A quick story from last game: I park a couple of blocks from the Dome and on the way to the last home game, we passed a couple watering their front garden. The woman said "Hi, enjoy the game."

She lived a block from the stadium, and knew there was a game on (probably from seeing people walk past).

I had two spare tickets, so I offered both to them. They said that they'd never been to a game before (despite living practically next door to the stadium!). They showed up in the seats next to mine about 10 minutes after we'd got in there, really got into it during the game (applauding, smiling, etc) and afterwards said that they really enjoyed it.

Hopefully they'll come to another game in the future, or tell friends about the game. The vibe, even with the less-than-full crowd, was great in the second half so I don't know how anyone could have left with an unfavourable impression.

I'm interested to know if the club has tried to build some rapport with people in the areas immediately surrounding the Dome. Send them out a schedule, invite them to a game (discounted ticket, or send them a food voucher that can only be used if they buy tickets?), etc. Obviously parking won't be an issue for them.

Anyway, what I took away from it is that there are going to be a number of people who've never been to a game or necessarily followed the sport, but are open to new things, have time/money available, and could become fans of the club. We just have to find them!

I do think, though, that these sorts of people wouldn't go out and buy a ticket without being made an offer, or taken along to see a game. You definitely can't wait for them to look up the website or call Venuetix unprovoked.

Nice gesture Isaac.

Isnt the job of the marketing department to market the game to new people and incentivise them to come along if need be??

Maybe they are too busy bringing in new sponsors to try this?!?!?!?!?

Panther, do you go to the games?

Who here does/doesn't?

I rarely go, mainly due to a young family but also costs of tickets. I am more of a AFL fan so financially supporting both codes is difficult.

I don't go although I still have season tickets someone else has the use of them for this season so they are still being used.

I don't go for a variety of reasons one of which is personally after so many years of involvement at various levels I'm bored with the game at that level as a spectator. I dislike crowds intensely and having to park my car weave through dawdling people, line up for drinks, foods, toilet doesn't not thrill me one bit.

I know you will all say its the excitement of the crowd etc but I'm over it. Again personally I think we have seen the best of basketball between 85-95 and the product on the floor is not as good.

It would take a lot at the moment to get me to go back to NBL as a spectator and it is not just the pricing structure.

I try to get to most games, depends who they're playing. I prefer to see the higher quality games like most likely the next one.

Anonymous -- what would make you consider buying tickets, or becoming a season ticket holder?

Is there a magic, accessible price for season tickets that would make you snap them up? i.e., I'd say that at $195, I'd grab two if I didn't already have an arrangement.

I rarely go anymore, the price for a concession ticket is reachable but not something I could afford to add in with all my other expenses - plus I always compare prices to the CHEAP CHEAP tickets at Adelaide United games.

splash some tickets around, run some competitions / give aways - pump up the public

they have done it before - do it again

give some juniors freebees

quite easy for people who get free tickets??? not everyone likes paying close to $30 per person and once you bring families into it, tends to get a bit hefty especially because you can see an afl game as a student for close to $11 or $12. Perth have a good thing going and fill there place(given it is smaller but still) they have enough people in the marketing and public relations department bout time they did something.

I once coached a team which not only got free tickets (+1 parent per child got in at a discounted price), but also got to play at half time. Afterwards got awarded with medals to remember the occasion. They were impressed and I know two families bought season tickets the following season.

Regarding the Perth situation, I talked to Oscar and Todd Gower last night and both said that the atmosphere in Perth was awesome. Smaller venue (3,000 or so?), but the announcer was pumping them up and they had a couple of really noisy cheersquads.

Everything I'm hearing from over there says that the Wildcats are doing a great job with their fans. (Whether that translates to an end of year profit, or sustained sales remains to be seen.)

I heard Brett Maher on KG & Cornesy last night talking about the crowd numbers and he blamed it on the poor performance from last year as a catalyst but when pushed further, he said "there are other circumstances involved that I do not want to go into right now" or something to that effect. Thought that was rather interesting...

