EVENT SUMMARY 2015

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Executive Summary 1The Numbers 3Audience Summary 4Marketing and Pre-Event Promotional Highlights 5Media Coverage 7Webcasts, Video Highlights & NBC Signature Series Highlights 8Crankworx.com 9Social Media 10Village Animation and Expo 11Key Objectives 2016 12

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Photos: Clint Trahan

The people up at the track make the event. Everyone’s cheering and shouting your name, it’s wicked and cool that everyone’s come out here. This Crankworx is probably one of the best atmospheres I’ve been to for a Crankworx event. There’s loads of people, but it’s small and compact, so everyone’s in the same place and it’s just amazing.

– Rachel AthertonCrankworx Rotorua DH presented by iXS winner

Photo: Clint Trahan

There were touching moments: Beerten and Wichman, Dutch athletes who grew up racing together, taking the Crankworx Rotorua Pump Track Challenge wins under the lights of a dirt stadium filled with cheering young groms. And there were heartbreaking moments as athletes like Crankworx Rotorua ambassador Lisa Horlor suffered sidelining injuries, dashing years of preparation and months of excitement in one fell swoop. If there was a word to describe Crankworx Rotorua, however, from athlete to spectator, three-year-old shredder to internationally-attuned Superfan, everyone would say it was: “Awesome.”

Rotorua is an area known for its love of all things mountain biking. With nearly a third of the population owning something two wheels, it is the kind of bike-minded enclave where Crankworx thrives, and the energy surrounding the festival’s arrival was palpable. At the base of Eat Streat, a bike tree served as a temporary art installation greeting hungry riders in the heart of town. And in the downtown shops, one could find a mountain bike used as a sunglass store prop as easily as a sandwich board adorned with spokes. The athletes responded to all of this dirt mania by pouring heart and soul into the experience, both on and off the course. Slopestyle legend Cam Zink took his turn

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1.

The inaugural Crankworx Rotorua has the mountain biking world doing a double take. From the stream of Cork 720s riders threw down on Kelly McGarry’s Slopestyle course to the double Dutch win Anneke Beerten and Joost Wichman delivered on the pump track, this festival packed a one-two punch out of the gate to make the sports world take notice.

With the international press corps on hand, including programs like NBC World of Adventure, and the upper echelon of endemic mountain bike media, Pinkbike, Vital MTB, and Bike Magazine, to name a few, Crankworx Rotorua secured an online audience worthy of the 10-day, 12-year-old festival’s Whistler home base. Fans from around the world were watching as Skyline Rotorua Mountain Bike Gravity Park filled with a community new to this level of competition and the gravity mountain biking disciplines. Several fresh challenges greeted athletes and this audience, including the Crankworx Series events, the Triple Crown of Slopestyle and the King and Queen of the new Crankworx World Tour. In other words, the inaugural festival, the first stop of the first Crankworx World Tour, was a tale of novice adventures.

As with any Crankworx event, the true story of the festival was the athletes. After years of chasing gravity tour de force Brandon Semenuk, Canadian Brett Rheeder finally defeated his friend and nemesis to win the first round of the Triple Crown of Slopestyle, a prestigious title established in 2015 to see if anyone is capable of locking down all three Crankworx Slopestyle wins in a single year. Californian Ryan “R-Dog” Howard brought the stoke to the opening event, while earning his first Crankworx win in the Official Oceania Whip-Off Championships, and the “Giant Swede”, Martin Soderstrom, delivered a heart-stopping return from injury to put himself on top as the frontrunner in the quest for the King of the Crankworx World Tour.

Photo: Clint Trahan

handing out medals to Kidsworx competitors and 15-year-old World Whip-Off Champion Finn Iles stepped up to judge his event when faced with a tweaked wrist. It is, thus, no surprise that Crankworx Rotorua can report 25,000 visitors came through the gates at Skyline Rotorua over the five days of the festival, with 8256 spectators on the hillside for the marquee competition.

