Mark McMorris Inc: Inside an Olympic snowboarder’s business empire

Article content

Mark McMorris is everywhere these days. The Prairie boy snowboarder wonder is competing in Beijing, posting to 800,000 followers on Instagram, and starring in commercial campaigns for Toyota, Royal Bank of Canada, SkipTheDishes, Bridgestone, General Mills and more.

Article content

The 28-year-old is an action sport athlete entrepreneur, with a sponsorship fiefdom that has crossed over from the purely athletic realm (Nike, Burton, Oakley) to the everyday act of pouring a bowl of cereal — take a look at your kids’ Cheerios box. Watch for him in ads for Subway sandwiches, because they will be coming soon, too.

McMorris has already won a bronze medal in China, his third career Olympic bronze, and he has a shot at a gold in the Big Air competition early next week. But collecting more Olympic hardware almost doesn’t matter at this point for Mark McMorris Inc., at least in terms of being able to pay his bills.

Is he rich? “He does well financially,” Russell Reimer, his commercial agent and president of Manifesto Sport Management, said. “But as far as major pro sports go, let’s be honest, he is not a salaried professional athlete, so what is so incredible about Mark’s success is that it has all been built up on his own.”

Article content

Well, not entirely. McMorris might be the guy doing crazy stunts on a snowboard and winning more X Games gold medals in slopestyle than anyone else in history, including American legend Shaun (The Flying Tomato) White, but beavering away in the background is a team that includes a filmmaker who spends two months a year documenting his every move, a manager, two agents and a content team, plus a bunch of advertising agency people on the other side of the table managing the McMorris account.

That’s not to say he competes in a bubble, blissfully unaware of the dollars and cents at stake. On the contrary, he is keenly aware of who the chief executive of Brand McMorris is, and he puts in the hours tending to his financial affairs, including while at the Olympics.

Article content

“I would say I’m engaged more on partnerships than most athletes, just due to the fact that snowboarding is strictly reliant on partnerships, and that is our livelihood,” he said via email late Friday night, Beijing time. “Working with these brands is, for one, a blessing, and, for two, a big deal.”

Brands love a good story and a big part of McMorris’s appeal is that he has a great one to tell.

Leading up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, it was about a humble kid from one of the flattest places on Earth — that would be Regina — dominating extreme sports competitions. To further sweeten his pre-Olympic debut narrative, McMorris fell less than two weeks before the Games and cracked a rib. He competed anyway — it is the Canadian way, right? — capturing a bronze medal, and then calling it as good as “gold” during a lengthy television interview with CBC personality George Stromboulopoulos.

Article content

McMorris revealed himself to be funny, self-effacing and humble, another holy trinity of admirable, Canadian consumer-friendly traits.

Three years later, he crashed into a tree in Whistler, B.C., and nearly died on the mountain while the cameras were rolling. It was a near-tragedy that led to an exponentially more remarkable comeback story, which was featured in a documentary on CBC just days before he won another bronze medal at the 2018 Olympics.

In that moment, McMorris went from being a Canadian snowboarder to something deeper.

“He is incredibly marketable, because of the Canadiana — him being from Saskatchewan, his near-death experience, his miraculous recovery — and people are just awestruck by it, and that generates an emotional response,” said Charlene Weaving, an Olympics expert at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S.

Article content

And emotional responses generate advertiser buy-in.

“Mark is an incredible athlete,” Jeevan Grewal, brand experience manager, Cereal & Snacks, at General Mills Canada, said in a statement. “But our admiration for him extends far beyond his success on the slopes. He’s had a remarkable journey, and, like all Canadians, we’ve been inspired by his resilience, passion and positivity.”

Those words might come as a nice pat on the back for an athlete-entrepreneur who has been hustling ever since he was 15 years old, which is when McMorris met his agent, or one of them. Jasen Isaacs then introduced him to the good folks at Burton, Red Bull and Oakley. They have been with him ever since.

McMorris can’t say what the best piece of financial advice he’s ever received is, but his guiding business philosophy basically boils down to: “Don’t burn bridges. Take care of people. And take risks.”

Article content

Once upon an earlier Olympic age, the riskiest thing a sponsor had to decide was which gold medalist to put on, say, a Wheaties box. Social media has changed the arithmetic.

“Social media is critical,” Weaving said. “Sponsors will get the older crew through standard television advertisements, but the younger crew most likely doesn’t have cable.”

Cue the Brand McMorris advantage.

The snowboarder and his team can inform a potential partner that his average branded-Instagram post is about 75 per cent effective at engaging his 800,000-plus followers, according to data from Upfluence, an influencer software and analytics company.

Article content

His average TikTok post to his 295,000 followers receives 116,000 likes. His 180,000 Twitter followers skew predominantly male, age 24 to 35. He can also tell them he looks good on a Cheerios box.

People who know McMorris personally often describe him as being “lovable.” One of his nicknames is McLovin’ — the nickname of a character in the movie Superbad. Another nickname is The Closer, derived from the earlier years of his career when he was universally regarded among snowboarding aficionados as being virtually unbeatable.

Now, even when he does get beaten, sponsors understand that the kid from the Prairies just can’t lose.

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: oconnorwrites