Cal Ticketing & Marketing Ideas: FINAL UPDATE - Page 2

eastcoastcal

5:22p, 11/21/22

PalyBear said:
Thanks for the hard work and report.

Curious to know if there was any research into parking solutions. I found a reliable parking solution but for the casual fan parking is a stressful barrier to attending games.

Thank you for the lovely comment PalyBear and parking is a huge issue. Unfortunately it's partially a Cal problem and partially a City of Berkeley problem. Here's an idea- strike a deal with IFC to lease the parking space at frat/sorority houses (in exchange for some money and perhaps tickets), Cal Athletics can set up a parking reservation system on calbears showing the open spots which travelers to games can reserve ahead of time.

eastcoastcal

5:26p, 11/21/22

In reply to 91Cal

91Cal said:
Thank you for the project, @eastcoastcal & @lucasst33! Disappointing to read that the engagement was less than engaging...ugh.

iirc, there were ticket giveaways to local elementary schools combined with inexpensive family plans in the early Tedford years that brought in a ton of new fans, including young families looking for an inexpensive day of entertainment. Each game had a welcome to a couple of schools at a break with a message on the (little) big screen.

But that's not the subject of this message...

This is a suggestion from a friend who is a big Boston College alum/donor who related that they had a tough time getting fans into the stadium for kickoff. The product fielded has been similarly mediocre to Cal, but they are now near the sold attendance at every kickoff because they started selling any beer bought before kickoff at half price and they promoted the heck out of it...they bumped up the price a little and stop selling at the start of the 3rd quarter, which has had the effect of getting fans in the game less drunk than if they were pounding beer/taking shots at tailgates and the consumption during the game slowed because the beer was twice as much as they had just paid (limit two per person) AND most had just had two full beers and weren't buying two more.

I passed along the suggestion to my contact in IA who said he'd pass it along...I'm curious as to whether anything like that came up in discussion.

Thanks 91Cal for the great reply

. Really disappointing and confusing to hear that they stopped this elementary school program & family plans. Great idea from BC. I suspect why your idea may have been stopped short is because it would theoretically be a short-term hit to revenue by cutting prices in exchange for drawing more fans. From what I can tell, the department has a revenue-first mentality. What I mean by this is that short term revenue loss in exchange for long-term fanbase building isn't that well received. At least that's the idea our group seemed to get especially since we were told mass ticket giveaways to elementary schools were a no-go and that they were looking for ways to boost revenue

HoopDreams

5:35p, 11/21/22

In reply to eastcoastcal

food trucks were great. at some point you get tired of the limited options of hamburger and hot dogs, although the new BBQ sandwiches they have (only) on the west side are good

but the asian and mexican food trucks were a big plus

thank you!

eastcoastcal said:
HoopDreams said:
sounds like your group did an amazing and valuable job

and thanks for the report

will they give you any updates what suggestions are implemented?

(by the way, there were 3 food trucks at the Big Game. not sure if that was from your suggestions)

would love to hear about your research of what other schools do!
Their feedback after our presentation was very positive. We had a specific section on 'short-term' implementations which were aimed at quick, low-cost implementations that could be enacted for the Stanford & UCLA games this season. Then later we gave more long-term solutions aimed at the next 3ish seasons and beyond.

Hope the food trucks were enjoyable, we specifically suggested food trucks & expanded options at Maxwell Field but unsure if these specific trucks were preplanned or a result of our suggestions. In any case it's good news because it means contractually they should be permitted beyond just the Stanford game. We were really clear that expanded food options were very popular among poll respondants.

Will put the competitor analysis in another reply below! Thanks for your nice comments

eastcoastcal

5:37p, 11/21/22

In reply to wifeisafurd

wifeisafurd said:
Good stuff EC (we got get you a nick name or initials).

I would be interested in what you guys viewed as happening in other Pac venues. The only ones we have not been to are the two Oregons. We were most impressed by Utah's student and young alum stuff (though copying the chants about BYU coeds may not be portable to Cal).

