Hello again readers, I'm back again with another weekly update and considering today is the 45th Superbowl, I decided to post this update a little bit earlier than usual. Which is strange because I don't watch many football games but for some reason I will be very interested in the NFL final between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. How could this be? And why isn't the Stanly Cup Final as exciting as the Super Bowl?
As most people know, the Super Bowl is one of the largest marketing and promotional events of the year, with millions of Americans and many other people around the world tuning in to watch the game. The excitement of the event spreads like wild fire throughout America, with people spending hundreds of dollars on food and drinks, as well as pre-game coverage beginning at 6 hours before the first kick. The closest thing the NHL has to the Super Bowl is the annual Winter Classic but they aren't even close in marketing magnitude. The average advertiser will pay $3 million for 30 seconds of air time, allowing advertisers to be very creative in using their time to their advantage. Half the fun of watching the Super Bowl is the commercials, which is why many people tune into the game.
The NHL is by far the smallest of the 4 major sports in North America as far as revenue is concerned, but yet the sport of hockey is probably the most exciting of the 4. It combines the speed of basketball, the hitting of football and the skill of baseball and puts them all together on a sheet of ice and the result is a sport where any team can win on any night and every game is exciting. What's not to like about hockey? But the World Series, the NBA finals and the Super Bowl, draw way more attention than the Stanly Cup final in the United States and this forces advertisers to side with those sports leaving the NHL with smaller advertisers and a smaller profit margin.
But the NHL can change their own destiny in the United States. Events like the Winter Classic and the European Premier games are a start, but they fall flat because the games are regular season games at a time in the season where there is not much at stake. The games just are not as exciting at the beginning of the season as they are in the playoffs. The NHL can market these regular season events and include fan fairs like they did for the Carolina All-Star game and provide more interactivity for the fans. If the fans are interacting the experience will be more exciting for people who are new to the hockey world and if they have fun while watching the game they will like it a lot more. None of the major sports in North America have tapped into the full potential of fan interaction either with their cell phones or online contests and with people like Brendan Shannahan and Rob Blake working in the NHL now, they are sure to come up with some creative ways to attract fans. And with the fans will come advertisers and money for the NHL which is always the goal of a business.
I know that I like hockey but I wish that more people realized how awesome and exciting the sport really is, and who knows maybe one day the game will be as big as today's Super Bowl.
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