Argos trying to bring back football culture to missed generations
Move to BMO enables Argos to engage younger customers via tailgates and the game-day experience.
Morgan Campbell Staff Reporter thestar.com May 16, 2016
Four weeks before the CFL regular season kicks off, the Toronto Argonauts’ brain trust has already drawn up its first blitz.
This one involves marketing.
In the lead-up to the Argos’ first season at BMO Field, the club plans to plaster the city with ads — on TV, radio, bus shelters and more — hoping to boost ticket sales to games at the team’s new home.
The ad campaign is part of a broader brand makeover aimed at making the team relevant again. Overtaking one of the city’s Big Three pro sports franchises might not be realistic, but Argos executives think a renewed marketing buzz could propel the club to a less-distant fourth place in local fans’ minds.
Outdoor ads are set appear this week in the neighbourhood surrounding BMO Field.
“It will show our players in a whole new way,” Argos president Michael Copeland said during a conference call Monday. “It will really re-ignite the conversation around Argos football.”
It’s nearly impossible for the club to have a smaller footprint than they had last season, when the Pan Am Games kept the Argos away from their home field until August. Later in the season, Blue Jays playoff games at the Rogers Centre forced the Argos to play “home” games in Hamilton and Ottawa.
The team’s absence from its home stadium had a drag on attendance. The Argos averaged 12,430 at home games last season, a figure that includes the sparse crowds at the out-of-market games the team hosted.
The Star commissioned a poll late last year that found only two per cent of sports fans in Toronto listed the Argos as their primary rooting interest, tying them with Toronto FC but placing them well behind the Jays, Raptors and Leafs.
Not a single respondent between 18 and 34 identified as an Argos fan, but the club is confident the re-brand and move to BMO will help re-engage younger fans who have avoided home games at the cavernous Rogers Centre.
Argos executive Sara Moore says the club conducted extensive market research before embarking on its marketing program. She says younger adults routinely reported being open to embracing the Argos if the club could deliver an engaging game-day experience.
Specifically, they wanted to tailgate.
“In this market there never really has been great football culture,” says Moore, the Argos’ senior vice-president of business operations. “There are a couple generations here that haven’t been immersed in what is the best game-day experience . . . That’s been missing and that is everything we’re creating and investing in.”
To craft a campaign that speaks to the cherished 18-to-34 demographic, the club enlisted Bensimon Byrne, the same Toronto-based ad agency that oversaw the CFL’s re-brand late last year.
That movement kicked off during Grey Cup week with “What We’re Made Of,” a commercial that stresses the league’s national appeal and local flavour. In Calgary, a man riding a white horse holds a Stampeders flag overhead, while in the next shot a beefy offensive lineman-type grips a rope and pulls a tractor across a flat stretch of Saskatchewan highway.
One shot features the Argos sprinting onto their home field, and another features longtime receiver Chad Owens flexing his muscles for the camera.
But Owens, one of the club’s most recognizable players, signed with Hamilton this winter, depriving the club of a familiar, marketable face.
Similarly, Moore acknowledges re-branding risks the equity a company has built among loyal fans but says the gamble is minimal here because previous Argos regimes haven’t invested in cultivating younger fans.
“The fans we have now didn’t become fans at 55,” Moore said. “We got them when they were young. The problem is the Argos haven’t gone back to that well and captured more of those 20-somethings.”
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