Northwestern Univ. last summer launched a new marketing campaign with the slogan “Chicago’s Big Ten Team," and "numbers prove the campaign has boosted interest and ticket sales,” according to Tina Akouris of the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES. NU had a 51% increase in football attendance from '09 to '10, the “second-highest jump nationwide among Division I schools behind Louisville.” The football ticket office started processing season-ticket orders “two days after the Wildcats lost the TicketCity Bowl to Texas Tech on Jan. 1.” Season-ticket sales in basketball “were up 25 percent, and season-ticket orders for the 2011-12 season have started trickling in well ahead of schedule.” NU “hadn’t had a division in its athletic department solely for marketing until this school year," months after it hired former AHL Chicago Wolves President and AFL Chicago Rush President & GM Mike Polisky as Senior Associate AD for External Affairs. Polisky: “Because of the advertising and the restructuring of the department, we have a new media-rights partner (Learfield Sports) that is spending 300 percent more with us than our previous one. Everything saw a bump (in revenue) because we started this.” NU AD Jim Phillips “credited a football team that finished 7-6 and made NU’s third consecutive bowl appearance and a men’s basketball team that won 20 games for a second consecutive season as boosts to the first-year campaign.” But Akouris wrote while the campaign “was successful from a marketing standpoint, an argument can be made that there was some oversaturation” (CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, 4/11).
