MediaMay 13, 2017

Welcome to the violent, viral world of Cold Steel Swords

Contributing writer

On YouTube, every conceivable interest is catered to, including the brutal power of top quality, highly engineered swords. David Farrier talks to Lynn Thompson, founder of sword, knife and viral video makers Cold Steel.

“The pig is the closest thing to a human, in terms of flesh consistency, arrangement of organs.” Welcome to the violent, viral world of Cold Steel Swords

I’ve been captivated by Cold Steel ever since my friend Dan showed me one of their videos on YouTube. The video, entitled “Chinese War Sword”, had millions of views. It showed showed various men slicing and dicing everything from bamboo, to a pig carcass dressed in a jacket.

Now I’ve seen my fair share of fantasy swords in my time. I am, after all, from New Zealand – Lord of the Rings country – but these swords and their videos were something else entirely.

They were product demonstrations, but they were theatrical and violent. The music, editing and sets reminded me of an 80s heavy metal music video. They were, dare I say it, inspired. There was a reason some of them had 12 million views.

Recently I decided to dig a little deeper into these strangely violent viral videos, reaching out to the company’s founder, Lynn Thompson.

I discovered a man deeply passionate about swords. He’s spent years reading up on weapons and tells me he has a library of over 2000 weapons-related books.

His company, founded in 1980, is nestled in Ventura, California, about an hour south of Santa Barbara. His wife, an interior designer, helps him with “aesthetic aspects” of the business.

But I wanted to know more about Thompson and his sword empire. We began by talking about pets and his love of suits. By the end of the interview, I discovered that America isn’t just obsessed with guns, it’s obsessed with swords.

Lynn – thanks for your time. I know you are busy! First off, tell me a little about yourself. How old are you? Where in America are you from? Do you have any wonderful pets?

Not unlike most women, I don’t disclose my age.

My goal is to stay perpetually 24. I keep myself young by training in martial arts with people younger than myself.

I am originally from Brazil. It wasn’t until I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan that I learned to speak English as a child. My parents forced us to learn even quicker because they stopped speaking Portuguese in the home. After five years, we moved to California, and I’ve been here ever since.

I have had dogs all my life, but right now I currently have Nikki, a 13-month old Doberman. She has just as much energy as intelligence. We also have Socks, a quarter horse, who is aptly named because when you look at him, it looks like he is wearing four white socks. He’s a highly trained in both English and Western disciplines.

Lynn Thompson, founder of Cold Steel Swords, gripping one of his products (Image: Youtube)

When did you get into the sword game?

I started Cold Steel in 1980, and we first started as I knife company. As the company grew and demand grew, I started expanding into other projects. I personally have always been very interested in swords. I’d been quality testing our knives and testing swords I had purchased at gun shows, and I realised it was doable to make a quality sword our customers could afford. I didn’t want people to only have the option of custom swords that cost as much as a down payment on a car or have nothing at all.

Our very first sword was manufactured in 1991, which was a Chinese manufactured “copy” of a Japanese WWI Cavalry Saber. We saw a big boom in our sword business right around the time of Tom Cruise’s big film The Last Samurai, because we and one or two other companies were the only ones manufacturing swords at a reasonable price point.

Being in the sword business forced me to become an expert in sword fighting. I feel that it’s unreasonable for me to sell you a sword that’s meant for combat, without knowing how it works. I equate it to someone trying to sell you a saddle when they have never ridden a horse. So I took it upon myself to learn all about swords and sword fighting. I consistently train for hours every week. I’ve put in the blood, sweat, tears & I have the injuries to prove it.

I came across Cold Steel’s videos when a friend showed me, and I can’t get enough of them. Like – if we’re watching a movie at my house on the projector, I will often show one of your videos as a preview. When did you start making these videos?

We first started making our “Proof” videos in 1996, with one camera in the parking lot of the office we had at that time.

My wife and I edited the time coded footage in my gym. It was very low tech. It wasn’t until DVD’s became readily available that we started investing more in the production.

We’d then include a DVD of the Proof videos in each catalog for that year, and that’s when the brand really took off.

Who are the men in the videos – are they staff or actors?

Staff. Besides myself, you see Robert and Sergio most frequently, both of whom have been here 20 plus years.

A Cold Steel staff member using a sword to chop a basketball in half (Image: Youtube)

I am fascinated by their wardrobe choices: often business shirts and ties. It doesn’t seem appropriate for the work being done! Talk me through your thinking there.