It's going to be a mixture of both things, bad performance (in Adelaide fans eyes) and in some ways bad marketing. You've got two groups of fans, those who are knowledgable fans who will be disappointed if the sixers do anything but win a championship and those who are maybe less knowledgable or hardly ever go that we need to create an atmosphere where they want to come back. Majority of times people say to me, "I went and saw the sixers play the other night, it was a great atmosphere." That keeps people coming back. Whether they give away a few more tickets through radio, on air and through the promo guys on the road or set promo's up with sponsors where they can buy a number of tickets from them at a discounted price and when a client of theirs either buys something or uses their services give them a ticket.
Having empty seats in the crowd does no one any favours. It doesn't make the sixers anymore money, it doesn't help the atmosphere and it certainly doesn't help the sixers.
No one likes giving away anything for nothing but if it brings back people it could only be good for the club.

yep heard the same interview, and it was good as they are really pushing BASA about it now. Mark Aiston(sp?) was talking about it too and they are going to try and get someone from BASA to talk about it. KG did mention the new family ticket thing but i think its great that they are making a fuss now and are trying to force their hand a little, even if the crowds cant. The product as a whole is good, (although half time is shit) its really just the price holding it back.

I believe people expect more these days, they expect a higher quality spectacle, why watch the SANFL when you can go to the AFL etc etc, people are probably investing in Foxtel and watching the NBA for example.

As with everything is Cyclic, Basketball was huge in the 90's.

Now its almost dead, its not very exciting, there are no characters, and all the great local talent are making the $$$ in Europe or even Asia.

Basketball is taking the tragic road Soccer has followed for several years, I dont think anything can help it other than huge cash investments, and maybe Michael Jordan putting on a Sixers jersey.

People either wanna see the raw talent (high school, collage, state league)or the best NBA, unfortunately the middle is just boring.

This topic would have been thrashed out within NBL ranks. It's really hard as they need to keep a salary cap so low in place to make sure the not so rich clubs can survive yet it would be great if we could lift it to retain players from going overseas and perhaps entice better imports over here. It's a hard battle to win, I think that's why they introduced the points system but they has it's flaws as well.

I have 2 season tickets, but couldn't go to the Cairns game. I couldn't even give those tickets away for that night.
Granted I only knew a couple of days before tha we definitely couldn't go, but I was very surprised that a number of people involved in Basketball didn't even want Freebees!!

we have done the same with the entertainment book, and luckily my hubbie gets the occasional freebies fromhis work too, so we too have made it to every game and only had to buy 2 tickets (and price of tickets is an issue for us as a family) as for a comment about perths awesome cheersquad, what has happened to the adelaide squad. we sat about 3 rows behind the "squad" which appeared to consist of about 10 people who was joined by the trumpeter who played the national anthem the 4 or 5 girls that were in front of us were trying their hardest to start up the cheers, but people just don't seem to catch their enthusiasm (possibly because so few inthe squad don't make enough noise to be heard throughout the stadium. the squad last year was huge from memory, what has happened?

My situation is the opposite to the above posts. I did not miss a single game last season, nor have I missed any this season. To take it further, I went to 6 away games last season and 1 this season with another to come at the end of the year. I guess either the passion is there or is not there. You hear a lot of excuses about the price of tickets, but people will still spend money on other things such as smoking, gambling, a night at the pub, the movies, other sports etc. I do not drink nor smoke nor gamble nor follow other sports so I guess the price of a season ticket is not an issue. The shortage of money is not always a problem, but the way you spend it is. I cannot understand how people can regularly show an interest in reading and posting on this website and yet are not enticed into going to a game. These people are also very well educated in the sport and know whats going on with the team. You would think that this in itself would encourage them to go to games. For those on a limited income, ie students, when you have a birthday party and people ask you what you want, ask for a ticket to the basketball. If you have 16 people at your party and each buy you a ticket, you can see every game. Same goes for Christmas presents. Just a thought.

My family has 6 season tickets... we have been either sponsors or season ticket holders since about 1997. The only year we didnt have tickets was last yr. We go to every game or give the tickets away if we cant make it. I think there has to be a group of at least 30-40 LOUD people sitting together at a game, to really get the crowd involved.