For the Crankworx brand, this attention, in what used to be the off-season, is building the biggest mountain bike festival in the world into a truly global affair, lending credence to the world tour claim and ensuring bike fans around the world follow its messaging year round. Social media numbers alone indicate consistent engagement is becoming the norm for its online presence, rather than a target goal. One doesn’t have to look far for evidence:

• The number of followers on the Crankworx Instagram account has virtually doubled since Crankworx Whistler in August 2014

• Pinkbike.com saw 1.7 million page views on Crankworx Rotorua stories in March, previously a media-hit dead zone for the brand and its partners

• And the new Crankworx website saw nearly double the number of views over the five-day period of the Rotorua festival as it did for the 10 days of Crankworx Whistler in 2014, surpassing rather than bolstering the parent festival

For the city of Rotorua, the spotlight translates directly to dollars, generating visitors at the beginning of shoulder season to fill local hotels, restaurants and shops. Of 694 spectators surveyed for the 2015 Crankworx Rotorua Economic Impact Assessment, conducted through on-site surveys, most claimed to have stayed in town for multiple days, with the average length of stay pegged at 3.8 nights. And of the 120 participants surveyed, those who engaged as athletes in the events, that average length of stay reached 9.6 nights. The experience both groups reported

was also very positive, suggesting these guests are likely to return to the region. Some 90 percent of the spectators surveyed rated their time at Crankworx as good or excellent with only one person suggesting it fell below expectations.

Against this backdrop of glowing reviews, Crankworx has taken its relationship with SRAM, Red Bull Media, iXS, Pinkbike, Specialized, Giant, GoPro, Fuel TV and Spank to a new level and forged new relationships with Scott, Camelbak, Mons Royale, BDO Financial, Air New Zealand and several critical tourism partners. From the Skyline Rotorua Mountain Bike Park to New Zealand Major Events, Air New Zealand to the regional tourism organization, Destination Rotorua, it has worked with influential stakeholders to open a market for New Zealand tourism, and another market for international mountain bike brands in the Oceania region of the southern hemisphere. These successes owe a lot to generous local contributions of time and money, such as the grant dollars freely given by Rotorua Energy Charitable Trust, and the countless volunteer hours dedicated souls like Tim Farmer and Marcello Ojerio, Kidsworx manager and operations manager, offered up, taking time away from work and family.

And the festival is, of course, indebted to the six accommodation partners: Millennium Hotel, Holiday Inn, Copthorne Hotel, Novotel Hotel, Rotorua Association of Motels, YHA Backpackers, Distinction Hotel (the EWS host hotel), Sudima Lake Rotorua Resort and Rydges, whose general manager, James Billing, played a key role in connecting the dots to bring the festival to Rotorua. With over $700,000 in international media hits, a Decline Magazine cover story and Australian Geographic Outdoor magazine coverage, there is no doubt Crankworx Rotorua attracted attention and that it has put the Crankworx World Tour on the map.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (continued)

2.

Photo: Atawhai CharterisPhoto: Clint Trahan

Photo: Clint Trahan

THE NUMBERS

• Over 24,000 visitors to the festival • Total webcast views: 262,900 (as of June 17, 2015) • Crankworx Rotorua Slopestyle: 8,256 spectators hillside and webcast views of 113,397 (as of June 17, 2015) • Official highlights video views of 1,012,407 - to date • 79 international and 69 domestic journalists/broadcasters on site for a total of 148 accredited media.  • Total prize purse of $103,000 • Total athlete entries: 724 • Kidsworx registration numbers: - 142 kids in the Kidsworx Hipster DH - 60 kids in the Kidsworx Pump Track Challenge - 90 kids in the Kidsworx Pump Track Skills Sessions • Ad-equivalency public relations value of over $730,000 to date

3.Photos: Clint Trahan

Crankworx Rotorua conducted a survey to provide a detailed eco-nomic impact assessment. Provisional results were delivered early June for survey work done on 694 spectators, 120 participants and

46 other individuals on site.*work conducted by APR Consultants

ATTENDEES• 95% of attendees were from New Zealand and 5% were international• 72% of attendees were male versus 28% female• 57% of attendees were between the ages of 30 - 49• 28% of attendees were visitors to Rotorua for the day; 61% stayed one to five nights; and 11% stayed six nights or more• 96% of attendees listed Crankworx as their primary reason for visiting Rotorua• 96% of attendees were satisfied or very satisfied with their overall event experience

EVENT EXPERIENCECrankworx Rotorua enjoyed a very keen audience with 80 percent of participants rating the festival as delivering good or excellent value for their dollar and 96 percent of spectators giving it an average to excellent rating for the same. Only two participants gave the competitions themselves a below average rating and 57 percent saw the events as excellent.