The only one you see in a suit and tie or business shirt and tie is me. bThat was intentional, I wanted to set myself apart as the president. But more importantly, I wanted to show customers that this wasn’t just a company with another “suit” at the helm, but rather someone who will back up the company’s brags and get his hands dirty. And I believe, in doing so, I help show that Cold Steel is for everyone, whether you hold a blue collar, white collar, or no collar kind of job.

Thompson in his trademark suit (Image: Youtube)

Your videos vary in extremes. One second you’re cutting a bit of thick rope or bamboo, the next you are chopping through a pig carcass. How do you choose what to demonstrate your swords on?

The materials used are all carefully chosen to help demonstrate different aspects and qualities that are critical when picking a quality knife or sword. They help measure against edge holding, pierce-ability, point strength and rigidity. So many factors besides just its sharpness. Of course, we wanted our videos to be interesting and visually stimulating – we didn’t want them to come across as overly scientific and sterile. So you’ll see the little touches we added that make things fun, like dressing up each mannequin differently, or as you mentioned putting a pig in a jacket.

In terms of selecting a pig for the videos, I drew inspiration from a 1980s video in which Jeet Kune Do instructor Paul Vunak sliced ham with a balisong. I extrapolated that to using pigs. After all, the pig is the closest thing to a human – in terms of flesh consistency, arrangement of organs – and I wanted to give my customers an idea how their knife or sword would perform in a real-world self defence situation.

I think the most confronting demonstrations are the ones with Ballistic Torsos, which I didn’t even know about until I discovered your videos. From what I can tell, they are modelled after humans, made with materials that mimic human skin, bones, organs and even brains. They are for the military to test guns on and stuff. Where did you get the idea to use those?

We had struggled with finding realistic targets, and I remember first reading about ballistic gel bodies from writer/policeman Ed Sanow. At the time when we first started ballistic gel bodies, they were very hard to come by. They’re also cost prohibitive as they’re several thousand dollars apiece, but we thought it could be and would be very impactful, visually speaking. We wanted something that could really show off what our knives and swords can do.

But, the decision to start using ballistic gel bodies wasn’t one we made overnight. We knew it would be risky, and the use of them could offend our customer base because it’s so graphic.

Thompson uses his Cold Steel Sword on a Ballistic Torso (Image: YouTube)

But, we absolutely want to tell the truth, which is why I think we ultimately came to the decision to use them. We want our customers to feel confident that they can adequately defend themselves with our products. And when you watch our videos where we’ve used the ballistic gel bodies… I think we did a pretty good job of conveying that!

Thompson says he wants to make his customers feel confident they can adequately defend themselves with his products. (Image: Youtube)

With all that in mind, who is your target customer and what are they using these swords for? In New Zealand I have some friends who collect swords, but they are mainly fantasy swords (this is Lord of the Rings country, after all) and just for display. I get the feeling with your swords maybe people are using them to go hunt bears or pigs or moose?

As a company, we don’t get political – except when it comes to one thing: We believe in the inherent right to bear arms. We vehemently support the U.S.’ 2nd Amendment. Our target customer is therefore EVERYONE! As such, one of the things I’ve always recommended is having a minimum of two knives on you for everyday carry. One knife should remain unused so that it is razor sharp and ready, its sole purpose is being used in a self defence application. Hopefully, you never need it. The other knife is your everyday utility knife.

When it comes to our knives in particular, we do a lot of business with the military and law enforcement community, as well as the prepper community. The primary purpose of a sword however, and truthfully, how the sword originated, was for the purpose of war and killing other men. In parts of Europe – France, Germany, and Spain – I’ve noticed that people still hunt with shorter swords there. A longer sword is not the preferred method for hunting, but it is a great self defence tool in modern times for a myriad of reasons. I’d suspect that the majority of the people buying our swords are buying them for self defence.

Swords are often underestimated and overlooked in today’s world when picking a defensive tool – but they shouldn’t be. Around 50% of most gunfights occur within five feet and 90% of gunfights occur within seven yards.

It may look like an empty boot – but at Cold Steel Swords, it’s full of meat (Images: Youtube)

A sword can certainly be used in these situations, and it all comes down to your movement and reaction time. Hear me well, I am not saying a sword is better than a gun. But it does have some advantages: It’s silent.

Unlike a gun, you don’t give up your location by emitting sound when you’ve used a sword for defence. Swords are not regulated: You’re not required to test or undergo a mandatory waiting period to purchase a sword. There are less negligence-related sword injuries or deaths. Stray swords don’t go through walls and kill a toddler across the street instead of your intended target.

