Hawks marketing team have to do better

[Blunt91]

I saw that they have Morris Day & The Time billed for the post game concert and they also have a Emanual Lewis autograph session planned. No one cares about these people. I didn't even care for Morris day back in the 80's, surely not now. If they wanted to go retro they would have did better to find "Guy" or New Edition to do a post game show.

[Nicholasp27]

it's a friday night

it's against the lebrons

it's nique night

nique statues given away

they don't need to have a AAA act at tonite's game

[chillzatl]

I don't think many teams are bringing in A-list talent for post game concerts.

And speak for yourself, my wife loves Emanual Lewis!

[DJ_Money]

...and I don't care what anybody else thinks (and most do think I'm crazy), but I like The Time, dammit.

[chillzatl]

I neglected to mention that my wife also loves The Time. She's a Prince fanatic and they are forever linked in her subconscious.

[Lascar78]

It's a themed retro night. Which is why we'll have the retro uniforms and all.

We already had a T.I. concert earlier in the season. I dare you to name an NBA team that's had an act as big as TI (especially as big as he is here) as a free concert. I bet none are even close.

[gsuteke]

it talks about Atlanta being a great NBA town. the ratings don't lie. it is on the front page of the sports section.

[gsuteke]

tonight will be the team's 4th home sellout this season. that's the total # of sellouts from last season.

[TexasPete]

I like the Highlight Factory. I think its good...A LOT better than Rise Up.

[gsuteke]

i'll type up some of the specifics from the article after i get back from my daily afternoon walk.

[Sothron]

I really wish they would let the team wear the Pac Man jerseys on a permanent basis. The Pac Man Hawks symbol is by far the best logo the team ever had and those jerseys were great.

[Guest]

Quote:

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I like the Highlight Factory. I think its good...A LOT better than Rise Up.

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I agree. What made the Rise Up campaign so lame was that we were so bad last year, so were we supposed to Rise Up about how good we were or how bad we were?

I bet all the players had a fun time with the Highlight Factory too, you can definitely tell Zaza did.

[TexasPete]

That Rise Up deal was pitiful. I can actually see the Highlight Factory thing sticking around, kind of like Blueland for the Thrashers. The Hawks have needed a theme to get some fans down there and HF is pretty good.

[GoDawgs21]

accept the dumb a@@ on NBA tonight f'd it up. They were showing the highlights and Mash said the "Philips factory was open for business" i was like oh lord

[gsuteke]

City's fan base solid, even if Hawks aren't

By TIM TUCKER

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 12/01/06

The Hawks have made it hard to be an NBA fan in Atlanta. They have been here for 38 years without winning — or even playing for — a league championship. They haven't made the playoffs — or even had a winning season — in seven years.

The city has responded by turning away, putting the Hawks near the bottom of the league in attendance for the past decade.

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And yet Dominique Wilkins, the former Hawks star, says: "I think Atlanta is a good NBA town that can become a great NBA town."

That contention might seem far-fetched if you've seen Philips Arena on one of its half-empty nights. But there are strong arguments, too, that an NBA town does exist amidst the Hawks' rubble:

• TV ratings. The NBA scores high with Atlanta TV viewers. For the 2005 NBA Finals, Atlanta posted the highest TV rating of any market without a home-state team participating; for the 2006 Finals, Atlanta had the third highest rating among non-participant markets. Atlanta tunes in to the earlier postseason rounds, too: For last season's playoffs, the city had the 11th highest cable rating among the 57 major markets — the highest of any market without a participating team except Las Vegas. Last year's All-Star Game drew a higher rating in Atlanta than all but three other markets. And for regular-season games on TNT the past two seasons, Atlanta's ratings were 12th and 16th highest, respectively, among the top 57 markets.

• Attendance spikes. Even in the Hawks' leanest seasons, marquee opponents tend to draw capacity crowds. The Hawks say they expect to sell out tonight's game against the Cleveland Cavaliers and star player LeBron James, as they did last month's game against the NBA champion Miami Heat. And while Philips Arena was under construction in 1998, an NBA-record 62,046 gathered in the Georgia Dome to watch Michael Jordan's last game in Atlanta as a player for the Chicago Bulls.

