with 53 warnings. Incredible AMA, glad to see you took the time to make your HTML/JavaScript standard. Heck, they even messed up the character encoding. Listing it as UTF-8 in the header and iso-8859-1 in the meta information. I’m not sure what kind of amateur web designer they hired for the site, but they did a royal job of making the sport look like a joke. I know that this site doesn’t validate perfectly, but I’m working on making it better, and I’m a 16 year old amateur. Not a professional sports organization.
P.S. The MLB’s website only has 21 errors!
Next, I checked out AMASupercross.com. Granted the design is much cleaner and more attractive (it actually looks professional). There’s a nice little photo viewer and clean links. But the site has little to no information on it. The Rider Bios have little information, and some of the biggest riders like Jason Lawrence, aren’t even listed!
This site only has 23 errors, so someone was actually thinking when they wrote this site. Congrats on making it cleaner, more organized, and more standards compliant. Shame for not taking the time to add good information.
Finally, I went to AMA Pro Racing.com. Looks like a Road Racing website to me. No mention of Supercross anywhere. Heck, even the AMA doesn’t want to be associated with the Supercross brand. I don’t blame them.
Finally, I looked at Supercross.com, which is not an official Supercross website. Yet, it has the cleanest design, best information, and has the most professional branding. I’m not sure who runs this site, but it is my go to place for Supercross information. Take notes AMA, you need them.
Supercross Live!
Supercross Live! was great last year. It was an awesome way to listen to the race live and a get of the action that regular TV viewers didn’t get. This year they started charging for it. They didn’t settle with $10 or $20, nope, they went for $40 for a “season pass.” Are you kidding me? All it is is Jason Weigandt running around with a microphone all day. With the live streaming technologies on the internet these days (Ustream and Stickam to name a few) anyone could replicate this service for a fraction of the price. Why not just read the great race reports throughout the web and watch the race on Sunday? If the AMA is trying to make money through Supercross Live!, they are doing it the wrong way. All they are doing is killing something that was loved by SX fans everywhere.
I guess the reason there is a “!” after the Live is to show how big of a ripoff this service is. It is still great to listen to, just not at $39.95.
</rant>
Sorry…
I’m sorry. This post was sarcastic, mean, unnecessary, and in 2 years I will probably hide it deep within the MikeMartinRacing.com archives. Supercross and Motocross are great sports, and I love watching them. I just wish the AMA would run them like a professional business as opposed to an amateur clown show.
Get your act together AMA. Find you identity and run with it. Don’t piggy back on the popularity of Monster Energy. It’s not working.
Add New Comment
Viewing 9 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks
(Trackback URL)