by Becky and Daniel Clark
On July 15th, the Senior Director of Marketing and Game Entertainment, Kieran Cain, graciously allowed us the opportunity to conduct a Q&A session for Class VI.
What marketing changes have taken place this year from last year?
I would say we’ve been up against more obstacles this year in terms of budgets. Last year, one of the big challenges for us was the opening of the stadium. We had more resources available for that to push the grand opening. So, obviously we don’t have that. It’s year two of the stadium. Every team that has their own soccer-specific stadium goes through that. When you’re in the building the second year, the newness has kind of worn off. You can’t count on people just showing up to take a look around. We have to find specific things that we have to work on this year that are going to drive people to come to games.
Are you marketing towards the huge Latino population here?
I’d say the biggest thing we did this year was this Lucho Libre, combining the two passions of soccer and wrestling. Everybody knows that Denver is very highly Hispanic, but it’s also highly Hispanic-Mexican. We knew that and the partners we tend to work with in the advertising world tend to be newspapers like El Hispano and a couple of the bigger weekly papers. So, a lot of times I tend to market the games that are going to be around Hispanic events. The good thing is, being in the promotions department, we can plan those games and make Hispanic events out of them. So for instance, when we were setting our schedule this year, one of the things we decided was one, we wanted a game on Cinco de Mayo. We wanted to play DC United on Cinco de Mayo, which we got and we wanted to play Blanco and Chicago on September 14, which is El Grito (Mexican Independence Day). So, we set those up. For your average game, when we played July 27 versus Columbus, I’m not going to do a lot of Hispanic advertising. I’m not going to reach out and do ads in Spanish. But we definitely do have a platform and a message. We develop our brand, “experience the world’s game.” “Experimente el juego de mundos”? is our Spanish language brand name. So, we kind of have those two separate entities that go hand-in-hand.
What about the college crowd?
We kind of tend to think about it when we’re thinking about our promotions based on the year. We’ve done the free beer night and those kinds of things. One of the main things that I tried to come up with this year was finding the right media partner to appeal to that crowd. I’m definitely past the college age, but the 20-30 year old males especially are who we tend to be missing at a lot of our games. To me, the right angle to reach that audience is through KTCL (93.3). We picked 5 games on the schedule that we wanted them to try to promote. They advertised us on the radio and in return get some stuff from us on the back end, but it really pumps up these certain games in the year that we think might be more appealing to the college age/alternative rock listening crowd. That is why we reach out to that station. A lot of times we partner up with things like The Onion and The Westward and those kind of papers and try to appeal to that. We also rely on our college students that are interns here with the Rapids.
Do you interact with the Denver Post? Or other newspaper outlets?
We actually have our media relations department. That’s their job. They’re always pitching them stories. I know they were talking to 9News yesterday about coming out here and doing a story about the complex and what’s going on this week. So, they’re constantly hitting them up. They’re in constant contact with Brian Forbes over at The Post and Brian Jennings at the Rocky Mountain News. They’ll take out the sports editor of the Rocky Mountain News and take him to lunch. We’re definitely putting them under pressure.
A lot of times, I would say, the writers get a bad rap, but it’s not them. They’re wanting to write more. Brian Forbes would love to write an article every day that goes to post. Honestly, it’s the editors that have the control over what runs. If you remember, we tried back in March of this year to get an e-mail campaign that we kind of put out there hoping the fans would take charge of that. What they tell us every time is that they base what runs on what fans want. They’re not hearing enough. They’re not getting enough e-mails asking about the Rapids. That’s why we kind of tried to put that out there and we intentionally leaked a bunch of their sports editors’ e-mails and kind of asked the fans to take over. It’s the fans that really drive that. People that write those letters to the editors are more powerful than anything we could ever do. We pitch them ideas everyday. We’re talking, even promotional stuff. There’s some buzz out there that our next game features a “Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament.” So, we thought about calling Drew Sourcher. He talks about that stuff on the news. He loves all those crazy types of things., so he’s already gotten a call from us. I’ve called all kinds of people. I’m sure they’re sick of hearing from us, because any time we have any scatterbrained idea, regardless if it’s just the team or just players, we’re always hammering those guys saying, “Hey, you guys, this is an angle you might want to run with.”
With the “Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament,” the hardcore fans think that you’ve run out of promotional ideas.
My response to them would be that it’s a little bit like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I mean, we’re just coming off a week where we’ve got the biggest 4th of July festival in the state of Colorado, we brought in a Mexican team, we brought in the US national team. That’s a week full of fantastic promotions. It doesn’t get any better than that. In my opinion, for us to get through last week where we had those three things going on, a third jersey launch, a big wine tasting event - to me, those are all promotions. Those are all coming through our promotions department. Yes, our next game features a Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament,” which is something our ticket sales department came up with because it did so well with the Minnesota Timberwolves. That’s actually where they got that idea Whenever we see something good, we’re not above stealing a good promotional idea. We had that Guitar Hero tournament a couple games ago. Last year we tried a “buy a ticket and get all you can eat in the stadium.” I’d say that’s a good example of a promotional idea that we tried and it failed. It wasn’t any good. We gave it a shot. Nobody did it, but we gave it a shot.
Just so the fans know how we kind of look at the games. Normally, I sit down once we get the schedule right here in January. It has all the home games listed for the season. So, what I do is sit down with our ticket sales department and my game entertainment director. We look at every single home game and we pick two or three promotions that are going to happen at each home game. For instance, our next game. I know we just talked about the “Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament,” but our next home game on July 27 also features a Rocky Mountain News Family Pack, which is 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs, and 4 sodas for $69. It’s also Celtic Heritage Night, which I wanted to do, being of Irish heritage. I thought we should celebrate our culture and have some bands and stuff out here. That tournament is one of the six promotions going on at the game. It’s also McDonalds Family Pack Night.