Guns: According to Thompson, not necessarily better than swords

Some of your videos have million of views. That’s sort of amazing. Did you ever see this videos taking off this much – and have they helped business, as well as entertain?

I didn’t know the videos would take off like they have. It’s awesome to see that they have a following all their own. But, I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I hoped the videos would become popular! Their popularity has in fact helped business, and certainly has helped us in terms of brand recognition on a worldwide scale. But I am always looking to improve upon that and I ask myself how can we be different? How can we try something new?

The media section is sponsored by MBM, an award-winning strategic media agency specialising in digital, with vast experience across all channels. We deliver smart, tailored media solutions as well as offering a leading data and analytics consultancy. Talk to us about your communications challenges and how MBM can help bring you success through the power of media and technology.

Keep going!

The morning news combatants

MediaMay 12, 2017

The radio survey results are out – and everyone won, again!

Duncan Greive

Founder

The morning news combatants

Every time the radio survey results come out we get the same amazing news: everyone killed it! Duncan Greive reads the press releases and tries to figure out what’s really going on.

EVERY NZME STATION INCREASES LISTENERS

MEDIAWORKS RADIO REMAINS THE NUMBER ONE RADIO NETWORK IN NEW ZEALAND WITH ITS LARGEST EVER REACH

Record Audiences for RNZ after latest Radio Survey

The fact that all media is ridiculous and horrible is no longer debated by serious people, but even among the humiliated denizens of our once-glorious industry, radio remains an island of depravity – a kind of godless media Ibiza where every citizen is oily and suspiciously tanned and pulling a funny face despite being 108 years old.

The reason we, the snobby and elitist ‘rest of the media’ continue to tolerate the goons of radio is that they are the only part of the failing media which is not in fact failing. It is a shocking but potentially true alternative fact that radio is the only branch of the mainstream New Zealand media tree which is consistently and reliably profitable in its own right, keeping the sweet sap of cash in our rotting boughs and allowing us to carry on pretending that there is demand for our ‘services’, such as they are.

Government institutions play the chainsaw-wielding maniac in this over-extended metaphor, with the Commerce Commission torturing us by refusing to allow us to merge our paltry assets to try and eke out a few extra months on this earth. Because competition in printed newspapers really matters when you spend a full calendar year thinking about it.

So while it’s easy to gaze in horror at radio, with its stunts and tightly controlled playlists and objectionable opinions, let’s take a moment to be thankful to the medium for its generosity in allowing many of our largest brands to continue to struggle through the post-internet nuclear media winter in the hope that one day it will pass. Long may it continue – though if Australian reports of Southern Cross Austereo interest in NZME’s radio assets accelerate into the ‘actually happening’ space then it may not continue for long, and we may be in deep(er) trouble.

Anyway, the reason radio remains so resilient is that people stubbornly continue to listen to it for literally hours on end, thus making it attractive to advertisers, while the costs of its production are basically a few humans, two microphones and a small black plastic box with a piece of string tied around it running up to a telegraph pole. (I have not worked in radio but am pretty sure this is how it’s done.)

Twice a year the radio industry is surveyed by a group calling itself GfK, which sounds like but is not a group of Russian hackers. I was once selected to complete the survey, so can speak to its methodology at the time. It was thus: they sent out a booklet with every radio station in the city on the y axis, and a long time (at least a week, maybe two) on the x axis, broken down into 12-minute intervals. You were meant to keep a diary of your listening habits during that period, and return it to them. It was a very full on task which I can only imagine that everyone receiving a survey completed without fail or fault.

It has apparently evolved somewhat since, according to an industry source, and now includes some online surveying – I have contacted GfK to ask about current methodology but have yet to receive a response at this time.

The morning news combatants: MediaWorks’ Garner, RNZ’s Ferguson and Espiner, NZME’s Hosking

Anyway, that period has recently passed and the results are in. And, as witnessed in the shrieking headlines italicised above, everyone killed it. Everyone! Seriously, everyone.

Even within the bizarro world of press releases, those for radio survey occupy a singular position. The combination of the immense amount of money the survey directs and the fact they’re put out by huge media organisations means that both the releases and the reporting on them are some of the most brazenly obfuscatory ever put out. They’re almost impossible for a layperson to read and designed only to make advertisers feel like organisation A deserves a greater proportion of their dollars than organisation B.

