Lucky to be There

By Pete Robbins

The Day Three weigh-in has just wrapped up at a BASS Elite Series tournament and among the 12 remaining anglers there are three Team Lucky Craft pros.

Nothing unusual about that.the company has compiled one of the most accomplished pro staffs in the business.
But lurking around the fringes is a linebacker-sized man with a camera. He's watching every move the three anglers make, snapping a few pictures, staying close but not too close.

Is he:
(A) Their bodyguard?
(B) Trying to steal the company's secrets?
(C) A stalker? Or
(D) A babysitter?

None of the above.

The correct answer is (E). He's a media innovator, taking the leading edge approach to promoting the sport and a group of the most accomplished professional bass anglers on the planet.

Doug Cox may look like a slightly older version of the college linebacker he was at the University of Central Florida in the late 80s, but now he's making plays for Team Lucky Craft and other tackle industry stalwarts like Tru Tungsten and Picasso. For the past several years, he's attended every Elite Series event, along with other industry showcases like the Bassmaster Classic and ICAST. He's a constant presence and a marketing tornado, and The Cox Group, the business he founded with his brother Rodrick, is a model for how to bring top-quality products to the attention of American anglers and keep them there.

Not content to produce just print ads and catalogs for his clients, he's expanded his efforts to become more multi-media. It's no longer a case of staged grip and grin photos that show up in the magazines months later. Now he's able to get the interested public the true scoop virtually instantaneously.

"I interview the Lucky Craft pro staff after each event and write up their thoughts for our electronic newsletter. Now I'm shooting HD video for the Lucky Craft Youtube channel, too," he said.

HD video? Is this bass fishing or the NBA? Where did he come from and how is he raising the bar?

He arrived in this corner of the world via the world of NASCAR, where he worked as Michael Waltrip's PR representative, on behalf of Citgo. At that point, Citgo was still affiliated with the FLW Tour, and that provided him with an introduction to the world of competitive bass fishing. Shortly after ESPN bought BASS, the company became that tour's title sponsor and Cox got to see how the other league operated. While he and his company still do a fair amount of NASCAR-related promotional work, now he's got fish on the brain most of the time.

"I thoroughly enjoy the industry," he said. "It's one big family, which is not a whole lot different from NASCAR, but I'm more of an outdoors person than a car guy. I never got all that excited about smelling the fumes."

His self-taught photography skills led him to co-produce a coffee table book called "The Series" with veteran journalist and raconteur Steve Bowman, a pictorial essay about the first year of the Elite Series.

Now, on top of those previous and continuing achievements, he undertaken the most comprehensive effort to date to quantify professional anglers' media value. These media exposure summaries, creatively titled "Cox Reports," put traditional photocopied and photoshopped quarterly reports to shame.

"We have 12 employees and five of them work on Cox Reports every day. We have subscriptions to I don't know how many magazines, and they clip ads and editorial. We tape tons of shows and then add up the value and attempt to put a dollar value on it," he said.

"It started with Marty (Stone), Gerald (Swindle) and Shaw (Grigsby), but now it's up to 25 guys. All of the big guys like KVD, Skeet and Kelly Jordon. It has really exploded as an asset and tool for them to gauge their value."

Anglers like Gerald Swindle and Skeet Reese have the personalities to promote, but without someone packaging them to the public, they wouldn't get maximum exposure.

In addition to his role in compiling photographs, video, statistics and prose - as if that weren't enough - Cox also serves as a de facto media coach to the anglers he works with.

"Marty used to say that I was always getting on them, saying things like 'That's not exactly how I would have said that." But I really don't have to babysit them. There are guys out there who understand the media and guys who don't. Fortunately, our guys know how to use it to their advantage."

Even when a media novice comes under his wing, instead of viewing that as a handicap, he looks at the angler's relative immaturity as an asset. Take, for instance, 2008 Classic Qualifier (and potential American Idol contestant) Casey Ashley: "He's a good kid, but he's young," Cox said. "He's willing to listen and he's like a sponge, so it's like working with a clean slate."

Adhering to the adage that "a body in motion tends to stay in motion," Cox never seems to stop moving. In addition to his BASS-related travels, he's also racked up frequent flier miles with multiple trips to Japan and Venezuela from his Charlotte, North Carolina base. Does the travel ever get tiresome? Does he ever want to just settle down in his recliner to watch an episode of The Bassmasters, or better yet something not fishing related?

"I used to travel 36 weekends a year for NASCAR. Compared to that, this is a walk in the park," he said.

So Cox is halfway to his unspoken plan to revolutionize the world of bass fishing promotions. Meanwhile, Rodrick is off doing the same sort of work in the world of offshore powerboat racing. The Earth is two-thirds water and it seems like they're covering all of the wet stuff simultaneously.

Surely, in his travels, he's seen some odd things, run into some characters. Can he give us the skinny, the lowdown, or some gossip about Skeet, Swindle and the boys?

"You want me to be more interesting than Swindle?" he asks incredulously.

Point taken. Doug Cox is hesitant to be the news, but when it comes to reporting the news, shaping the news, and influencing the state of our sport, you'd be lucky to have him on your side.