Hookit Goes Mobile and Hits the Road to Build its Online Brand, Audience

pinpoint those locations.” A key aspect of the changes has been to include the location of “Spots & Sessions” for action sports-related events and activities, which have enabled Hookit to expand its gear and apparel “brand” advertising to include local businesses, such as surf or skate shops.

“It definitely expands the size of our market because we can cater to more dollars,” Tilton says. The company has expanded its online, so local business as well as major brands can now set the parameters for Hookit’s performance-based, “pay-per-click” advertising.

To promote Hookit’s new Spots and Sessions feature, along with its new iPhone and Android mobile applications, Hookit devised a marketing road show, using an RV to visit and promote 150 skate, motocross, surf, BMX, mountain bike, and wake spots and retailers nationwide. The tour, developed with Monster Energy, began at a San Diego skate park on May 31, and is scheduled to return Sept. 15—after logging 11,000 miles.


This weekend, the Hookit-and-Monster-branded RV will be appearing in the Kansas City, MO, area before heading into Illinois. At each stop, Hookit’s roadies will host top local athletes and run contests and giveaways for action sports-minded enthusiasts to win swag from tour partners Piranha X, Osiris Shoes, GoPro Cameras, Spy Optic, and AXO USA. The roadies also will stop at local hot spots for various action sports and location-based promotions, demonstrating how local sports communities can use Hookit’s mobile apps to check-in and post photos, videos, and local athlete features to Hookit, Facebook, and Twitter.

As Tilton says, the challenge now comes down to marketing.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.