Sixers Gift Registry, starting soon! ;)

Not every fan is a die hard supporter unfortunately. I know of only a handful personally who I'd classify as that level of fan.

There's also "perception of value" coming into play for some people, I would guess. Every week, I go to The Astor for "$10 Tuesday" and to catch up with friends and it's an easy decision to make personally and it's easy to convince others to come along because the perception of value is so high -- a decent scotch fillet or other meal for $10 is hard to turn down.

Additionally, it's a lot easier to impulsively and incrementally spend $4-5 on a beer (and then another, and another) at the pub than it is to impulsively spend $25-30 on a ticket to the basketball.

There's a lot of competition for your money these days -- forking out for general utilities, plus mobile phone, plus ADSL, plus Foxtel, going out, etc. You know the sort of marketing that these companies are throwing at people (Optus, Virgin, Telstra, and so on) - in one sense, that's what sports entertainment is up against at the moment. Not everyone plans their expenses ahead of time, nor can a basketball club expect them to do so.

Finally, I do wonder if there is some low stigma attached to basketball - that it is "below" AFL or that it's for a certain type of people only. As others have posted, it can be tough to even give away a spare ticket sometimes.

If anyone has spare tickets that they can't give away, Anonymous is always on the scrounge. Let him have it as I'm sure it will be put to good use. And no I am not from South.

I haven't been to a game for a long time.
I have great memories of the stadium atmosphere during finals in the past, one particular final springs to mind when Rob Rose was playing (think he scored 49, we either lost the game or the series but the atmosphere was huge), however in the regular season since those days, I got bored with the same ol crap music and sock giveaways....they need to do something different to create more hype....kinda like the old chicago stadium in the early nineties (not that i was there, referring to video footage).

I have to admit that my days of basketball don't quite go back that far so I can't compare then to now. The sock giveaways and lousy half time entertainment however dont bother me as I am only there for one reason and I get that every time. I wish I had discovered basketball back in that era as a lot of good comments have been made about the quality and excitement of those games.

In relation to a few suggestions about free tickets.....management has tried giving away free tickets to each of the local district clubs, and they never got used!!

I tend to agree with one of Isaac's theories that we need to make going to a basketball game an "event", rather than just killing a few hours on a saturday night.

Improve the marketing, where budget constraints allow, maybe stop chasing the big end corporate dollar for a while (because that seems to be a viscious circle, there always seem to be a couple of new corportate boxes each season), and focus on grassroots.

It's good to see the crowds slowly increasing again, and I know the general media perception, both here in Adelaide and nationally is that the league is back on its way up, and we are trying the best we can to get good news out there.

I had a meeting with 36ers management a month ago, where I was promised to receive press releases, so I could help them get some FREE PR out there. Haven't received one release.

I have also heard that people in the upper echelons of the 6ers admin also beleive that the prices are too high, and there are concerns over the public backlash there seem to be regarding ticket prices.

Maybe, we need to force some of the supply/demand economic rules.

Some rings the Dome a week out, asking for 4 seats...make it sound like they are hard to get. Obviously there are Fair Trading laws that need to be adhered to, but surely some "creative" marketing could be done to generate demand on what is perceived to be hard to get tickets.

Think about it - 20/20 Cricket - which goes for 2 hours longer then a basketball match would - highest ticket price is $11.70 for a one-off, for a GA adult and members (ie season ticket holders) are in for FREE.

Adelaide Utd, I know I go about it, but cheap!! AFL is cheaper, National Netball is cheaper, Cricket I can get a $60 (I think cant remember researched a month ago) ticket for 5 DAYS action....

Is the BASA debt THAT big of a liability!?! Surely corporate sponsorship can't do SOMETHING about it!?

Libertine -- agree.

Yogee -- on the free tickets, they gave out 20k, and maybe 40% or something were used. Fair enough. That doesn't say it's an entirely bad tactic; it also says that they're not valued highly enough (i.e., people aren't dying to go), and that could be addressed. Think about those Seinfeld episodes where one of the characters has tickets to a Knicks game and everyone wants to go along...