Haha lets go!! Thanks WIAF for the nice comment. I'll give more on the competitor analysis in my next reply but for Oregons--

One thing that particularly stands out is Oregon & OSUs department usage of low-cost material for easy branding. They hand out a ton of stuff like flags, schedules, towels, etc. to local restaurants, shops, and bars. Its free visability, easy to put up on a store window, and helps encapsulate the surrounding town like Eugene or Corvallis as "Oregon" or "Oregon State" territory. We advised the AD to go around Berkeley handing out flags & printable schedules to all the stores. It's fairly low cost and easy branding.

Oregon is very good at social media. Of course helped by the Phil Knight bankroll but generally excellent social media presence.

Finally OSU has a lot going for it but a big advantage is there's not as many entertainment options in Corvallis as there is in the bay. Which is why it is so important for the gameday experience to improve, because poor experience means fans will just go to another entertainment option since there are so many.

Utah in particular, as you mentioned, has a great pipeline of young alum & students. In fact we specifically researched this facet of Utah's ticketing structure. They have created and promoted the hell out of their young alumni package. Our proposed model in terms of pricing & market targets is really similar to what they've employed. It's reaping huge benefits for them

Thanks again for the kind reply

RayofLight

11:34p, 11/21/22

In reply to eastcoastcal

Quote:
Firstly, YES we absolutely hammered the importance of maintaining traditions. If the folks in the AD office didn't get it by the end of the presentation then there is no hope because this was absolutely one of the central points we tried to convey. Explained the importance of the band, how statistically per our survey data, nothing even comes close to being as popular as the band and traditions are for most alums.

I will make a side note here- we also brought up the idea of the sound system issues and piped-in stuff... I think it is a sore topic of discussion because we were told to deemphasize it and that many of the ppl in the department were a little sick of hearing about it and they understood people were unhappy. Take that as you will.

Suggested having a traditions seminar, having old yell leaders and knowledgeable alums come in and pass down their suggestions and expertise.

There is a DeCal that is run by the Rally Committee every semester on the history and traditions of the campus both athletic and academic. The training already exists.

One of the significant issues is that there are so few people in decision making places in Athletics (meaning Marketing) that predate 2011, or even 2006. Both years are not picked idly.

The move to the Giants ballpark in 2011 cratered traditions that most student groups and the department do not know about that were fondly cherished by the students of the time and of alumni. I don't think I've seen a student rolled up (either in derision or in celebration) since. Effective card stunts have also dropped off since that point (part of this is because card stunts were impossible with the seating that season, part of this is because the Rally Committee chooses to do complicated stunts that worked 15 years ago with an active student section and do not work now. The Cal Band used to tour Memorial Stadium during the 3rd quarter and play for each section of the stadium because they knew the drawbacks of where they sat and how they could not be heard. The Band was chastised and banned from doing this when football resumed in Memorial in 2012 and the current Band is a decade from knowing of such a tradition or whether it is worth the effort. So much institutional memory has been lost. There are still those who are in the Athletic Department from that time, but few of them are in places to make policy - they are all at the lower rungs of the administration.

The peak of Tedford's power and success marked in 2006 marked the beginning of the decline of student control of gameday entertainment. Tedford despised the amount of noise that both the student section and the Band made when the team was on offense, so much so that he would send coaches to silence both the Mic Men and the Band regularly. If you look at clips and film from 2006 backward, you can hear the yell leaders leading cheers and the Band playing songs regularly while on offense or on defense, at their own whim to celebrate a first down or a long score. Cheers were created on the fly, Mic Men had running conversations with the student section on the microphones the whole game, and did not let the energy, focus, or attention die. That died during Tedford's long tenure, and by the 2010s, Marketing was perfectly poised to use the dead airspace they saw as available and to script the students out of it.

