One of the struggles UH has had is the lack of dollars spent on Marketing or Sales if you will. We have tried and had some success with interns. I know that we trail other Pro Sports teams are out spending us as Barry Warner pointed out when Tom was first hired. So my questions are has the spending increased? What are we spending currently and what amount do we need to get to budget wise to feel like we have done an adequate JOB?
I would say the spending on traditional media advertising has increased this year. Also, they have decreased spending on the freebies they give when we arrive at games. I am hoping long term, at least for the entire department that the partnership with the Valenti school will produce some new campaigns and such. As a graduate of the Advertising program, I know that there is good talent and instructors there - they work with real clients on real projects. Same with the PR program and I assume the Integrated Comm program that started recently.
Obviously funding is an issue, and we have to have interns do lots of work (it helps them learn and helps the school). What we need is to be creative and effective with every dollar. Honestly, I’d be interested in volunteering in the marketing department if they needed help that I could give.
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We spent $944,379 across the entire department the year before CTH arrived (well, the school year he arrived since he got here in Feb 2015).
The marketing budget has improved, but it seems a lot of it was spent to ensure max sales for the OU game. Since then, it doesn’t seem that there is as much advertising of the team or upcoming games other than via social media. Maybe the idea was to spread it out a bit throughout the year and on other sports.
Pricing and placement are two of the P’s of marketing. The three pack thing with Louisville tickets, while not totally original, is still a very solid strategy that was widely lauded and supported here. That got three other games much better sales than they would have had if trying to sell on their own merits, meaning that the marketing/sales team let Louisville do the hard work and really made the best use of the budget money spent on each one of those sales.
Just because you don’t see TV commercials doesn’t mean nothing is happening.