Partnership Proposal
The ICAST
Fishing Film
Awards*
We want to partner with ICAST to build a film culture in fishing — like never before.
A partnership proposal for ICAST
Confidential · 2026 · *A Working Title
We want to partner with ICAST to build a film culture in fishing — like never before.
Here's the whole idea, in one breath.
Partner with ICAST. The one place the entire fishing industry already gathers.
Put on the show — at the event. An awards night for fishing film, staged live at ICAST.
It changes everything. Validation turns films into a culture — and a category ICAST owns.
Snow had Warren Miller. Surf and skate had whole film cultures. Fly fishing had nothing — until a stage changed everything. Here's the playbook, in three moves.
A scrappy group of creatives — us among them — started shooting fly fishing for love, long before anyone paid for it.
Beautiful films with no venue, no audience, no validation. The work existed — but it didn't build anything.
A video awards night at the sport's flagship trade show. Suddenly the work was ranked, recognized, celebrated — in front of everyone who mattered.
Validation set off a chain reaction.
Awards validate the work
Brands fund films
Audiences seek them out
Tours & companies form
A new genre is born
And it worked. Fly fishing — one of the smallest ways to fish in America, ~8 million anglers — built the strongest film culture in the outdoors. From a standing start, because someone gave the work a stage.
How America fishes — 57.9M U.S. anglers in 2024, an all-time high. The smallest slice built the strongest culture. The biggest slices have no awards, no engine, no film culture at all.
anglers lost to churn in 2024 alone. Gear and access don't retain anglers — culture does. Awards don't just celebrate the sport; they defend its future.
It worked in fly fishing because the awards lived at the sport's flagship trade show — the one place the whole industry was already gathered. ICAST is where we recreate what we already know works.
The definitive awards of fishing film — hosted, and owned, by ICAST.
Institutional control of a whole content category as it's being born.
A marquee, media-generating night that grows the entire show.
Partner with Off the Grid to launch The Fishing Film Awards at ICAST — and own the ceremony that validates the category.
Twenty-five years in — from the very first night of the Drake Video Awards to nearly every major film tour since. There's a difference between running a program someone else created and building one from nothing. Tours change hands; builders don't.
Twenty-five years of credibility & relationshipsA curation & judging frameworkProduction, show craft & the origin story only we can tellThe industry's home stage & built-in audienceInstitutional weight & trustA marquee to grow the whole showWant to learn more about this vision? Let's schedule a meeting and walk you through the whole thing.