If the Athletic Department is sick of hearing that no one wants to listen to their gimmicks, maybe they should quit it. The nature of the game feeling like paid programming with a side of football drives away young and old Blues alike. Remember, Young Alumni not only watched the slump of Cal football (which means they have less fond memories of winning), they also have less fond memories of silly, exciting, memorable moments orchestrated by the student section either, only exhausting ad-reads.

Restoring energy, excitement, and freedom for the students is what matters. There is absolutely no reason why the Mic Men cannot be speaking on the student section speakers during an ad-read. The students are near broke and don't have money to invest in whatever hair-brained scheme the ad is shoving anyways.

Spreading light and goodness,
Over all the West.

bearsandgiants

2:51a, 11/22/22

This is such an awesome topic and needs to be fixture on the main page. The point about the band really resonated. It's my favorite part of the cal game experience outside of the actual game. Yet we have almost no funding for it. We should double the size of the band and look to fund scholarships for some members through athletic dept donations. Making cal a tailgate school with an incredible band would go a long way toward reviving energy and tradition. Cal Band Great already, too! Great work on this whole thread. Go Bears!

JB was a Chieftain

6:35a, 11/22/22

Thanks for all your hard work!

DiabloWags

7:12a, 11/22/22

Thank You for your hard and illuminating work!

I've found that many of the "failures" that you have highlighted are endemic in the government sector. People are hired without any real experience in problem solving or an aptitude for being creative. As a result, the bureaucracy becomes embedded with a "Can't Do" attitude rather than "Can Do". I see this in my local (city) and county (animal shelter) on a regular basis.

It would certainly be helpful if people in the Marketing Department were Cal Alums. Until then, how can anyone lacking the culture of Cal . . . have the knowledge base with which to improve the Game Day experience?

"Cults don't end well. They really don't."

pasadenaorbust

7:33a, 11/22/22

I really liked the idea of a halftime flag football game (maybe brief) to have the frats/sorority gain interest to come and show up instead of staying in the houses. Really good idea I think.

rafterfan180

10:44a, 11/22/22

Rushinbear

11:27a, 11/22/22

In reply to CannonBlast

CannonBlast said:
When I was a student athletic marketing intern back at the turn of the century, many people in the Cal athletic department graduated or were working toward a masters in sports management at USF. Not sure if most of the folks that work in the AD come from some type of sports management program but I found that the things they learn at these programs are very formulaic and mechanical. I don't want to over generalize but I guess I am. If not USF, they are all from the same handful of sports management programs from across the country, and I guess similar to some other industries, is a relatively small world where friends, acquaintances, classmates, or fellow program alums hire one another.

You get the same unimaginative crap across all of college sports. An example is Learfield. Yeah, it's convenient and can cut down costs on AD overhead, but for an organization with a multi-million dollar budget, is that the right move to garner the best marketing, media or promotional opportunities? Do pro teams hire companies like Learfield (I'm actually asking, I have no idea).

Another is this weird notion that giving away free tickets cheapens the value of a Cal football ticket. If JK really thinks that, that's just another big fat strike against him. I guess we'll added it to his growing list of transgressions.

This backwards mentality is no different then when televised MLB baseball games became a thing and the owners at the time started to freak out that no one would attend games because you were basically giving it away for free. Why pay to go to games when you can watch it at home for free! News flash, that is not what happened. It did the opposite.

Your work on this project is impressive and inspiring. It is smart and solution-oriented. They could have hired a high-priced consulting firm and I don't know that they would have come up with a fraction of these ideas. Perhaps JK would only have the right comfort level with high-priced consultants and not smart and energetic students in his own backyard. Sorry...had to include that M bball dig in there.

I don't post much but I really appreciated the work you and your fellow students did here and I wanted to take the time to respond (I also wanted to vent). :-)

Maybe, one reason Cal doesn't have a sports management degree is that students like these would populate it and, in pursuing their studies, would show up the Ath Dept and put pressure on them to work hard and think harder.

