Irvine-based medical device maker Masimo Corp. will look to win a place in the world of big-time athletics as part of a marketing effort anchored by its sponsorship of the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament in Indian Wells, which runs through this week.
Masimo will showcase its MightySat fingertip pulse oximeter—which measures a person’s oxygen saturation—during the tournament. The marketing push includes a player summit that will feature discussions on how using the device could improve performance, along with an exhibit featuring MightySat at the tournament’s Tennis Garden Village. Also part of the package: the company’s first-ever television commercial, which will air on ESPN and feature cyclist and Olympic silver medalist Dotsie Bausch, a MightySat user.
The device maker also sponsored the McEnroe Challenge charity event a couple of days prior to the tournament’s March 9 start. Proceeds from the event went to four charities, including the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, which Masimo spearheads.
The push into athletics helps take Masimo from institutional segments of healthcare—selling devices to hospitals and other providers—and into consumer markets. The company will follow a well-worn path by seeking to win over star athletes as endorsers and customers.
Masimo Chief Executive Joe Kiani said he’s hoping to start along the lines of sports drink Gatorade, which grew by word of mouth from college and professional athletes.
“We’re looking at personal health and athletes—can we help athletes get an edge?” Kiani said. “We decided to go meet with the stars, so we have meetings now, a roundtable—the first of its kind ever. We’re going to have a meeting with top players, their coaches, their trainers [and] introduce them to this technology and see if some of them want to start using it in their training.”
Measured
It’s a measured marketing step, even with the high-profile sponsorship—the BNP Paribas Open typically draws more than 400,000 fans over its 14-day run and gets more than 300 hours of live and encore TV coverage from ESPN, ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel.
“What we don’t know is whether the consumer market is real or not,” Kiani said. “It could be like sending your product on a space shuttle—you know, it’s kind of a neat, fun story but it doesn’t bring in the business.”
Masimo gains the majority of its revenue selling pulse oximeters for hospital and healthcare uses. It has data showing that the individual-consumer market for pulse oximeters currently ranges between $7 million and $20 million a year.
Masimo had revenue of $586.6 million last year.
“We are not projecting big revenue growth out of this—it’s something that’s kind of a trial balloon for us,” Kiani said.
How well it flies might depend on “high-performance athletes” such as Bausch, an Irvine resident who won a silver medal in team pursuit cycling at the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
‘Personal Gold’
Bausch is also a former model who took up cycling as she was recovering from an eating disorder. She also was one of the subjects of a documentary film called “Personal Gold” that examined how some athletes achieved goals through the use of data.
Bausch “reached out to us,” said Michael Drummond, a Masimo spokesperson and one of Kiani’s “lieutenants” in the nascent sports monitoring effort.
“She lives literally 10 minutes from our headquarters,” Drummond said.
“We met her after she was a Masimo pulse ox user,” Kiani said, adding that Bausch told them that she won events because of the oximeter’s ability to collect and analyze data in a way that helped her to determine the training dates she was able to push herself hardest.
Kiani mentioned that there’s a possibility for a wider television advertising campaign for MightySat on channels besides ESPN. He said he would be talking with Ken Solomon, the Tennis Channel’s chief executive and a friend, during BNP Paribas about the possibilities.
Masimo also would be open to working with clothing manufacturers to put its technology into sports apparel.
Baltimore-based athletic apparel maker Under Armour Inc. made moves last year into wearable devices through its acquisitions of a pair of fitness app makers—My FitnessPal and Endomondo.
“So far, all the wearables, all they do is pulse rate and track how many steps you take. It would be nice to find a good partner to add the other data, which is oxygen saturation, which is what people like Dotsie say is critical to their work,” Kiani said.
Masimo’s sponsorship of BNP Paribas stems from one of Kiani’s personal passions.
His family has attended the tournament for roughly 10 years, he said last week during a break at the Roth Capital Partners conference in Laguna Niguel, where he and other Masimo executives were presenting.
“We’ve heard there are going to be some 500,000 people going in and out of that place,” Kiani said about the tournament. “We’re going to see what their reaction is to what superathletes use.”
