Attendance & Alcohol

[goon]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

nope, that's SUU on the 21st.

Oh yeah. Thanks. So no beef bowl crowd to help attendance which often helps. Weather should be great compared to last week.

[Mr_Tibbs]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Based off of available seats for Saturday's game, the $8 experiment for getting fans in the stands is not working very well. East side has the vast majority of seats still available and there's a good selection available on the westside too.

It will take a monumental walkup crowd to generate 12,000 fans, maybe even 10,000.

Color me shocked...

In fairness, we don't know how many people actually saw/took advantage of the $8 promo. Instead, we'll have to see what the pricey $17 dollar tickets bring in for a crowd on Saturday. Anything below 12k at this point in the year, with good weather, would be extremely disappointing and concerning.

[CappinHard]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Color me shocked...

In fairness, we don't know how many people actually saw/took advantage of the $8 promo. Instead, we'll have to see what the pricey $17 dollar tickets bring in for a crowd on Saturday. Anything below 12k at this point in the year, with good weather, would be extremely disappointing and concerning.

Agreed on people not knowing. The handful of people I told had no idea, which is a problem. When the Gophers had their $10 ticket promo, I saw it multiple times on TV (twins games), twitter, and Facebook. Hopefully that new firm they hired can change things for SDSU in terms of a social media and advertising presence.

[thumper_76]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Agreed on people not knowing. The handful of people I told had no idea, which is a problem. When the Gophers had their $10 ticket promo, I saw it multiple times on TV (twins games), twitter, and Facebook. Hopefully that new firm they hired can change things for SDSU in terms of a social media and advertising presence.

Our advertising of these sort of things is awful IMO. It’s all internet based it seems, just like the rest of our games (from what I can see).

Another thing to take into account. Sioux Falls just got rocked, and there’s flooding and other issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people are having to use their Saturday to deal with clean up of this weeks events, unless my view of things from Fargo has grossly overstated what’s going on right now....


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[MontanaRabbit]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

unless my view of things from Fargo has grossly overstated what’s going on right now....


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I don't think it is. At least two dams have washed out. Montrose is under mandatory evacuations as well as evacuations in Madison. I suspect you're right that some will have other priorities because of the weather the past couple days.

[filbert]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Based off of available seats for Saturday's game, the $8 experiment for getting fans in the stands is not working very well. East side has the vast majority of seats still available and there's a good selection available on the westside too.

It will take a monumental walkup crowd to generate 12,000 fans, maybe even 10,000.

Growing the fan base is a lot more difficult than just lowering the ticket prices.

The advertising/promotions need to up their game bigtime, IMHO.

And, y'all seem to be going through a stretch of rough, nasty weather lately up there, that don't help at all.

[KUlawJack]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Agreed on people not knowing. The handful of people I told had no idea, which is a problem. When the Gophers had their $10 ticket promo, I saw it multiple times on TV (twins games), twitter, and Facebook. Hopefully that new firm they hired can change things for SDSU in terms of a social media and advertising presence.

Im disappointed we decided to do anything with Aspire. KU used them for some time and it was a complete disaster. Granted, KU football sucks right now, but Aspire did nothing to help with ticket sales. I’m skeptical at best about that company being involved in our ticket office.

[Nidaros]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Im disappointed we decided to do anything with Aspire. KU used them for some time and it was a complete disaster. Granted, KU football sucks right now, but Aspire did nothing to help with ticket sales. I’m skeptical at best about that company being involved in our ticket office.

Interesting testimony. They listed their successful customers, but not their failures.

[Jackedforlife]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Interesting testimony. They listed their successful customers, but not their failures.

I expect most do, like a HS kid and his HUDL highlights, it's all the good stuff. Always focus on the great stuff I guess. Hopefully during the discovery phase they talked about a failure or two and gave a summary of what mistakes were made, what they learned and how they'd correct it or do it over if they had the chance. If I was recruiting a player I'd ask to see a clip of his 5 or 10 plays where they failed, what they learned to show me they are capable of self analysis, open to critique and are coachable.