Instead, we have another group of bureaucrats who are safely entrenched as long as they look like they're continuing the "tried and true" which isn't "true" anymore.

They sound like the elementary school janitor who stands in one place in the hallway, sweeping the same spot all day. He can't be criticized for not putting out effort...or fired.

rkt88edmo

12:55p, 11/22/22

In reply to RayofLight

RayofLight said:

The move to the Giants ballpark in 2011 cratered traditions that most student groups and the department do not know about that were fondly cherished by the students of the time and of alumni. I don't think I've seen a student rolled up (either in derision or in celebration) since. Effective card stunts have also dropped off since that point (part of this is because card stunts were impossible with the seating that season, part of this is because the Rally Committee chooses to do complicated stunts that worked 15 years ago with an active student section and do not work now. The Cal Band used to tour Memorial Stadium during the 3rd quarter and play for each section of the stadium because they knew the drawbacks of where they sat and how they could not be heard. The Band was chastised and banned from doing this when football resumed in Memorial in 2012 and the current Band is a decade from knowing of such a tradition or whether it is worth the effort. So much institutional memory has been lost. There are still those who are in the Athletic Department from that time, but few of them are in places to make policy - they are all at the lower rungs of the administration.

Agree, roll-up, band touring the stadium, and card stunts were all rocking in the mid-late 90s. Thanks ECC for sharing the info. Posters and schedule cards also used to be a pretty regular thing at least all up and down Telegraph, but probably could have been distrbuted more widely.

HighlandDutch

2:19p, 11/22/22

In reply to RayofLight

RayofLight said:

The peak of Tedford's power and success marked in 2006 marked the beginning of the decline of student control of gameday entertainment. Tedford despised the amount of noise that both the student section and the Band made when the team was on offense, so much so that he would send coaches to silence both the Mic Men and the Band regularly. If you look at clips and film from 2006 backward, you can hear the yell leaders leading cheers and the Band playing songs regularly while on offense or on defense, at their own whim to celebrate a first down or a long score. Cheers were created on the fly, Mic Men had running conversations with the student section on the microphones the whole game, and did not let the energy, focus, or attention die. That died during Tedford's long tenure, and by the 2010s, Marketing was perfectly poised to use the dead airspace they saw as available and to script the students out of it.

If the Athletic Department is sick of hearing that no one wants to listen to their gimmicks, maybe they should quit it. The nature of the game feeling like paid programming with a side of football drives away young and old Blues alike. Remember, Young Alumni not only watched the slump of Cal football (which means they have less fond memories of winning), they also have less fond memories of silly, exciting, memorable moments orchestrated by the student section either, only exhausting ad-reads.

I look back on the early Tedford years, say from 2004 to about 2006, as the peak of Cal football gameday experience (at least in my 40+ years as a fan). The teams were good, and attendance picked up beginning in 2004, so that the stadium was reasonably full for most games, even against lesser opponents. And, as you point out, Cal Mic Men and the Band hadn't been silenced yet.

It was around 2007 or so that I, and people I took to the games, noticed that non-stop commercials and inane contests at every timeout and commented that Cal games "were starting to be just like NBA games." We didn't mean that as a compliment then. Now, we'd never make that comparison, because NBA games are at least much better at all that stuff than Cal.

I think the commercial breaks at Cal games reached their nadir a few years back when Waste Management sponsored a contest to see who could sort recycling, composting and garbage most quickly. Did the powers that be honestly think anyone wanted to watch that? Or did they just not care because the AD was getting paid by Waste Management? Neither answer would speak very well of the people running gameday, and those are the only two possible answers I can think of.

The people who might become loyal Cal fans will do so in large part because of all the unique Cal traditions, not because we have BART races and stupid sing-alongs just like every other stadium. That's especially true if we can't field consistently winning teams, which the past 70 years or so should suggest is highly likely.

Many thanks to eastcoastcal and colleagues for their hard work on this project...I pray someone was listening.

