thrill_me_mogilny said:
Hopefully this isn't too OT, but I've seen it mentioned, about the early start time in MN. I'm guessing that the urban area is big enough so that people(most people finish work between 4 &5PM) could pop into the game after work and grab a burger there for 6Pm game? Is the arena in the middle of nowhere and hard to get too? To me there isn't much difference between 6&7PM start times to make me not attend.
I'm lucky, because as a department manager I pretty much set my own hours. But most people don't have that kind of flexibility. The problem isn't that the arena is in the middle of nowhere - it's the other way around. The problem is urban sprawl. The Ex is right smack in the middle of downtown St. Paul, within a few blocks of both major freeways. But most of the people who
work in the Twin Cities work in the middle of nowhere - the Cities are spread out over about a thousand square miles, and most people work in the suburbs. People in the most densely developed suburbs work 25 to 30 miles from the arena, and it's a solid 90-minute to 2-hour drive during rush hour. Very few people work in downtown St. Paul, and everyone who doesn't is just SOL trying to fight rush hour traffic for a 6 o'clock start.
thrill_me_mogilny said:
And I definitely agree about the bad marketing. You can't force people to shell out money for something they are not interested in. Could it also be in part that the area does not have large ex-pat communities to cheer on the old homeland? As for expensive ticket prices, it would have been cheaper for me to fly to MN and get a good ticket than to do it here!
Cheaper than you realize. People at the ticket office today told me that they were giving away tickets at game time last night.
I agree with you and Ceber about the marketing, and about the seasonal impact on the attendance. I love hockey more than almost anything, but on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, there was no way on God's green Earth that I was going to be sitting in an arena watching a hockey game. Summers are way too short here in Minnesota, and at game time last Friday I was halfway up the North Shore of Lake Superior on my way to a weekend of camping and hiking in the Boundary Waters. I missed last night's game because I was too bus unpacking and doing laundry from the weekend. I don't have time for indoor spectator sports until around mid-October, and a lot of other people in this area feel the same way. We love the outdoors here in Minnesota.
As for the marketing, well... frankly I can't comment on it, because I haven't noticed much of it. Which I guess is a comment in its own right, eh? There've been a lot of full and half-page newspaper ads, but I have yet to see a single TV commercial about the tournament. Not that I watch that much TV, but still. I would think I'd have noticed
something. Same with radio - several interviews on various sports shows, but not one commercial that I've heard. I don't know what their advertising budget was, but they don't seem to have spent very much. I'm speculating that they were counting on a lot of word-of-mouth getting people worked up, but that just doesn't seem to have happened.
Heck, even the local TV stations hardly seem to give a rip. All you hear is "Twins this, Vikings that, high school swimming blah blah blah." Last night I was 5 minutes into a 6-minute sportscast before they even bothered mentioning that there'd been a hockey game in St Paul that night, and by the way the Americans won it. Not exactly stirring people into a hysterical frenzy. I'm surprised anyone's even aware that there are games to be seen this week. They had stacks of tickets available today for Friday's game; I could have still gotten lower bowl if I'd wanted to spend the money. It's very puzzling to me.
