The NHL Florida Panthers are working with Miami-based internet marketing agency Corey Consulting on a new ticketing campaign that "aims to capitalize on the team's popularity" in Finland, "in part because of the success of Finnish-born players on the team," according to Ian Thomas of SPORTSBUSINESS JOURNAL. Panthers Chief of Staff Sean McCaffrey said, "Anecdotally, we've always noticed Finnish groups showing up in the arena, or Finnish fans talking about the team on social media. With a number of fairly cheap and reliable flights from Finland into Fort Lauderdale also popping up, we wanted to see if we could help grow that fan base in Finland, as well as encourage them to travel here." Corey Consulting co-Founder Christopher Corey said that through analyzing search engine trends among Finland's 5.5 million residents, he found that the volume of searches for information about Panthers center Aleksander Barkov was "roughly the same as for the 320 million people in the U.S." McCaffrey said that the team's website has seen a "steady increase in the amount of Finnish web traffic, and has had more than 200 inbound leads from Finnish-based ticket buyers," leading to 50 sales averaging "about three to four tickets per purchase." The NHL has a Finnish-language website and has played games in the country as recently as '11. Corey said, "It's a little bit off the wall marketing to people 5,000 miles away across an ocean to come to a hockey game in Sunrise" (SPORTSBUSINESS JOURNAL, 10/30 issue).
