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World Series: ‘Uncharted waters’ good for Royals

Mere hours after extracting themselves from a massive sea of blue at the Kansas City Royals’ championship parade, Mike Bucek, the team’s vice president of marketing and business development, and many of his colleagues were back in their offices facing a simple, almost overwhelming question: How do we top 2015?

In many ways beyond the club’s first World Series title in 30 years, the Royals were baseball’s top business story all season long. The Royals set a franchise attendance record of 2.71 million, posted the largest attendance increase of any team, led all MLB clubs in local-market TV ratings, and sent the most starters to the All-Star Game in Cincinnati. The ridiculous local-market TV figures of a 60 rating and 80 share for the Royals’ clinching Game 5 were exclamation points on a powerful story happening all season long.

So what’s next?

The club has relatively little headroom for further attendance growth; Kauffman Stadium’s 37,903 capacity makes it one of MLB’s smallest ballparks. Even with standing-room tickets maxed out, the Royals’ effective limit for a season is about 3.1 million. And despite the current fan frenzy around the club, Kansas City’s notoriously fickle and occasionally violent summer weather makes it hard for club officials to envision a lengthy sellout streak along the lines of San Francisco, Boston or Philadelphia in recent years.

“We’re really in uncharted waters for this franchise,” Bucek said. “We were already at about 89 percent capacity for the season. What we want to do is get up into that elite level of clubs that regularly do 90 percent-plus every year, and we’re now obviously in a strong position to do so. But pushing to 3 million and beyond does still present real challenges given we don’t have a roof.”

Cozy Kauffman Stadium doesn’t offer the Royals much room to sell more tickets.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
Television and sponsorship, conversely, present greater opportunities for growth. Bucek said at least a further double-digit percentage growth in ratings in Fox Sports Kansas City beyond the 119 percent surge seen this year is likely. And the club is looking to fill open sponsorship categories in oil and gas, commercial real estate, tires, agriculture and home improvement, among others.

In another sign of the Royals’ quickly growing status as a desirable locale for corporate marketing, the club participated this season in local activations of national-level MLB sponsorship deals with Maytag and The Hartford.

“We’re additionally seeing some nice spinoff from the national partners, and I would expect that to continue and grow,” Bucek said.

MAPPING THE METS: The New York Mets know they are poised for a sizable bump in attendance next season coming off their first National League pennant in 15 years. And to do so, the club is looking to greatly expand the map.

Similar to what the Royals did a year ago in enlarging the power of their geographic footprint on the heels of a surprise rise to the 2014 World Series, the Mets are looking to use their deep playoff run to expand their areas of fan draw. The Mets’ landscape is much more complex, however; the club shares a market territory that includes the crosstown New York Yankees, three states, five city boroughs, and myriad traffic, public transit and bridge issues.

The Mets typically have drawn the majority of their fans from Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan in New York City, as well as Long Island and some parts of lower Westchester County. But thanks to the club’s newfound on-field success, team officials project that northern areas of Westchester and southwestern Connecticut, areas that traditionally have been Yankee strongholds, will be hotbeds of growth in 2016 for the Mets. The Connecticut areas are particularly of interest because they boast some of the wealthiest counties per capita in the entire U.S.

“We think we can really push our draw more north and northeast,” said Lou DePaoli, Mets executive vice president and chief revenue officer. “Even some further-out areas like Poughkeepsie, other parts of Dutchess and Putnam counties, are very much in play, particularly for weekends.”

The Mets will look to draw more fans to Citi Field from traditional Yankee strongholds.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
The Mets in 2015 drew 2.57 million to Citi Field, up 20 percent from last year, and the club’s highest draw since the ballpark’s debut season in 2009. Even before this season’s playoff run, DePaoli had been pushing a weekend-first sales strategy in which the club primarily sought to maximize its top-drawing dates such as summer weekends and marquee opponent games such as those with the Yankees before moving on to other dates on the calendar. That approach will continue next year, and well before the World Series, an average season-ticket price bump of 2.86 percent was imposed for the 2016 season. Renewals for 2016 began four months ago, before the club made its furious late-season run to the National League pennant.

The big question, though, is whether the Mets can return to an annual attendance of 3 million, a figure the club surpassed during the final three seasons at Shea Stadium and that first season at Citi Field before falling in 2012-14 to one of the weaker draws in the National League. More than 6,500 new deposits have been submitted thus far for 2016 season tickets, suggesting by itself a six-figure total of new ticket sales. The Mets are mining data from playoff ticket sales on StubHub, one of the key components of the league’s official relationship with the ticket resale marketplace, as a source of additional sales leads. Other more traditional offseason ticket sales elements, such as pick-your-seat days and the release of the promotional calendar, have yet to occur.

But DePaoli refused to guarantee reaching the 3 million mark next season.

“I’m not sure yet. That’s a big bump,” said DePaoli, who as a then-Florida Marlins employee in the late 1990s saw any shot of a halo effect from the 1997 World Series title fall apart in a matter of days when the roster was dismantled.

“But it’s not often you get the opportunity of a World Series, and we’re determined to make the most of this. There are a lot of people who became engaged with this team for the first time, or the first time in a long while, [that] we would like to move up the ladder,” he said.

