I find it sadistically amusing that an industry not only begging for more media attention, but one that gets offended at the lack of media attention it gets (“RC racing should be on ESPN!”), has such an easy time being completely full of crap.
ESPN, a network who draws its millions of viewers by beating dead horses to death, would tear RC racing apart. Do you really think a TV conglomerate who has spent the last three months analyzing every possible way to make coverage of Michael Sam as awkward as possible, blows everything to do with Lebron James out of proportion, and benefitted more from baseball’s steroid scandal than anyone or anything else on the planet, would care if they exposed a driver for Brand 1 was running tires from Brand 2?
RC racing is relatively alone among competitive activities in which 100% of the professionals, as well as the media, are supported exclusively by companies within that industry. It’s the only form of motor sport in which the products used by those professionals are (supposedly) directly available to the amateur participants.
It’s also the only form of motor sport in which greater participation on the amateur side is absolutely vital to the sustainability of the industry.
Thus, comparisons to NASCAR, motocross, TORC/LOORRS off-road racing, or any other “full-size” racing are invalid. Sure, a Dale Earnhardt Jr. diehard may choose to only drive Chevrolet vehicles, but that’s not because he’s expecting the 2014 SS in his driveway with Goodyear tires that he filled up at the local Sunoco station to be anywhere close to what he watches on Sunday afternoons, even if he did paint an “88” on the door.
Yamaha no longer fields a factory motocross team, because Joe Gibbs Racing can do just as good of a job promoting the brand using outside sponsorship money.
Dodge knew they didn’t need to keep dumping millions of dollars into NASCAR to keep selling automobiles, because people need transportation.
If RC racers don’t buy new stuff, whether they’ve been racing for 30 years or are picking up their first RTR, the RC industry manufacturers will go broke.
RC racing is stuck in an interesting catch-22, where companies participate in races largely blocked from the general public in order to persuade a larger portion of the existing RC population to use their products. Because of the general public’s inaccessibility of those racing events, and the lack of promotion of them outside of the industry, the only way that the event reaches more than the few hundred people interested in that event in the first place, and the maybe 200 individual racers who attend, is through the media.
The manufacturers, however, turn around and hold their advertising money for ransom in exchange for conveying only the messages that they want the media’s audience to read and hear.
Someone posted this on LiveRC’s Facebook page last week:
“The big problem imho is the lack of journalism from RC websites, they should know these things and figure out and ask the real questions. Instead of just pushing the marketing jargon. There is no wrong in rebranding a good product and back it up by superior distribution and customer service and consumers know that. So why can't companies come clean and be transparent?”
The answer, at least from the media side, is the desire to stay employed and continue putting food on the table. If being objective and telling the truth means a company pulling their advertising and black-balling you to the rest of the industry (who expects the same control), what would you do?
As a part-time contributor, and then a full-time editor for two different magazines and now a web publisher, I cannot count how many times over the last nearly ten years I’ve been asked to spew complete untruths about a product or completely omit something from a story.
I’m not picking up any company in particular, because the list of companies that have not asked me to lie is much shorter than those who have.
Those requests come in many different forms, too. When a racer asks, “can I ask you to please not take a picture of my pit area right now? I have the wrong tires on my table,” that’s not so bad. It’s much worse when someone asks the reporter to lie outright, and even worse when they expect that you and your audience are too stupid to know the difference between the Brand X products they say they’re running, and the Brand Y product that’s blatantly visible in any number of the thousands of photos taken at an RC racing event.
Those of you who read my coverage of this past weekend’s ROAR Electric Off-Road Nationals probably noticed that I didn’t include the equipment used by each driver. Honestly, I didn’t want the headache - at least 30% of the A-Main finishers in each Modified class were using products that A) weren’t what they said they were, or B) aren’t publicly available/perfectly legal.
I’d really love to hear what LiveRC’s readers think.
8/27/2014
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