No. of Recommendations: 7
Apparently advertisers have bottomless pools of money.
Having had the broadcast rights for a variety of teams (Bulls, White Sox, Pirates, Patriots, Penn State, Notre Dame, and others) I will say it isn’t just “advertising.”
Typically when you buy an advertising package, at least one big enough, you get a slug of tickets which you can use to enjoy yourself, treat associates, create contests for customers, or whatever. When we had the Bulls, for instance, we got 400 seats to every game. 200 were “good”, and of those about 50 were “excellent”, and of those about 10 were “unbelievable” (like 2nd row, center court). Another 200 were upper balcony, end zone, but hey, it was the Bulls and most people never got inside the arena at all.
For the 200 end zone we would have 2 employee nights for our own people, and then would slap them off 50 or 100 at a time (to9 a single game) to car dealers, soda distributors, banks, etc who bought a big enough ad package. They would also get 2, sometimes 4 of the “excellent” seats to every game. We kept the “unbelievable” seats for ourselves, with which we could entertain potential or current clients. Once the luxury suites became available we had 16 more tickets (yes, we paid full retail for them), and worked the same kind of thing: you could get “the entire suite” for a night, or you might get 4 seats in it for 4 different games, or whatever.
On a pure “advertising” basis there was no justification for buying our ads, I could show you 20 ways to reach more people more often with a regular ad schedule. But add in tickets to see Michael Jordan and those car dealers were salivating and practically pushed the money across the table.
(*It wasn’t just “tickets”. We could also get some “backstage passes”, player appearances, etc. - and yes we had to pay extra for them - but that cost was just priced in, and the merchant just wrote it all off to “advertising.”) We did the same with SuperBowl excursions, even though we didn’t have the rights to the Super Bowl, but we sent you ojn an all expense paid vacation to Hawaii and then back to New Orleans (or wherever) for the big game for 5 days, all expenses paid (*except booze) if you bought a package in 1st quarter, which was notoriously slow, ad-wise. Lots of people were happy to puke away their ad budgets on this sort of grift, and we were only too happy to help.)
Of course the television stations also had rights and the same deals, only bigger), and the team itself (which sold advertising in the stadium) also engaged in this practice, so it’s not as though we were the only source. But priced right (well below television, for instance) we made a pretty handsome living off of it.
(If I didn’t make it clear, *nothing* was free. In addition to the rights fee, we had to pay for the seats, the suite, the player appearances, the jerseys, etc. all at retail. The difference was that we could get them whereas Johnny Car Dealer on the street could not on his own.)
