Possible move puts spotlight on turnout for playoffs
When Crew SC held on in the final minutes Nov. 5 to close out a 4-3 aggregate win over New York City FC in the MLS Eastern Conference semifinals, Morgan Hughes saw an opportunity.
A spot in the conference finals against Toronto FC meant another game for the Crew at Mapfre Stadium and another opportunity, Hughes said, to set the record straight. With more than two weeks between the conference semifinals and finals, the Save The Crew movement frontman and Crew fans made their goal
simple: Fill the stadium.
Irregular scheduling — the Crew’s Tuesday home game is its second straight weekday home playoff game — low temperatures and higher average ticket prices can make marketing a challenge for MLS playoff games.
The decision by Precourt Sports Ventures, the team’s ownership group, to potentially move the team to Austin, Texas, after the 2018 season adds another layer to an already challenging process, and the team, supporters and local businesses each explored marketing the match in their own ways. The result will be a standing-room-only crowd.
“We are all incredibly excited to be this deep in the playoff run,” Crew President of Business Operations Andy Loughnane said. “This is an important match for the club and excluding MLS Cup, this will mark the second sellout for a playoff match (since 2014).”
For fans, daily social media reminders to purchase tickets served as a way to challenge the idea that the Crew, which finished 20th of 22 teams in average home attendance in 2017, lacks broad-based community support in Columbus.
“One of the things being argued by (Precourt Sports Ventures) is that there’s just not support in Columbus, that no one cares,” Hughes said. “We are focused on setting those narratives correct and so getting people in the stadium is a big, big thing for us.”
The front office’s marketing push is rooted in data points, an important one being an announced crowd of 9,040 for a conference semifinal game against New England in 2014. Since then, the club has made an effort to make fans aware of potential playoff dates earlier in the process.
Mediums like outdoor advertising can be challenging with short lead times entering playoff games, Loughnane said, but the club’s marketing plan has been a blend of radio, television and digital, along with social media and some outdoor advertising.
In total, Loughnane said, the front office has spent twice as much marketing Tuesday’s game as it would for a regular-season match. Some fans have been critical of the front office’s marketing efforts, indicating the marketing push is not what it would be in a normal playoff run, one without the threat of relocation looming.
Asked about the criticism, Loughnane said, “If people are making those comments, it’s not reflective of the effort or the facts.”
Local businesses, too, have done their part to draw eyes to the Crew’s playoff run.
Pursuit, the team’s matchday suit outfitter, has managed to walk a line in its social media presence pushing Tuesday’s match. The company and Nate DeMars, its founder and CEO, work directly with the team as a sponsor but are Columbus-based and have been vocal in their support of the Save The Crew campaign.
“I think what it came down to was the idea of moving the team is not the idea of anybody that we work with,” DeMars said. “It isn’t the people we’ve worked with on the (Crew) sponsorship side, it isn’t the players, it isn’t the coaches, it’s none of the people we’ve developed a strong relationship with, so we can speak our minds and hopefully do it in a positive way.”
The Columbus office for Lamar, the outdoor advertising company, donated five digital billboards at the start of the team’s playoff push with the same design it used for the 2015 playoffs.
The billboards’ locations vary depending on availability but will remain up throughout the playoffs, said Chris Avondet, general manager for Lamar Columbus. The donation spurred an outdoor advertising purchase from the Crew’s front office, Avondet said.
“We want to support the positivity of things and a playoff run is a positive thing that’s going on right now with (Crew SC),” Avondet said. “Part of it was the perceived lack of corporate support; we want to show that we are supporting the Crew on a corporate level here in our Columbus office.”
Lamar is a corporate entity, but many employees in the Columbus office live, work and play in central Ohio and were born and raised in the Columbus area.
“Our heart is in Columbus so we want to see all good things come to the city,” Avondet said. “Anything we can do to help make that impact, we try to do that to the best of our abilities.”