MilleniaBear

11:42a, 11/23/22

In reply to HighlandDutch

God I hate the BART races.

As a former East Bay pop warner coach I can tell you there was zero outreach effort from Cal.

Also one observation about the give aways and idea of half price beer before kick-off. Those things kind of gut the tailgating experience. Having to shut down your tailgate an hour before kick-off just to get the the giveaway or get the cheap beer is tough. They might also consider eliminating or mitigating the pass in/ pass out prohibition. Thats right up there with the breathalyzer and actively dissuades attendance.

91Cal

2:17p, 11/23/22

In reply to MilleniaBear

MilleniaBear said:
God I hate the BART races.

As a former East Bay pop warner coach I can tell you there was zero outreach effort from Cal.

Also one observation about the give aways and idea of half price beer before kick-off. Those things kind of gut the tailgating experience. Having to shut down your tailgate an hour before kick-off just to get the the giveaway or get the cheap beer is tough. They might also consider eliminating or mitigating the pass in/ pass out prohibition. Thats right up there with the breathalyzer and actively dissuades attendance.

Really bummed to hear there's been zero outreach to even the youth football/Pop Warner community, but not surprised given ECC's post.

As far as your criticism of the half-price beer before kickoff, the promotion should especially work at Cal because there is constant criticism of the lack of tailgating. The point is to have folks in their seats when the team comes through the tunnel...or the very least at the opening kickoff. Henry's and Free House might complain, but those going to fraternities or already tailgating just have to get to the stadium in time to get a beer and get to their seat. Several folks in our tailgate and almost all visiting fans are in disbelief when we don't pack up in time to get to the game for kickoff.

Beer on sale starting half an hour ahead of kickoff ensures that no one intending to be at the game before kickoff would have to shut anything down much earlier than we want them to anyway.

There have been so many games where the student section doesn't hit its peak occupancy until the second quarter that this would be a perfect solution to get them in the stadium before kickoff.

;-) Alternate response: Cal has tailgating?

ddc_Cal

11:28p, 11/23/22

In reply to CannonBlast

CannonBlast said:
When I was a student athletic marketing intern back at the turn of the century, many people in the Cal athletic department graduated or were working toward a masters in sports management at USF. Not sure if most of the folks that work in the AD come from some type of sports management program but I found that the things they learn at these programs are very formulaic and mechanical. I don't want to over generalize but I guess I am. If not USF, they are all from the same handful of sports management programs from across the country, and I guess similar to some other industries, is a relatively small world where friends, acquaintances, classmates, or fellow program alums hire one another.

You get the same unimaginative crap across all of college sports. An example is Learfield. Yeah, it's convenient and can cut down costs on AD overhead, but for an organization with a multi-million dollar budget, is that the right move to garner the best marketing, media or promotional opportunities? Do pro teams hire companies like Learfield (I'm actually asking, I have no idea).

Another is this weird notion that giving away free tickets cheapens the value of a Cal football ticket. If JK really thinks that, that's just another big fat strike against him. I guess we'll added it to his growing list of transgressions.

This backwards mentality is no different then when televised MLB baseball games became a thing and the owners at the time started to freak out that no one would attend games because you were basically giving it away for free. Why pay to go to games when you can watch it at home for free! News flash, that is not what happened. It did the opposite.

Your work on this project is impressive and inspiring. It is smart and solution-oriented. They could have hired a high-priced consulting firm and I don't know that they would have come up with a fraction of these ideas. Perhaps JK would only have the right comfort level with high-priced consultants and not smart and energetic students in his own backyard. Sorry...had to include that M bball dig in there.

I don't post much but I really appreciated the work you and your fellow students did here and I wanted to take the time to respond (I also wanted to vent). :-)

============

I have wondered for a long, long time why the Cal admin NEVER seems to take advantage of the massive amount of intellectual capacity that exists on campus. And they could get it for almost free by giving credits, awards, perqs, etc. -- but of course that in itself would require thinking outside the box.