MORE SPACE NEEDED: Temporary retail space was the name of the game for World Series merchandise sales at both Citi Field and Kauffman Stadium. A 7,000-square-foot tent outside Citi Field, strategically situated next to the entrance to the subway station serving the ballpark, represented a focal point of retail sales activity during Games 3-5 of the series. In Kansas City, Aramark installed a 2,500-square-foot temporary bump-out to the main Kauffman Stadium retail shop, a 25 percent increase from the additional space installed for the 2014 World Series. And in both markets, a 46-foot merchandise trailer stationed in the stadium parking lot served as an additional point-of-sale.

For Aramark, the extra space served as a boon for the first World Series since 2007 in which it served as the concessionaire for both the American League and National League teams. Game 3 at Citi Field on Oct. 30 in particular represented the single-best merchandise sales day ever for Aramark at any MLB event, and by extension, the Mets’ best merchandise sales day in franchise history. Beyond core items such as hats and T-shirts, programs were a hot seller, with 22,500 copies of the official World Series program selling during the three Citi Field games, representing roughly one for every six fans in attendance during the weekend.

The extra retail space also served to highlight some cultural differences between the two markets.

“In New York, the bags were filling more quickly. Definitely not as price sensitive. In Kansas City, it was a bit more shopping, and looking around,” said Carl Mittleman, president of Aramark Sports & Entertainment. “But it’s been an October to remember, being able to have both markets like this, and both have performed very strongly. And we have seen huge interest this year in some of the heavier items — outerwear, throws and blankets, wool hats, items like that.”

A-ROD TURNABOUT: Away from the Royals-Mets on-field drama, the World Series media also focused on New York Yankees designated hitter Alex Rodriguez. Hired by Fox Sports as a guest analyst for the 2015 MLB postseason after the Yankees’ elimination in the AL Wild Card game, Rodriguez won widespread rave reviews for his insight and on-camera poise. Even to veteran industry executives who have helped shepherd many other athletes into on-air roles, Rodriguez’s ability to immediately grasp the nuances of broadcasting was notable.

Alex Rodriguez (center), with Kevin Burkhardt (left) and Frank Thomas on the Fox Sports set
Photo by: FOX SPORTS
“We deal a lot with athletes who are used to being asked the questions throughout their playing careers, and then have to pivot when they go on air,” said Eric Shanks, Fox Sports president, chief operating officer and executive producer. “It’s a totally different thing to have to drive a conversation forward and be the one asking the questions, pushing the discussion. And that is what A-Rod has been able to do right away. He’s initiated conversation and shown a real curiosity that has been engaging.”

Houston Astros rookie shortstop Carlos Correa, whose prodigious on-field skills at the age of 21 have been compared to a young Rodriguez, won similar media raves. Correa worked Games 1-4 of the World Series as a social media correspondent for MLB.com, with specific reports including celebrity interviews, trips to Kansas City’s famed barbecue restaurants, and a visit with Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Andrew McCutchen, who received the Roberto Clemente Award before Game 3 in New York.

TABLET POWER: They weren’t leveraged as a marketing platform, so you had to use a telephoto lens to get a good look at them. But Apple iPads in MLB dugouts were still the biggest marketing news of the postseason.

Since Apple has always been reluctant to pay sponsorship fees, the pairing suggests a new hybrid deal being formulated, for which the playoffs were a soft launch.

Duly noted are the many existing Apple-MLB touch points: Apple had a large media buy during the postseason, and the MLB.com At Bat mobile application is a perennial top-grossing sports app, with the majority of its purchases happening on the iOS platform.

Noah Garden, MLB’s executive vice president of business, said the league hopes to have iPads in all MLB dugouts for the 2016 season, and the forthcoming release of the iPad Pro elevates the nearly 6-year-old device with a powerful new set of hardware capabilities.

“We have a long-standing relationship [with Apple], and our interest in integrating technology with the game started with replay and is continuing,” Garden said.

SPONSOR MATTERS: After a season in which MLB added insurance partners Esurance and The Hartford, replaced Firestone tires with Sumitomo’s Falken brand late in the year, and brought on Starwood Hotels, Garden was feeling nearly as ebullient as the fans in Kansas City. A unified marketing regime under new Commissioner Rob Manfred and Bob Bowman, president of business and media, showed a new willingness to cut short-term deals, like Maytag’s “official washer and dryer” status, which began in July and ran through the 2015 season, and the revival of former MLB sponsor Taco Bell’s “Steal a Base, Steal a Taco” promo for the World Series.

Renewals for this offseason include some large and important categories: banking, where Bank of America has been a sponsor since 2004; autos, with Chevrolet in the fold since 2005; wireless, with T-Mobile’s three-year pact signed in early 2013 expiring; and credit card, with MasterCard holding MLB rights since 1997.

“We’re feeling good about all of them, now that we’re able to bring all our assets to bear on every deal,” Garden said. “In years past, to break a new client in would require negotiations with three different entities [MLB, MLB Advanced Media and MLB Network], and it was difficult to finish one deal before you closed the others. … Now the speed in which we can negotiate is unprecedented.”

Generally, positive vibes are afoot regarding Chevy and T-Mobile, the latter of which was described by industry insiders as well past third base, but still lacking a more concrete commitment toward figuring out a ballpark communications system that was promised in the original 2013 deal but not fully realized.

T-Mobile would also like some assurances that if MLB cuts a deal with a telecommunications hardware brand, such as Apple or Samsung, the carrier would get a seat at the table with regard to activation plans.

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