Rocky Brands, Inc.

Rocky Brands, Inc. and BottleRocket Marketing Create Winning Strategy Using Vontoo
First Round of Bull Riders’ Phone Calls Predicted to Earn Style Points with Fans

In a sport where a mere eight seconds can determine whether the athlete stands to be famous or can barely stand, sponsors are always seeking ways to maximize visibility. For the management of Rocky Brands, Inc. (NASDAQ: RCKY), the desire to enhance their support of the Professional Bull Riders’, Inc. (PBR) makes them no different from any other corporate sponsor. As part of a truly unique marketing strategy, Rocky Brands is delivering personal phone messages from top bull riders to their most ardent fans. Powered by Vontoo (vontoo.com), the world’s first on-demand, permission-based voice messaging company, the calls seem sure to earn huge style points with fans.

Rocky Brands not only contributes directly to the PBR; it also sponsors several top professional bull riders. “Our goals through these sponsorships are three-fold,” explains Rocky Brands Marketing Manager Chris Lorenzo. “We want to help grow the sport’s fan base, get our cowboys more exposure, and increase brand awareness.” To help better meet these goals, Lorenzo turned to Michael Thompson, Jr. of BottleRocket Sports and Entertainment Marketing.

“Most PBR followers are extremely passionate and knowledgeable about bull riding,” says Thompson. “They are constantly on the Internet looking for information about their favorite riders-visiting their MySpace pages, memorizing their scores and looking for updates on injuries. Impressing this kind of fan base was going to take something truly extraordinary.” After exploring more traditional marketing vehicles like blast e-mail, Thompson was left unsatisfied until he discovered Vontoo.

“We were immediately impressed with Vontoo’s capabilities,” recalls Thompson. “It allowed us to give fans something they could never enjoy before-raw, off-the-cuff personal calls from their favorite riders talking about wins, vacations, families, even how they are healing from an injury. We saw Vontoo’s technology as a great tool to help fully activate the PBR sponsorships while potentially translating fans into new Rocky Brands customers.”

Using Vontoo, Thompson and his staff at BottleRocket developed the Rocky Riders Rally, a high-end fan club. Still in its soft-launch phase, the full program will debut later this year. Bull riding fans that sign up for the club’s gold level will receive several benefits, including a subscription to Rocky Talk-a permission-based message service that will deliver regular calls to their personal phones direct from the rider or riders of their choice. Once a fan has joined at the gold level, there is no additional fee to receive the calls from the riders.

Vontoo uses patent-pending technology along with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to deliver prerecorded messages to any landline or Internet-based phone in the United States. In the case of Rocky Talk, a Web page designed by BottleRocket and partly supported by Vontoo, fan club participants first select which riders will call them and then provide their preferred phone number to receive the calls. Throughout the year, featured riders will record their messages using a simple call-in procedure. BottleRocket will self-manage the entire scheduling and distribution process through Vontoo’s easy-to-use Internet interface.

“We’ve already done some messaging and so far it’s been a pretty seamless execution in terms of getting the riders to successfully make the recordings,” says Lorenzo. “It’s a cool technology that provides what appears to be a turnkey execution.”

Thompson agrees. “In terms of our management, we’re very comfortable with the system and its ease of use. Truthfully, I think the biggest advantage of Rocky Talk is the personal connection it provides. For the average fan, this kind of up-close experience just isn’t something they can get other places.”

Thompson also sees the one-on-one relationship via Vontoo’s technology as key to making the entire fan club program stand out. “This is definitely a far deeper mass activation of the sport and riders than we’ve been able to achieve previously through more traditional methods such as print collateral,” he emphasizes. “The unique content delivery of Rocky Talk is huge.”

Vontoo also provides automatic tracking reports that detail which calls are listened to by a live recipient, how long that person listened to the call, and which calls reached a voicemail system or answering service. Using these reports, Thompson predicts BottleRocket will be able to provide its client with statistics on the program’s success.

“We’re going to be able to measure dollar-for-dollar how successfully we’ve incorporated Vontoo into this broad fan club umbrella,” he explains. “Additionally, the control and instant feedback Vontoo provides will allow us to constantly test and optimize our messaging.”

Equally important to these benefits, Rocky Brands is excited to be able to leverage the program for charitable purposes. “For every fan that signs up for the club’s gold level by a certain deadline, Rocky Brands will be donating a dollar to the Resistol Relief Fund for injured riders,” Thompson says. Given the fan excitement that the promise of personal calls from favorite riders is likely to generate, it becomes easy to imagine the potential size of the contribution.

BottleRocket is now exploring how it will use Vontoo with other clients. At least three additional projects are potentially in the works and Thompson views Vontoo’s ability to quickly convey a key message, to thousands at a time, using the emotion of a celebrity’s voice, as an outstanding asset in the firm’s niche market.

“Whenever you have a target market that is passionate about certain people, celebrities, a particular cause, sport or what have you, Vontoo is a terrific tool to fully activate a program or leverage a sponsorship,” adds Thompson.