Colorado Mammoth Message Board

Mr. Govett,

During the past few games, our section has been discussing in detail the marketing of the Mammoth and we had a few questions that you might be able to answer for us.

Our observation is that the NLL/Mammoth seem to market to young males, maybe 18-25, in both promotions and in game entertainment. Is that correct?

Our section has a number of long time season ticket holders. In this group, the vast majority of the ticket holders are females, females who feel a bit as though their presence is completely ignored by the in game entertainment. Our question is do you know if our section is just an anomaly with the male to female ratio or are there roughly as many female as male season ticket holders? If there are a large number of female ticket holders, why not make the in game entertainment more inclusive? Females and males in the hot tub? Female and male dancers?

Thank you for any information you can provide.

Thank you for the question, it probably begs a far longer discussion than I will take here but I will take a shot.

The simple definition of Marketing encompasses many things, sales, advertising, branding, PR, Community Relations, etc. Our goal, as anyone would understand, is to put as many people in the arena for each game as we possibly can, with the most appropriate amount of resources that we have at our disposal.

We employ pretty standard, tried and true methods from our history and from the industry to do just that. Our business unit has done a fairly strong job for 11 seasons, and we have enjoyed modest success, can we be better, of course, we are always striving to be better.

With a limited advertising/marketing budget we attempt to do as most businesses do, find low hanging fruit, males 18-35 are certainly the easiest to target in traditional media/advertising outlets. As we use radio significantly, the numbers don't lie, our reach into that demographic is, and always has been very strong.

We have tried a number of strategies to appeal outside of that particular demo, but we can't deny the core. In fact, the surveys that we have done show that we skew younger in the male demographic as well as evenly distributed towards women. The challenge is spreading the available budget over many demographics and an ever growing number of mediums to sell tickets. Consider the challenge of advertising on the internet currently, not one person is easily defined as a "Mammoth Fan".

Once those fans are in the building for a game, we attempt to entertain everyone that walks through our doors, regardless of age or gender. As you can probably relate, tough to be all things to all people in just 2.5 hours.

Whether its music, on screen humor, interviews, dances, hot tub, video board pieces, contests, halftime "acts" etc. etc., our in game entertainment is trying to appeal to a wide variety of consumers. All that doesn't even consider the fact that, oh yeah, a game is being played by pretty spectacular athletes.

We are certainly aware that our surveys have suggested that our fan base is approximately 60-40 split male to female and that female fans are significant and appreciated portion of our consumer. That being said, each of our halftime entertainment pieces this season have been gender neutral, the big dig finals, jr. mammoth skills competition, fly dogs, cancer survivor walk at the last game (probably had more women than men), and next game's military inductions are all non specific when it comes to gender. Our contests to shoot the ball and catch the ball, as well as sponsored elements like smashes and crashes and find the sandwich for Brother's BBQ, have had both men and women and kids. We have two in-game hosts, that do interviews, Conor and Shannon one from each gender. Pieces like kiss cam, dance cam, etc. all show both men and women or both.

I think the essence of this question is about the dance team and the hot tub, so I will answer it as simply as I can. Aside from the fact that we don't do things much differently than what is very widely accepted in the NFL and the NBA with our dance team/cheerleaders, we also don't think that we create an uneven ratio. This is after all a sporting event, as shown above, and there are more male ticket buyers in the building than female.

The game itself is the main portion of the entertainment product in both substance and time at a Mammoth experience and there are 20 young men from either team out there wearing shorts. These guys are mostly good looking, athletic, young men with 36 of them wearing shorts showing off their bare legs to 16,000 fans. To compare there are 14 dancers and 4 hot tub girls, the simple math is that the ratio is about 2:1. My joking comment for those that ask me personally is that people shouldn't be greedy, there are twice as many men during the game to look at wearing shorts than women.

I don't pretend to know what men or women look at when they watch the player's play or when they look at the dancers or the hot tub girls, I can only hope that we are providing a spectacle for everyone that walks into Pepsi Center to enjoy an evening of fun and excitement!

I also know that we aren't for everyone, we are what we are, and don't apologize for that, we have entertained almost 2 million people over the years and most of you keep coming back, we must be doing something right. Can we be better? Always, and we will keep trying!

SG