You've suggested before I'm sure of getting SA B-grade celebs in there, and getting photos of it in the press -- easy idea and I don't know why it hasn't been done to death. Check out the NBA site -- this week there've been photos of Victoria's Secret girls at games, Usher, Nelly, Kournikova, etc.

Even get photos of fans. Wouldn't be hard to get more interesting social pics than some of the corporate presentation stuff that makes The Advertiser sometimes.

you forget we are basically a one newspaper town....

I don't dispute that fact, but I'd like to know how that impacts inviting minor celebs to games and publicising the fact that they were there. Adelaide Confidential will always need content. The social pages will always want pictures more interesting than some boring corporate event.

They're printing stuff about Crows' facial hair for goodness sake!

I've said this before: take photos of fans in the crowd. Put them up after games on the Sixers website. Have people return there to see if they were featured ("If you're circled, drop in to pick up your free t-shirt.") On the page of fan photos, promo the hell out of tickets and merchandise. Or sponsors.

Easy and free to do.

Oh, and the other thing -- use the newsletter system built into the site to contact fans a couple of times a week with a game write-up, a game preview, news, a promo, whatever. I subscribed and I've never received a thing.

unfortunately people are interested the crows facial hair or lack of it. basketball is a minority sport i often get the melbourne herald and some days with some 15-20 pages of sport you will be lucky to find a small article on basketball

A lot of people aren't even aware that basketball can be as exciting as it is. If free tickets are given out by the club and they are not used, then its an education issue. Find a way to get people there for the first time and many will come back. I have introduced several new people to the sport both here and interstate. These are people who have never been and were very pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was. I have no doubt that these people will go again. When the atmosphere is great with the crowd cheering and making a lot of noise, it is very contagious and even people going for the first time will get caught up in that excitement. Getting them there is the first hurdle to overcome. If the club is giving away so many free tickets, why not give them to people who want to go. From the posts on this topic and other topics regarding ticket prices, it is obvious that many would take advantage of them. They should advertise on the official website that there are so many free tickets up for grabs for the next game and first come, first serve. They could be tickets for the upper perimeter that now looks quite empty.

All true, but people on here that are willing to go if tickets are free aren't the ideal candidates. They're aware of the basketball, they know what it's like. They may well wait for more free tickets rather than end up buying their own. These people appear to not be going because they find it boring or too expensive.

The education issue needs to be addressed, and I have suggested taking a projector/bigscreen to shopping centres and showing people what it's like. Run a stunt testing to the noise level of a game compared to football, etc. People see AFL games and know what they're like from TV, but the same can't be said regarding basketball -- people who've not been don't know where the stadium is and its capacity, what crowds are like, about parking, about what happens on game nights.

The NBA is a largely successful model. Celebrities go, there are waiting lists for season tickets and so on. Ideas should be shamelessly borrowed from everything they do. Visit an NBA team site and look at their pages about game nights and the various competitions and prizes that go on. Would be absolutely trivial to do that here -- what happens at half-time, the girls bringing out the slingshot, something about the mascot, what kind of music is played, what food and drinks are on offer, etc.

One of the ideal things the club should be doing is getting a stand at the Royal Show each year.

They could actually use this as their official "launching pad" for the season, given the Show is always on from last Friday in August, about 1 1/2 months before season start.

Get players down there to meet the fans, have heaps of posters, give aways, and as Isaac has mentined, show some of the last season games / championship wins on a big screen.

Do season ticket sign ups on the spot. Give special discounts for those who sign up there. Promote the web site. PROMOTE THE LIGHTNING AS WELL.

Whilst we complain about lack of marketing for the NBL, there is almost NONE at all for WNBL at the moment. Get both teams right up there in peoples minds.

Unfortunately all the morning talk shows on TV are national now. When we used to have like AM Adelaide etc, that could have been a great marketing tool as well.

So many ideas.....it woould be great for the marketing team to actually pick up and run with a couple of these.

Keeping it going...

I have a fair few more ideas that I've never posted. Here's a couple.

The Sixers and club staff get given movie tickets to previews fairly frequently (usually from Academy in Hindmarsh Sq). Formalise it a little more by getting a double pass for a fan as well, and get them to put a review up on the Sixers with some review points/comments from the players too. Have a small box on the Sixers site with session times as co-branded marketing. Make it relevant to the site by having photos of players at the cinema with other fans; pitch it as an event.

