The “latest trend” in college sports is a “push to boost revenue by being dramatically more aggressive and sophisticated in sales and marketing activities,” according to a cover story by Steve Berkowitz of USA TODAY. UCF DeVos Sport Business Management Program Associate Dir Bill Sutton said that companies and consultants “are reshaping a college sports industry that ‘has a history of not being aggressive, letting people come to them.’" The “financial and competitive pressures that college sports programs have helped to create are colliding with a tough economy that, in some cases, has left colleges struggling to fill stadiums.” Such colleges' “increasing desperation to keep the revenue flowing has led them to create ties with a new generation of savvy entrepreneurs who have sports-management degrees and have made a specialty of increasingly aggressive marketing to devoted fans of college sports.” The idea of a college athletic department “hiring an outside company to handle at least some aspects of revenue-generating activity isn't totally new.” But proactive ticket-selling “is a new and potentially delicate enterprise for colleges.” The “potential windfall has led more than a dozen colleges to establish ties with marketing firms.” During the past year, “at least 20 of the 120” NCAA FBS schools “have gone into proactive sales, on their own or through an outsourcing deal.” Berkowitz writes the “limits on this seem only to be the imaginations of the schools and the capabilities, entrepreneurship and inventiveness of third parties.” Meanwhile, schools with “overwhelming ticket demand are leveraging it as never before in an effort to boost revenue.” Notre Dame, for example, is “varying football ticket prices by opponent for the first time this season.”
PROJECT DEVELOPMENT: Georgia Tech has hired The Aspire Group, which “specializes in selling tickets.” Even with Aspire, Georgia Tech Associate AD for PR Wayne Hogan said that the program's football season-ticket sales “have decreased from 26,308 in 2009 to 22,848 so far in 2011.” But Hogan added because the firm seeks only new sales -- not renewals -- it has "turned what would have been a monumental decline into a moderate decline." Georgia Tech's contract with Aspire “includes terms under which Aspire employees can be used to make fundraising calls for the athletic program,” although Hogan said that “that had not yet occurred” (USA TODAY, 8/5).
BACK TO CAMPUS: In North Carolina, Richard Craver profiled IMG and reported IMG College has partnerships "with more than 90 universities," and the company has "about 700 people nationwide, mostly serving in 100 offices near their college partners." IMG College indicated that since IMG Worldwide bought ISP Sports in ’10, “it has added nearly 50 full-time jobs” to its operations in Winston-Salem, N.C., “expanding its workforce to nearly 120” (WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL, 8/4).
