I just sent the following email to Grand Central Marketing:

to: info@grandcentralmarketing.com
from: Neal Boyd

My name is Neal Boyd, I’m the webmaster and a “big brother” for skateboarders in the city of Hammond, Louisiana.

When it came to our attention that Hammond would be a part of the Andale Posse skate tour, we were able to stir up the masses… I had hundreds of kids and skate-vets ready to experience what might have been the biggest event in Hammond’s skate scene… for this Sunday.

One thing bummed me out though… on the official Andale Posse website, you had Hammond referred to as New Orleans. I called up Donovon Will and voiced my displeasure… he kept defending the use of “New Orleans” over our actual city’s name of “Hammond,” even though Hammond isn’t even in the greater New Orleans area. In fact, not only are we several cities and parishes away from NOLA, but you’d also have to cross the longest bridge in the state to get there from here.

You might as well refer to San Francisco as Los Angeles.

Anyway, with that said and done, I resigned myself to the fact that Hammond would be referred to as New Orleans, since in the marketing world, all of Louisiana = New Orleans… even though in the skateboard world (your target market), Hammond is known as the only city in the state with a three-quarter of a million dollar skatepark, and an cultural identity of its own.

…then last night I started getting emails. Those emails told me to go look at the Andale Posse website, so I did. There I saw that Louisiana had been removed completely, and Memphis had been put in its place. We received no warning, so I was left with a lot of damage control… hundreds of skateboarders were preparing to get out here for the event, so now I’m forced to send the message out at the last minute.

I fired off an angry email at Donovon, but I don’t think that’s enough. Not only am I doing everything in my power to reach the hundreds of skaters in the state to let them know that the event was cancelled, I’m calling for a boycott of any and all “Andale Posse” goods.

We felt we deserved recognition we weren’t getting… fine. But we deserved to know that we were taken off the tour.

Sincerely,
Neal Boyd
225.278.6656