Do this in exchange for cinema advertising. Cinema ads are on a huge screen with quality sound. What better place to showcase the atmosphere of games? If on a budget, use a still/sliding set of photographs with audio -- production costs would be virtually nothing.


Also, feature the shoes worn by each player within their profiles online. "Brett Maher wears XX YYY; get them for $189 at ZZ". Trade exposure with Footlocker or Rebel Sports or something to feature their price for the shoe and list someone they can go and see for a specialised fitting. Give away a Sixers hat with each pair of basketball shoes sold from that store and from that referral (if you've ever bought a hat in Asia, you know they don't cost very much at all to produce ($5), yet the quality is great).

i have a young family, but my partner and i get to most games - this is our ninth season as season ticket holders and we still love it - the dusty/willie/brett combo is great to watch and its great to see oscar and jacob coming on

i'm taking my two little girls for the first time on sunday and i hope they love it - i take them to afternoon lightning games whenever i can

the price increase in recent times has made it difficult, but we just can't keep away

Hi Folks,

Just my two cents worth on this topic&

There is a definite balancing act with relation to devoting energies to chasing corporate dollars or increasing overall patronage/crowd numbers through marketing/advertising campaigns. It is not impossible to both simultaneously, however, if you have a small staff like the Sales & Marketing department of the 36ers, it can be difficult to devote time to both and so one usually suffers over the other.

Corporate packages; including pre match hospitality, suite hire and signage, usually give an organisation a higher margin then general tickets sales e.g. A single 36ers Suite may bring in a profit of $1 - 2K profit for a game, which if you sold them all out for a single game would be about $10 - 15K. That's equivalent getting 400 - 500 people to buy general admission tickets. As mentioned before, if you have a small team of workers then you may have to make a choice between investing time in 'higher end' and 'lower end' sales and advertising and with the figures above it seems like a wise choice to go with the Corporate Sales that yield a greater return, but suffer with smaller overall crowds to the games.

HOWEVER...The catch 22 is that the bigger the crowds the better the atmosphere and the more people want to come to your games, including the corporate crowd. The 36ers are not like the Power or the Crows, were you have a vast supply of die hard wealthy corporates who will go to a game regardless of a) how the team is doing or b) how big the crowd is. The corporate crowd in sport outside of your core group of devoted fans is quite transient; people want entertainment and want the buzz of a big crowd and will soon leave unless they are getting their needs met. If there isn't a decent crowd then its harder to sell out your boxes and suites, which puts pressure on your department to make budget, which means you are looking for 'high income earners' to get quick hits to your bottom line, which means you chase more corporate $$ and neglect the need for 'bums on seats' promotions and so on, and so on... It's a negative spiral!

As Libertine routinely mentions, the people who have done the best 'juggling act' with limited recourses at hand are Adelaide United, who managed to pack out the stadiums AND sell out their Corporate boxes (although they have had some support from a 'die hard' supporter base as a large section of the Adelaide European community threw their support behind the team but not as much compared with the Power or the Crows). They figured that you build a huge atmosphere from game one (they gave out a ton of comp tickets to the first game and then slowly weaned off the supply of these comps to the general public as more people purchased tickets to come back for more excitement), and both the Corporate businessman/woman and the 'Average Joe' will be happy. It is this model I think needs to be studied and implemented at the 36ers with minor modifications to suit basketball.

(I am not a huge fan of giving out a massive amount of free tickets as it devalues them to people who are willing to pay for them. Comps should be given out in targeted campaigns to a captured market that have a high likelihood of bringing in business afterwards - not just handed out from the back of a radio station van to a bunch of people who are just their to get anything for free that they can get their hands on. Maybe every know district U/10 player should get a double pass to a game so that the 36ers can capture these young fans early and having them begging Mum and Dad to bring them back for years to come!).

There have been a lot of terrific ideas from Isaac and the many forum posters in the past few months. I think all of them have merit and I hope that someone in the know does a feasibility study on them&maybe even ask for some of us hoops fans to help implement them.

