Minor league baseball is always trying to pack the stands with some sort of gimmick or promotion. It seems like the ideas just keep getting wackier and wackier with every passing season. Of course, if all the front office knuckleheads would just stick to the basics then attendance wouldn’t be a problem. You don’t need to give away bobble heads of players or put together expensive postgame firework shows. Nope, just sign up the Famous Chicken to make an appearance and watch the dolla, dolla bills come rolling in.
Its appearance at minor league games, on average, increased attendance by 26 percent.
That’s pretty good when you consider, as the firm [Plan B Branding] reveals, that the Chicken’s appearance only cost teams 22 cents per fan. It’s also pretty good when you consider that the Chicken is more than 30 years old.
My favorite business story with the Chicken involves the day long ago that the man inside the costume, Ted Giannoulas, negotiated an attendance deal with the Padres. The rule worked that he’d get a piece of every ticket above a certain number of expected fans for the night.
The Chicken brought some 30,000 more fans to the game and Giannoulas came home with a $40,000 payday. As the story goes, he spent all that money defending himself in a lawsuit against KGB radio, the station that in March 1974, first put him in a chicken suit as part of a promotional gimmick.
And if you can’t get the Famous Chicken to pay your park a visit then we’d like to suggest this lady as option number two.
Links:
[CNBC.com]: The Ex-San Diego Padre Chicken Still Rules!!