Monday, August 29, 2005

Cal vs. Stanford: Who will win the marketing game?

By Eric Young
San Francisco Business Times
Updated: 8:00 p.m. ET Aug. 28, 2005
With their football teams' performance heading in opposite directions, UC Berkeley and Stanford University have drawn up contrasting game plans to attract fans this season.
Cal, enjoying back-to-back bowl appearances and a preseason ranking among the country's top teams, has a relatively easy task. The football program is capitalizing on winning by scheduling more TV advertising to further expand its reach even as the school expects to sell a record-setting 40,000 season tickets. Stanford, on the other hand, is in a funk. The Cardinal, a Pacific-10 Conference flop in recent years, hopes to draw fans with the promise of a brighter future.
For both programs, stoking football enthusiasm now can pay big dividends in the future. Both Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley have new football stadiums on the drawing board. Both teams are going to want to fill the seats of their new gridiron palaces, which will help bring in money to boost their athletic departments' finances.
Of the two schools, Stanford is having a tougher time inciting pigskin passion. Attendance has been on the decline. Last year the team averaged 35,942 fans, down 30 percent from 2001, the last year the team had a winning record.
The team hopes to stir excitement among former Stanford students. For the first time the team is sending out a brochure to 170,000 Cardinal alumni, offering approximately 15 percent discounts on tickets. Cardinal athletic officials have also organized a telephone campaign and even had new football coach Walt Harris record a phone message urging support for the squad.
Stanford will hold the line on ticket prices this season, keeping the average general admission at $10.
While Stanford can't focus on the team's success, it can highlight the team's new planned home. The school said it will renovate Stanford Stadium into a 50,000-seat facility, one-third smaller than the current park. Stanford marketers are urging football fans to buy season tickets this year to guarantee seating priority when the new field is ready next year.
The school plans to begin building once the football season ends in November and have the stadium ready for the first game in 2006. The project is expected to cost $85 million, with several millions of dollars coming from major school donor John Arrillaga, a real estate mogul. But Stanford still needs to raise at least $25 million for the work.
On the bright side for Stanford, the team has an attractive schedule this season. The Cardinal hosts UCLA, Notre Dame and Cal, teams that consistently draw crowds of 45,000 or more fans.
Meanwhile, in Berkeley, Cal's football marketers are trying to maintain the team's newfound popularity. Golden Bear fans are snapping up season passes, which go for as much as $235. Cal said it expects to sell at least 40,000 season passes, breaking a school record set last year.
The team also is hiking individual ticket prices: Reserve tickets are $32, up 10 percent, and general admission tickets are $17, up 13 percent.
To reach a broader audience in the Bay Area, Cal has shifted money traditionally spent on billboards to TV ads. TV ads give the team "more reach and more frequency and the message is more dynamic," said Robert Hartman, who is in charge of marketing Cal's sports.
Once the season starts Sept. 5, the Cal football team for the first time will have its games broadcast on the radio across the state. Berkeley has several new deals with radio stations from the Oregon border to San Diego. The agreements are an outgrowth of Cal's decision to hand off marketing of its sports sponsorships to an outside company. Starting this year ISP Sports has rights to sell advertising, sponsorships and broadcast rights for Cal athletics in exchange for a guaranteed amount of cash each year.
Cal's stadium plans are moving slower than Stanford's. Cal has selected architects for the renovation of 73,300-seat Memorial Stadium. The university has raised more than $40 million for the stadium work, but has not said how much the project will cost or when it will complete the job.

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