AUDIENCE SUMMARY

4.Photos: Clint Trahan

As the licence holder, the Crankworx Rotorua team headed pre-event marketing efforts, solidifying some very beneficial partnerships and executing strong media buys. In addition to leveraging its tourism partnerships directly, through the Destination Rotorua website, the team built several adver-tising and awareness campaigns. Some of the highlights included:• Leveraging the Destination Rotorua magazine, Famously

Rotorua (circ. 70,000), Facebook page (80,000 likes), me-dia fam opportunities and TV advertising for the event

• Rotorua District Council printing 100 street flags for Fairy Springs Road, next to Skyline Rotorua Gravity Park

• A Crankworx installation in the Rotorua Visitor Centre, which sees a million visitors annually

• Event and ticket posters distributed through Rotorua Ticketmaster

• Crankworx Rotorua ads playing on the big screens at the Rotorua GLO New Year’s Festival; and Rotorua Bike Festi-val ticket giveaways, MC announcements and Crankworx flagging

MARKETING AND PRE-EVENTPROMOTIONAL HIGHLIGHTS

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• A Crankworx Rotorua stakeholder document for local businesses to reap the full benefits of the event

Advertising buys hit everything from traditional media to the race track, and included:• Two weeks of online ads in the sports section of nzher-

ald.co.nz with 439,998 impressions and 929 “click-throughs” for a performance rate four times the baseline for a successful campaign

• Two videos created by local filmmaker John Colthorpe to build awareness of Skyline Gravity Park and showcase New Zealand trails

• Seven billboards placed strategically around the city of Rotorua

• 1000 Crankworx posters distributed around Rotorua and other Central North Island and Auckland locations

• A NZ Grabaseat promotion for a getaway package, draw-ing an average of 30,609 unique page views daily

• A TRAC Summer of Racing Promotion, which involved naming a horse race Crankworx.

The name was thus featured in major newspapers nation-wide, on billboard space at the track in Rotorua, and the race was broadcast nationwide on radio and television. “Crankworx” was printed on every bet ticket sold and had a full-page advertisement in the official race book at all seven events. It was also featured on a 30-second broadcast on the super screen at the races and hit the news ticker on several race-oriented and news websites.

Crankworx World Tour 2015Rotorua | Les 2 Alpes | Whistler

All Kidsworx activities are available as part of ticketed entry to the Crankworx festival.

Pimp My Ride • Kidsworx Tamariki Track • Tiki Tour Scavenger Hunt • Hipster Mini Downhill (DH) • Pump Track

Sessions and Pump Track Challenge • Meet the Pros

Find out more at crankworx.com

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Photo: Clint Trahan

MARKETING AND PRE-EVENTPROMOTIONAL HIGHLIGHTS (continued)

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ONLINE ADVERTISING:• The Crankworx Facebook page successfully helped home in on the target market with an ad campaign boosting

page likes from 30-40 daily to 70-80; the page had 49,147 fans • Pinkbike.com ads were produced for a straight month of pre-event advertising on the largest mountain biking news

source in the world• An E-blast was used to send monthly newsletters to 4000 recipients, generating a 40 percent open rate• Seven ambassadors from New Zealand were identified to help bolster social media support and further explain the

sport on the Crankworx website to an audience new to the Crankworx name

Competitions and event listings:• Crankworx was listed on Newzealand.com, Bookabach.co.nz (holiday bookings website), several magazine and

newspaper listings and eventfinda (New Zealand event aggregator)• Poster and ticket giveaways were executed through cycling and sports clubs and local schools • RotoruaNZ Facebook giveaways were also employed, along with Waiarikei O-week competitions

CENTRAL OREGON

Hillside Terrain Park

CHILEAN URBAN DH

JUNE 2015 $8.99-USA $9.99-CAN

MEDIA COVERAGE

First time event or not, Crankworx brought the media to Rotorua’s door—and the Rotorua media out to Skyline Gravity Park. Some 148 accredited media were on site for the event—79 international and 69 domestic journalists and broadcasters—generating a glut of media coverage before, during and after the event.

Now the 10-page cover story for the June edition of Decline magazine, Crankworx Rotorua caught the attention of mountain biking’s storytellers and they ran with it. From Pinkbike to Vital MTB to Dirt Magazine, the endemic media were out in full force with Bike Magazine sending no less than 10 people to cover the event. It was nonetheless the breadth of coverage, with niche publications like the Czech Velo Magazine, iVelo, and Asian bike blog Bikezilla, which made the festival a global affair.

