FINDING THE HOOK WHEN NONE IS APPARENT
This is an example of successful brand storytelling despite having the deck stacked against us. Though Mongoose got into the high-end titanium bike business for all the wrong reasons, we were fortunate to have a visionary product manager named Chris Conroy (now of Yeti Cycles) who was resolute and uncompromising in developing product. Just as Chris had done his very best on the product side, I did my best on the marketing side, hiring the best rider we could find with the money we had--Steve Larsen, now dearly departed--and leveraging him to tell our product story despite not having the right ammo or even the right gun. I would neither have picked TV as the medium nor the Tour de France as the vessel--it was inefficient, expensive and inauthentic--we had no team in the race. But those were the marching orders. Undaunted, I tapped Steve's personality and pedigree as the creative basis for the spots and think the work holds up to this day. Wish I could say the same for the music we picked.