From my perspective I think an improved ticket pricing structure that encourages fans to bring friends to the games and makes it attractive for groups (i.e. Basketball teams) to come to the game would be an excellent way of building crowds and would not require a great deal of marketing/advertising dollars.

The philosophy I would use would be "The more you bring, the less you pay', with prices reducing on a sliding scale the greater number that you purchase at a time. For example, one ticket may be $25 on its owns, but buy 2 tickets and the cost comes down to $20, and so on until you have a group of 10 paying say $8 a ticket. I know a lot of district teams would get together and make a night of it of they could buy their tickets all together for that smaller price, and by having more people in the stadium their would be positive effects on other other revenue streams i.e. Merchandise sales, Canteen Sales.

They also need to be more community minded to improve their image. Dropping the prices for pensioners, students and children is a great start (maybe a $10 ticket for upper sections of the stadium), plus offering a family ticket that again reduces in price the more people are bought on it. The more you help out the 'Aussie battler' the better press you will recieve from Boti, KG & Cornsey etc

Just my thoughts. Feel free to comment.

Cheers

Great post from someone with the experience to back it up.

As I mentioned, I go to The Astor on Tuesday nights for "$10 Tuesday". All of our friends go. I tell everyone about it and look forward to it because it's such a great positive night, and I attribute a lot of that to the perception of value.

If cheaper tickets were available, I think people would be a lot more positive about the games. $15 above the concourse. 10 for $100. $75 for a family, however many children you've got -- that would definitely get in the papers (would need to verify though)!

Jesus Liam was that the second edition of war and peace??? ;)

Just as a note re the Adelaide United i noticed the couple of games i went to last year was that all the boxes were taken up by companies related to the building industry. Engineers, conveyancers, plumbers, tool supliers etc all had signage.

Intresting too is the income source for the man who owns the team....the building industry!!

I would imagine that Pickard would have that much clought that if you wanted to do business with him you would almost certainly have to buy a box to the soccer.

On a related note, Oscar said of the Sixers pool night that one/some of the groups were from a trucking company (I think). They said that they weren't interested in formal functions as a corporate outing, but for future events like a pool night, they could get lots of colleagues along as it was much more their style.

Maybe there could be more diversity in the promotional calendar beyond things like the MVP Dinner, Golf Day and so on. Can't immediately think of what those extra events would be off the top of my head. BBQ? Darts even? Haha.

Strip club??

Cricket and BBQ in the park lands....

Yeah sorry about that Panther. Just wanted to be thorough :)

I've got a contact whose Dad is close to Pickard....basically he called in alot of favours to make Adelaide Utd successful. He also has muchos corporate power! One example:

They were driving home and he called up the flag place to put in an order of Adelaide Utd flags at about 11am, for the game that night. They told him it would probably take a week they could get them to him the next, by the Friday. He told them it was Gordan Pickard and someone would be picking them up at 3:30 that afternoon - they were ready at 2pm.

Basketball just needs someone with the corporate sponsors and business know how.....Rob Gerrard was that man, but obviously can't provide anymore, right? Who owns Distinctive Homes? ;)

When I was a youngster, doing a bit of a fundraiser once. This nice ferrari pulls up at the lights and someone gets the bright idea to approach the ferrari for a car wash. The guy in the ferrari (Gordon Pickard) says no I have to go somewhere but here is $500 and proceeds to give the guy $500 out of his wallet towards the team uniforms!

firstly change the name back to the powerhouse. the dome is such a bad boring name. tix prices cost too much. they need to do more deals etc. 2 4 1 thingys. pump up the sixers with tv exposure not meaning actual games but highlights stuff that would wet the appetites of tv viewers.

why dont they have the under 12s or under 14s play at half time like they used to and give them free tickets. i played in one of those games once and it really got the crowd going for the second half. they should also make the tickets a bit cheaper. i mean i went to a game earlier this season and it cost me a concession $26.50 just to go in anmd watch. They could even do what they did one home game i was at and do the good old halftime shootout. the one where they start at the foul line and work there way back until they get to the half way line for a shot. come on guys we dont want to have to get rid of the 6ers do we?