Pinkbike numbers indicate fan interest peaked on opening day with 327,000 accumulative article views on March 25. The most popular discipline was enduro, with the Giant Toa Enduro earning 535,528 accumulative article views. Instagram likes on the Pinkbike account, meanwhile, reached 234,069 over the course of the festival.

The numbers are still pouring in as print magazines crank out a season’s worth of coverage, however, the current estimated third party media coverage is valued at $737,983.53.

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Photo: Clint Trahan

WEBCAST, VIDEO HIGHLIGHTSAND NBC SIGNATURE SERIES HIGHLIGHTS

In the careful hands of the Boombox Group, Red Bull Media House, Pinkbike and GoPro, Crankworx Rotorua came to life with HD-quality live webcasts, TV broadcasts, video highlights and video preview spots. The content was strategically distributed to achieve a total viewership of 1,862,307 views of the competitions. This plan saw Crankworx content reach its global audience in a number of ways:

• LIVE WEBCAST – Distributed on Redbull.com, Crankworx.com and a number of our partner/sponsor websites, using Red Bull Media House player, YouTube and Crankworx.com, all webcasts were also available on demand immediately following each event

• GOPRO COURSE PREVIEW – Working with Wyn Masters, GoPro helped create course previews, shot and commentated by Masters, and released on the Crankworx Facebook page

• DAILY HIGHLIGHTS – A short video clip highlighting each of the events was produced by Pinkbike, using footage from the Boombox Group. Each clip recapped the winning runs, included interviews with the winners, where possible, and shots of the champagne podium celebration. It was distributed on Facebook and Crankworx.com

• MOBILE RIDER RUN CLIPS – New to the Crankworx video and broadcast experience was the Mobile Rider platform, which provided clips of athletes’ runs.

• BROADCAST – The Crankworx Rotorua Slopestyle was featured on a 26-minute Red Bull Signature Series program for Red Bull TV released in May and NBC’s World of Adventure program, released May 10

THE VIEWS• Total views of webcast content: 262,900 (75 % same day and 25 % replay)• Total views of video highlight content: 1,012,407, which does not include over 1.9 million views of

Facebook or other media views• Total TV Households: Shown on NBC World of Adventure, Fox TV Australia, SKY TV New Zealand,

Crankworx Rotorua, generating 587,000 broadcast views• Total Rotorua: 1.8 million views of Crankworx Rotorua competitions

8.Photos: Clint Trahan

After rolling out a new website in February, a boost in event-time numbers on Crankworx.com was anticipated; however, the results proved well beyond expectation. Over the course of the five-day festival, the website saw 278,800 visits, nearly double the number of visitors to the site over the course of the 10 days of Crankworx Whis-tler in August 2014..

The new website is adaptive and focused on presenting the colourful spectacle of athleticism and talent, artistry and creativity that is Crankworx in the most concise manner possible. Retaining the live webcast poll and graphic press releases introduced in 2014, its event-time coverage now includes clips of individual riders’ runs, via the Mobile Rider platform, and an image aggregator, Pixlee, to pull crowd-sourced content into the live webcast for a more robust viewing experience.

With plenty to explain at an inaugural festival, any website would be a critical information portal, but this rede-sign allows Crankworx.com to serve as a narrative hook for viewers, drawing audience members in to learn about the sport and how it is constantly evolving. The website presents several new sport concepts introduced in 2015 in a streamlined platform users can easily circumnavigate for results and highlights of the world tour. Those new sport concepts include: • The World Tour itself • The King and Queen of the Crankworx World Tour • The four new series events (Crankworx DH Championships; the Pump Track Challenge Series; the Speed & Style World Championships; and the Crankworx Slopestyle Championships) • The Triple Crown of Slopestyle, a crown for winning all three Slopestyle events in the World Tour in one year

Among the many tools used to catch the sport fan’s eye, the infographic news release, created in 2014, continues to engage audiences with quotes, stories and videos consolidated on a single page, and the poll continues to se-cure more attention than anything else on the site, attracting 38, 022 page views. With a bounce rate of 10 percent, it is clear the audience coming to Crankworx.com is specifically seeking out Crankworx and finding what it needs when it arrives at the website.

