The Search has been an evocative ad campaign for decades and it still has the power to inspire surfers today - as demonstrated by a new film set in Scotland, writes Roger Cox
Back in the 1990s, surf magazines were saturated with ads. In the January 1995 edition of leading US mag Surfer, for example, some 23 of the first 30 pages were given over to advertising, with particularly high-profile slots for multinational megabrands like Billabong, Quiksilver, Gotcha and Reef. The day-glo 80s may have been over, but the surf industry juggernaut that decade had unleashed was still rampaging along, turning saltwater dreams into serious amounts of cash, and the major surf gear companies of the day were locked in a ferocious battle for market share.
Quiksilver pulled off the sponsorship deal of the decade in 1990 when they signed up a young Floridian called Kelly Slater, who would go on to win an unprecedented 11 world titles with their stickers plastered all over his boards, but in marketing terms their rivals at Rip Curl had something that was arguably even more effective – an ad campaign called “The Search”.
Rip Curl was founded in March 1969 by two Australians, Brian Singer and Claw Warbrick, who started out making surfboards together in Singer’s garage in Torquay near Bell’s Beach. Later the same year they were joined by Alan Green, who had previously worked with a company that made diving wetsuits, allowing Rip Curl to add wetsuits to their portfolio. While the company had done well out of the surfing boom of the 80s, by the 90s its founders sensed a shift in the culture was overdue.
Singer later explained how “we thought that after a decade of greed and money, money, money in the 80s that people might reject that in the 90s and in some way go back to some of the values of the 70s.” As a result, the marketing concept they devised at the start of the 90s harked back to some of the earliest cultural touchstones in modern surfing, notably Bruce Brown’s 1966 film The Endless Summer, which followed two young surfers, Mike Hynson and Robert August, as they travelled around the world hunting for perfect, uncrowded waves.
At a time when most print surf ads consisted of a close-up action shot of a surfer, sponsor’s logos prominently displayed, Rip Curl’s Search ads felt as if they came from a different world. Many of them didn’t even feature surfers at all – just a tantalising image of an empty wave breaking in an unnamed location, plus the distinctive Rip Curl/The Search logo, and perhaps the odd literary quotation for good measure. The ad on the back page of the August 1997 edition of Surfer, for instance, is a cliff-top shot of a hollow, deep green left-hander peeling along a remote reef with a (slightly misquoted) line from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner underneath: “Alone, alone, all, all, alone on a wide wide sea”. At a time when the subliminal message behind most surf ads seemed to be something along the lines of “Look at our guy! See how he surfs! Buy our stuff and that could be you!” the Search ads were doing something more subtle. These were images that invited you to insert yourself into the frame, and the messaging was more akin to: “this is your story, you’re the main character, off you go...” Hardly surprising that The Search became such a hit, or that it’s still such a big part of Rip Curl’s brand identity three decades later.
The Search wasn’t just a print campaign – it also became a long-running series of films, starting with The Search: An Indian Ocean Sojourn in 1992, featuring three-time world champ-turned-soul surfer Tom Curren. As with the print ads, the focus was on travel, on adventure and – as per the title of the third film in the series – on going “beyond the boundaries”, both in terms of where you could surf and what surfing could look like.
The latest chapter in the story of The Search brings us to Scotland. In their 2024 film Caveheart, Rip Curl-sponsored Hawaiians Mason Ho and Sheldon Paishon took an entertainingly full-on trip to the north coast, specifically to Caithness – a location that’s becoming increasingly known for fast, hollow waves breaking over shallow slabs of rock. That film saw them hurling themselves into some horrific, right-onto-dry-reef monstrosities for our viewing pleasure, but now it seems this was only a warm-up for Caveheart II.
In the recently-released new film it becomes clear right from the start that Ho is taking the Caveheart concept seriously: he’s had an entire quiver of five boards painted with a giant Mel-Gibson-as-Braveheart image specially for the occasion. He’s taken the “beyond the boundaries” ethos of the Search film series to heart, too: we’re only three-and-a-half minutes into the action before he gets dragged across an uneven section of reef and comes up with one of his Mel boards snapped in two. Most of the gurgling, below-sea-level barrels Ho and Paishon surf in this film are mesmerisingly sketchy, and in a couple of spots there’s no obvious exit at the end of a ride: it’s just a case of hanging on until the inevitable rock sandwich. In one sense, then, we’re a long way away from the original Search ads: this is less “wish you were here”, more “rather you than me”. Then again, perhaps the message is this: if Ho and Paishon can find and surf waves this dangerous – albeit their idea of perfection – and come out mostly unscathed, what’s to stop you tracking down your own perfect wave, whatever that looks like? The Search goes on...
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