[Nidaros]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

I expect most do, like a HS kid and his HUDL highlights, it's all the good stuff. Always focus on the great stuff I guess. Hopefully during the discovery phase they talked about a failure or two and gave a summary of what mistakes were made, what they learned and how they'd correct it or do it over if they had the chance. If I was recruiting a player I'd ask to see a clip of his 5 or 10 plays where they failed, what they learned to show me they are capable of self analysis, open to critique and are coachable.

This is a much bigger issue than run of the mill recruiting choice. As KULaw mentioned KU football sucks and maybe unrepairable; but to screw up KU men’s basketball would be hard to do. I have no idea how KU .women’s basketball fares in tickets sales or if Aspire was involved or was Aspire hired for KU football only. According to the press release Aspire at SDSU will work on all revenue sports.. We will have to wait and see how they do at SDSU.

[Nidaros]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

I might add that Scott Brown told me Aspire will have two full time employees on campus running the SDSU ticket office.

[WestSideRabbit]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

I might add that Scott Brown told me Aspire will have two full time employees on campus running the SDSU ticket office.

Thats the biggest thing to me! The constant turnover* in the ticket office truly made it difficult to build momentum. It doesn't make me feel great to know that they didn't get much done at KU but hopefully that was an exception and not the standard.

*Please note I'm not blaming folks for leaving. SDSU athletics pays their support staff very poorly while demanding lots of weird hours.

[Nidaros]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Thats the biggest thing to me! The constant turnover* in the ticket office truly made it difficult to build momentum. It doesn't make me feel great to know that they didn't get much done at KU but hopefully that was an exception and not the standard.

*Please note I'm not blaming folks for leaving. SDSU athletics pays their support staff very poorly while demanding lots of weird hours.

Amen, I fully agree. I had questioned Scott for reasons of using outside services and he mentioned the turnover in the ticket office. Also questioned the role of Learfield and was told they more than doubled corporate sponsorship. So that has worked real well. Being a retired fed employee and fearing out sourcing, I just automatically question outserives. Sometimes they serve a very good purpose.

[filbert]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

Im disappointed we decided to do anything with Aspire. KU used them for some time and it was a complete disaster. Granted, KU football sucks right now, but Aspire did nothing to help with ticket sales. I’m skeptical at best about that company being involved in our ticket office.

I don't think the KU and SDSU situations in their respective markets are that similar. KU football has pretty much never been good (with a few brief exceptions) so getting non-die-hard fans to go to a KU football game is damn near impossible--especially with K-State sitting there a bit over an hour to the west, Nebraska sitting three hours north, and even Mizzou three hours east, not to mention the Chiefs. On the other hand, KU doesn't have to try very hard at all to sell men's basketball tickets.

SDSU has a market ready to be exploited for football I think, and is positioned to do it. But the "doing it" part of "exploiting the market" has IMHO been sorely lacking to this point.

[Mr_Tibbs]

Re: Attendance & Alcohol

I'm not sure if this is a good strategy or not, but it's worth noting that USD has implemented a very geographic approach to marketing for athletics this year. Supposedly, they've used their alumni network to designate alumni "ambassador" of sorts I every town with an hour of Vermillion to help promote USD athletics and encourage more fans from that town to attend games. While I don't know that something like that will work, I've think that there should be a more concerted effort to get alumni in certain areas to encourage more friends from their town to come to games. I also think we have a lot of advantages with the SDSU extension offices/4H/FFA that they don't have to do something along these lines with outreach and giveaways to families in every county. For example, I'd like to see some type of group started in pierre, with one of its primary focuses as getting jackrabbit fans from pierre to come to games. Designate 15 parking spaces in a tailgate lot as "Pierre only", make sure their tickets are together, and work with a gas station and restaurant in Huron to give them 15% off if they show their ticket after the game. And then repeat the process for Watertown, Mitchell, Aberdeen, Yankton, Rapid, and Sioux Falls. I think if people that are casual fans and/or haven't ever been to a game can be invited and encouraged to go by folks in their own town, the likelihood of them coming back for another game goes up. Things like carpooling, group tickets, etc. all become realistic if you have a group of 20 coming to the game from Pierre, vs trying to convnice people on an individual basis that they need to be at the game.