CRANKWORX.COM

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media proved instrumental in hyping Crankworx Rotorua, drawing in a new community before, during and after the event. With animated gifs on Twitter, and new clips on the Red Bull and Mobile Rider players to toss in the mix, not to mention Vine videos taken by Crankworx media volunteers stationed on the sidelines, the online profile of the event grew exponentially.

At the end of the day, Instagram proved the shining light of the festival’s social platforms, nearly doubling the number of follow-ers for @Crankworx in the period between Crankworx Whistler and the start of June, or the timeframe fed by the Rotorua story-line. Response to the live play-by-play on Twitter for the five days of the festival, generated plenty of interaction, and Facebook proved an instrumental tool for distributing video content produced specifically to recap and tease daily events.

INSTAGRAM• Instagram followers grew from 25,000 to 40,000 from December to the end of May, the period fuelled by Crankworx Rotorua

previews, event and post-event coverage• The total number of images posted between Crankworx Whistler, when Crankworx Rotorua was announced, and Crankworx

Rotorua: 551• Total number of posts in March, the month of Crankworx Rotorua: 96• Total number of likes received on posts in March: 157,689 (out-performing CWX Whistler, which brought in 116,000 in Au-

gust 2014, then an all-time high)• Average number of likes per post in March: 1642• Highest number of comments on an image posted to @crankworx of all time: 2971 likes on a shot of Sarah Atkin in the

Crankworx Rotorua Downhill presented by iXS, posted May 3 as a throwback to Rotorua• All five “most liked” posts of all time on @crankworx were connected to Rotorua as of mid-June• The second and third most commented on Instagram posts ever on @crankworx were for a regram of Antoine Bizet flipping,

which was done as a preview post to say “See you in Rotorua” (59 comments), and the Steps to the Top Instagram cut from SRAM featuring Brandon Semenuk (51 comments), done as a post-event wrap up post

TWITTER• Hit an all-time high with a Klout score of 71.3 mid-April• Gained 1,039 followers in the month of March alone, just shy of the 1,140 gained during the 10-day Crankworx Festival• Total number of retweets in the month of March: 492• Total number of @Crankworx mentions 1,203

FACEBOOK• Total page ‘Likes’: grew from 41,795 to 53,389 from the time Rotorua was announced to the end of May, the time period fuelled

by Rotorua announcements, hype, event and post-event coverage• Organic reach of pre-event, event and post-event posts from January to mid-April resulted in an organic reach of 1.2 million

people with a paid reach of 829,831• During the week of March 26-29, page impressions soared to 405,414• The page saw 3 million impressions from January to mid-April from some 1.5 million users• Over 53,000 total likes to posts were made during the same period with 803 people talking about posts on the page• The top post was a video of Wyn Masters on the Crankworx Rotorua Downhill presented by iXS with an organic reach of 45,760

and 11,463 video views, for an average 22-second view on the 36 second video

GOOGLE +• Crankworx hosted a Google hangout to announce the course for the Giant Toa Enduro, the opening round of the Enduro World

Series• All-time total page views grew to 302,043, a substantial increase over the 186,737 recorded by the end of Crankworx Whistler

in August

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VILLAGE ANIMATION AND EXPO

An impressive number of companies jumped on board and joined the expo and tech zone, with a combined total of 45 different brands represented.  At any given time, up to 100 festivalgoers had the opportunity to test demo bikes from six different companies in the Skyline Rotorua Mountain Bike Park.  The demo, expo and tech areas were the hub of activity for the festival, with the expo zone quickly becoming the main thoroughfare for spectators, while the demo and tech zone locked down spectators in the heart of the competitive action.   

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Photo: Atawhai Charteris

Photo: Atawhai Charteris

Photo: Clint Trahan

KEY OBJECTIVES 2016

KEY OBJECTIVES• To continue to advance the story of the Crankworx World Tour

and the Triple Crown of Slopestyle.• Grow the global awareness of the Crankworx brand.• Push for the equal treatment of women across mountain biking

disciplines with equal prizing.• Build a worldwide audience for the sport of mountain biking.• Enhance New Zealand’s reputation as a true international

mountain biking Mecca.• Inspire New Zealanders to fall in love with the sport of mountain

biking.• Build a Crankworx culture that people want to be a part of year

after year.

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Photo: Clint Trahan