Criteria: Awarded to the men's apparel, footwear, wetsuit, hardgoods, accessory or media brand that produced the most creative marketing campaign in 2008. Consider men's brands that displayed a creative, cohesive and consistent brand message in print, digital and point-of-purchase materials. Campaign must have first appeared in consumer print publications with an on-sale date on or before October 1, 2008 (approx. the October or November issues of endemic magazines.)

Nominees:

...Lost's "The Old ...lost Campaign"
Billabong's "Evolution of an Icon Campaign"
Hurley's Phantom "True Performance Campaign"
Nixon's "Motion Campaign"
Sanuk's "This Is Not a Shoe Campaign"

Divel's warped creative mind has finally been rewarded with an award that couldn't have gone anywhere but to the ...Lost Marketing team. 2008 was the year for ...LOST to once again break free from the restraints of typical surf advertising. From the Mexican surf team, Obama-McCain spoof, LOST goes green, LOST gives you gas, LOSTAGRA, and even doing an ad that we won before we had won. We continually tried to push the limits of surf advertising while keeping it true to Lost's "real"ity - by "keeping it reeeeaal" we made ads out of what we were all actually doing or joking around about. Surfing is supposed to be fun - pure and simple. Many people were wondering how the ads were going to go over and we were even wondering if Divel and his team could continue to "one-up" themesleves. Well, they must have been having a lot of fun cuz ...LOST marketing went into overdrive - pushing out more and more of some of our best ads ever. "Now that we've won we are all going on a 3 month surf break... which should give us all the inspiration needed for more ads". We don't even have to look too far when guys like Chris Ward are setting ASP records last week in France...

Which leads to Action Sports Business 101: If you're not scared to eat it, breathe it, live it and surround yourself with it - then you don't really have to create it, hire it or buy it. Everyone can point to creativity in coming up with ads - but really these ads or any of the ads Lost has ever done just aren't really that difficult to create when all the people and events around us including ourselves ARE the marketing ideas. If an environment is created where it allows the marketing director Divel, who himself has been hilarious subject matter in and out of the water since the beginning, then you can't go wrong. P.S. He can outcharge the entire team; he can get hired, fired, and re-hired (yes the car floating in the lineup at Salt Creek incident); and yes he actually learned a bit of structure that he never would have learned from us at his jobs at Rusty and Electric. Simultaneously as Divel did his "Prodigal Son" bit, Lost grew and became a career for so many - and maybe we got a little "scared". It took Divel coming back to wake everyone the f*ck up. Luckily the economy sucks and no one is hiring or else we'd be worried about losing him... Congrats Divel. - MReola

P.S. Don't forget about our Skate marketing Director - reigning "Ultimate Boarder" Chad Shetler.