Nothing displays the bewildering segmentation which occurs between markets than the volume of asterisks and other markers used to identify the claim being made. I mean, what the fuck is a ɸ and where else would you ever see it apart from a radio survey press release?

While each matters, given the relatively small number of surveys distributed and large number of stations and timeslots discussed, it’s a given that the more finely divided the data the less sound it becomes. It means that whatever you’re reading, while each claim is based on a real number, it’s almost never a direct like-for-like comparison with an opposing station. For example, MediaWorks proudly beat its chest over The Rock’s position as “the number one music station***”, based on its 428,500 “nationwide listeners”, placing it “equal with The Edge”. This is strange, because just a paragraph earlier we were told that “The Edge retains its title as New Zealand’s most popular station with 662,300 listeners”. It’s… confusing.

Worse, GfK’s own website seems – and likely actually is – purposefully designed to make dispassionate analysis a horrible experience. The average page looks like this:

Finally there’s RNZ, the station I listen to most, which does a more sober and considered version of the commercial radio networks’ releases, a full week later under the terms of their agreement with GfK. What to make of it all? I tried to close-read the three releases and bullet point what seem to be conclusions able to be drawn from the surveys.

10 hopefully sound takeaways from the latest radio survey

1. RNZ’s move to join the survey appears vindicated. RNZ National’s weekly cumulative audience was measured at 579,400 listeners, up from 535,200 last year. It’s a lot, and seems like vindication of Paul Thompson’s open content stance and major rejuvenation of key shows. Every major property recorded an increase, a seriously impressive result after the grumbling which accompanied the moves initially.

2. The general sense is that it was a good result for NZME after a bad run. “They call it the ‘jaws of death’,” one radio insider unaffiliated to either network told me. “The way the 25-54 demographic had been swinging to MediaWorks. That’s been incrementally reversed.”

3. The numbers bear this out: MW remains far out in front in that crucial demo, but it lost ground to NZME nationally, sliding back from a 58.7% share to 56.9%, while NZME and partners rose from 32.2% to 33.6%.

4. That gap and dynamic motion holds, albeit less so, for the entire network cumulative audience of humans aged 10+. MediaWorks achieving 2.262 million weekly listeners (up 53,200) while NZME has 1.952 million (up 150,000).

5. The most intense battle is for the hearts and minds and brains of the morning news listener – particularly in an election year. NZME and its reported $1.2 million man Michael Noel James Hosking earned his money by growing his breakfast audience from 297,900 to 329,600. The network released a graph razzing Duncan Garner’s AM Show for dropping around 10,000 listeners from the Paul Henry days – which actually seems pretty small, given what we are repeatedly told about Henry’s starpower.

6. The real morning news champs are the Guyon Espiner and Susie Ferguson tandem at RNZ’s Morning Report, however, who own nearly as much as Hosking and Garner combined, with 430,300 listeners – up an impressive 50,000 on the last survey. It sort of suggests that their approach – considered, tireless, balanced to a fault – might be a more accurate vision of ‘what kiwis really think’ than the inflammatory rhetoric of Hosking/Smith on ZB.

7. Despite the impressive growth of streaming platforms iHeartRadio and now MediaWorks’ Rova, the numbers (and likely revenue) are dwarfed by radio’s audience. Which is to say that the car is an incredible transmission device for radio, and the smartphone is not.

8. (Conspiracy theory: the bad ZB morning hosts’ boner for roads and furious denunciation of commie rail is in fact in their naked self-interest. More cars on ever-more congested roads means more listeners listening for longer. Whereas the smartphone-infested CRL will be bad for radio as a medium. Is there a link?! Definitely not. But there could be! But there’s not.)

9. There is an impressive resilience in music radio. Despite the rise and ubiquity of Spotify in the smartphone era, music stations, even those targeting younger audiences, retain a very large audience.

10. The whole sector saw growth, and across all demographics save one: 10-17, which dipped slightly, and in which most stations slid backwards. This implies that radio isn’t onboarding new listeners at quite the rate it once was, predictably – but the growth and stability across every other demo, including 18-34, suggests that radio is going to be around a good while yet. So those of us toiling away in print, online and television better hope that our benevolent radio overlords remain kind enough and confident enough in our eventual recovery to maintain the shackles which keep so many of us afloat.

The Spinoff Media is sponsored by MBM, an award-winning strategic media agency specialising in digital, with vast experience across all channels. We deliver smart, tailored media solutions as well as offering a leading data and analytics consultancy. Talk to us about your communications challenges and how MBM can help bring you success through the power of media and technology.