But, just so everybody knows, every home game on the schedule has at least two or three promotions attached to it that are just different angles that are great for our ticket sales staff, because the one person heading up the “Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament” is something they can focus on to try and sell tickets. If they want to run with it and they want to go with it and it sells 500 tickets, then great! If there’s a “Rock, Paper, Scissors” freak-out there that has never been to a game, then why don’t we host it and bring them to a game? So, it’s stuff like that that there’s one person heading up. You know, the ticket sales guys as a whole kind of deal with the Rocky Mountain News Family Night thing. Our game entertainment department is really focusing on the Celtic Heritage Night. And then the team, obviously, is focusing on playing Columbus. The hope is that five different departments are all working together all to get more people to be going on July 27, which is what it all comes down to. So, if it’s stuff that’s not interesting to you, then there’s four other things going on that might get you to come to the game.
What if fans have ideas for promotions?
My e-mail’s right on the website. They can e-mail me. I know Mark has e-mailed me a couple times with different ideas. We’re trying to do a viewing party for a game in August that can generate some exposure for Class VI. It doesn’t necessarily have to be self-serving. It could just be an idea. We’re always open to that. Sure. I will say that we always try and think about the fact that it’s nice to have promotions and stuff going on at games, but the one thing we always have in the back of our minds is, how many tickets is this going to sell us or is there some sponsor money that we’re going to get out of it? The whole Guitar Hero thing didn’t sell a whole lot of extra tickets to the game, but we were able to close a sponsorship deal for the entire year through Comcast. We do a tournament and now they’re on for a multi-thousand dollar deal for the whole year. People that might not have known that just think it was a dumb halftime thing. So, it’s really about what kind of finances will be in it for the club, because we don’t want to be a minor league baseball team.
I remember it was a couple of years ago that we were playing at old Mile High that there was feedback from the fans that there was too much focus on the promotions and it was all about the giveaway. People would talk about free soccer ball night, but they may not know that we were playing Kansas City. The focus was more on the promotion, so we made a conscious effort over the past few years to move away from that. If you notice, it used to be that in ’99 and the early 2000’s, every Rapids game you came to, you got a giveaway. Whether it was a lunch box or it was a whatever. We haven’t had a single giveaway over the last two years that I can think of, besides the Lucho Libre mask. Just so you guys know and we want the fans to know, we do hear those kinds of comments and we made a conscious decision to change, and you definitely don’t hear about it around our office anymore. There’s nobody talking about free jersey night, which we used to talk about all the time and it was more, “how can we sell free jersey night? How can we get people to come?” Now it’s more like, “Hey, we’re playing Columbus in the next game. There’s also some other stuff that may be going on, but the focus is one the game.”
Is there any chance of getting a shirt sponsor any time soon?
Yeah. For sure. It’s a big priority for our sponsorship sales team to get that big deal sold. It’s going to go a long way to making us financially where we want to be. Actually, we were just working on some demographics stuff as a presentation, so there’s constant presentations out there. We wouldn’t just sell it to anybody. You wouldn’t see Marlboro or something like that as our jersey sponsor. It’s got to be somebody that fits into our belief and our brand system, which is “we are the world’s game.” Through what we bring to the table through our youth connections and our global partners with Arsenal and Pachuca, we’ve got some major backers that are the right companies with the same mindset. There are some people on the table right now that would be very interesting. I’d say the steps have been taken to get us to where we want to be, but we’ve got a ways more to go. We’re not going to do anything prematurely. It’s a big thing for Jeff Plush to get that thing sold, but to sell it right and not undervalue it. We rate ourselves at a certain level. We’re not going to take less than what we think we deserve. But the fans should know that it’s a very big part of our business and our sales team is working on it constantly.
Speaking of the fans, how do you feel about the Rapids’ supporters’ sections?
I like them. I much like the Class VI section because I think it’s unique to see a group that just wants to be able to be a sitting group. To me, that’s awesome. Our concern is that supporters’ groups aren’t growing on their own. We want them to be alive and grow. We want it to be like Toronto. We want it to be like DC. We want the boards of each of the supporters’ groups to get together and have meetings. We want to help you throw an event, like a fundraising event here at the stadium to raise money for the supporters’ clubs. Raise $10,000 and give it to charity or use it for whatever. The more things we can do like that, the club should be helping.
I can’t believe we don’t get requests. Nobody ever asks us for help. You’ve got to hit us up. Tell us you want the stadium for a field day or whatever to raise money. Put on a membership drive. Put something in our newsletter or put a story on the website about why you should join Class VI. Put a story in the programs or the handouts at all the games. It’s easy for us to do it, especially if it doesn’t cost anything. If our supporters’ clubs want our help, we’d be crazy not to do that. I just wish there were more requests. Let us know how we can help. If you guys have an idea, let us know. We can do anything from donated jerseys at the end of the seasons to writing articles for Free Kick to whatever. It’s much better for us to support you guys, because you support us than some other organization.
The one thing that everybody in the supporters’ groups should know is that everybody that works here is a fan. When I started off, I went to the first Rapids’ game as a fan. I went through the whole first year as a fan. I pretty much decided that’s where I wanted to work. I’m not going to go work for Dallas, DC United, or New York. I’m a Rapids’ fan. That’s why I came to work here. We go out of our way to find the right people. If they have a ton of great experience and they are a fantastic marketer, but they aren’t a soccer fan, we won’t hire them. You have to be a soccer fan to work here. You may not get paid all the money in the world. We’re not breaking the bank. I work here because I love it. I’m not a soccer fan, I’m a Rapids’ fan.
Posted by mark at August 26, 2008 08:36 AM