John MacKinnon
Edmonton Journal
The Edmonton Eskimos are going to punch up the game-day entertainment package so they can attract more fans to fewer, but wider and far cushier seats at Commonwealth Stadium this CFL season.
So says the club’s CEO, Len Rhodes, a brand management professional, who joined the football franchise last fall after serving as a senior executive with Reebok-CCM for several years.
On Tuesday, Rhodes outlined the Eskimos “Unleash It” marketing campaign, which will feature those long-awaited modern seats – complete with cupholders – new home and away jerseys, and the deployment of a $250,000 boost to the club’s existing $87,000 budget for the a season’s worth of game-day presentation.
“Ten dates in a year is something that can be viewed as a happening,” Rhodes said at the club’s kickoff luncheon. “And we want to make that the best place to be in Edmonton.”
Rhodes has pledged to be more transparent about many aspects of the communityowned club’s fashion of operating, such as its season-ticket base, which sat at 22,000 last season. Including suite holders, the base bumps up to 25,000. Walk-up sales lifted the club’s per-game average attendance to 34,000 in 2011.
But in 58,000-seat Commonwealth Stadium, the largest average gate in the CFL can look a bit scattered, something Rhodes is intent on changing.
The $12 million cost of installing the modern seats, a project started on former president and CEO Rick LeLacheur’s watch, will be borne by the City of Edmonton, the Eskimos and a five per-cent ticket surcharge on all events at Commonwealth.
“In terms of numbers, I want the stadium full,” Rhodes said. “I won’t be happy until we really fill that stadium.
“But I don’t want to get caught up on numbers, I want to talk about fans coming out saying, this is the place to be.
“Let’s say, 40,000 is a nice number to start with as an average, and be the pride of the league.”
With the newer, wider seats, to be installed incrementally over the next two seasons, the capacity will dip by about 6,000 to 52,000, Rhodes said. But by making Commonwealth comfier, the hope is to enhance the fan experience.
To that end, each of the club’s 10 dates (nine regularseason games and one preseason date) will be themed. The 2012 calendar will include Ladies Night, Military Appreciation Night, Country Night, and Pinktoberfest, a hybrid affair that combines a fall beer fest with the CFLwide Pink campaign for Breast Cancer Awareness.
“Can it be better? Yeah, and I think the learning was we can do more in making sure that, in and around football, halftime, pre-game, all the little details, we can ramp it up a bit and make it a little more entertaining,” Rhodes said.
That will start, game-in, game-out, with 200 fans holding a massive, 75 by 150-foot Canadian flag on the playing field during the singing of O Canada before each game, but also include pre-and postgame festivals at the completed field house to foster a party atmosphere every game.
Finally, what drives the fan experience, in any sport, is the on-field product. On that score, head coach Kavis Reed said the formula is simple.
“It’s one thing to say we want an exciting brand of football. I’m going to go so far as to say, we just want a winning brand of football.
“We want the Edmonton Eskimos to be (at a level) that when people walk into that stadium, there’s an expectation that we’re going to play solid football and we’re going to win the football game.
“That’s the biggest thing. And that’s the biggest way that we can support the efforts of our marketing guys and our president is to win football games.”
edmontonjournal.com