• Surveys. Polling by Scarborough Research pegs the number of NBA fans in metro Atlanta at a robust 1.35 million.

Such factors suggest that Atlanta likes the NBA in larger numbers than it likes the Hawks — and perhaps that there's a fan base convertible to the Hawks when or if the team becomes a compelling winner.

"I have never bought into the fact this is not an NBA town, like a lot of people say," said Hawks season-ticket holder Zach Hubbert, 36, who began going to the games with his season-ticket-holding father in the late 1970s. He sees Atlanta as an untapped NBA market, held down by the home team's performance.

"The only flirtation we had with greatness in the NBA was that period in the '80s when I fell in love with the Hawks," Hubbert said. "I really felt the Hawks and Atlanta as an NBA city were turning the corner then, although I was young and probably didn't know what 'turning the corner' meant.

"But just at the time that we were starting to [thrive as an] NBA town, the process fell apart. I think one of the things that killed it was the hiring of Bob Weiss as coach [in 1990], and maybe the trading of Dominique for Danny Manning [in 1994]."

The Hawks continued to do fine in the regular season and poorly in the playoffs until 1999, when they moved into Philips Arena, made the ill-fated trade for Isaiah Rider and relinquished much of their fan base. In recent years, they often relied on the opponent to draw crowds.

When fans in Philips Arena cheer for the opponent, "I hate it, I absolutely hate it," said Vicki Kremer, a Hawks season-ticket holder since 1995.

Kremer grew up in Iowa and became an unconditional Hawks fan after moving here. "I have a good time whether we win or lose," she said. Many others have moved here and kept their allegiances to other cities' teams.

The transplants have influenced Atlanta as a sports city, as in countless other ways.

"As long as you have football and baseball, those definitely are going to be the sports that stand out here," said Wilkins, recently inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. " But I think ... it's become more of an NBA market because of the consistent flow of transplants. We have a lot of basketball fans in the city. Are all of them Atlanta fans? Probably not. But they are basketball fans. And they will come out to see good basketball."

The Hawks, though, haven't played good basketball in recent years, and the city's NBA fans, whatever their number, largely disavowed the home team's product. The Hawks were next-to-last in the league in attendance last season with an announced average of 15,068 per game, their fifth consecutive year in the league's bottom three at the gate.

So far this season, they are averaging 16,821 per home game, 20th in the 30-team league. They expect their fourth sellout in eight home games tonight, matching last year's total.

Hawks management says that signs of on-court progress and changes in the ticket sales operation have contributed to the upswing. The early crowds also have been boosted by a postgame concert and a couple of marquee opponents.

It's an open question what type of NBA town this would be with a stirring home team to call its own.

"Before I came here, I wanted to try to figure that question out myself," said Lou DePaoli, a former NBA executive who now is the Hawks' chief marketing officer. "And the more I dug into the research, I could see the demographics point to this being a really solid NBA market. I looked at the TV ratings, the sellouts of marquee opponents, and I said, 'It's a market that is basketball-centric, a market that loves the NBA but right now is just not in tune with the Hawks.'

"We just went through seven years of marginal product. It's really worn on people. But to get back to the days when the Omni was packed, with 'Nique playing and [the Hawks] winning 50 games a year, I don't think we're far from that."

Fan fervor for the Hawks peaked in the late 1980s, when the team was perceived locally as an NBA title contender and attendance records were set in the old Omni. "It was pandemonium here," Wilkins said. "It was a great NBA town and NBA time."

By the late '90s, Atlanta had soured on annual early-round playoff elimination. And now the Hawks' seven-year absence from the playoffs is the NBA's second longest such drought.

Bernie Mullin, president and chief executive of Hawks owner Atlanta Spirit, said a recent study done for the NBA by a consulting firm showed a team "gets about three years of grace from its fan base when it goes in the tank." The Hawks have been there longer. "Obviously, the base has been eroded," Mullin said.

But he is encouraged by what happens when teams with a "popular iconic star" visit. "Generally speaking, we get a good 3,000-ticket bump just from that visiting team star," he said. Those ticket buyers are NBA fans — and perhaps prospective Hawks fans.

"I think they easily can be converted into real Hawks fans if the team moves in the right direction, which I think it is," lifelong Hawks fan Hubbert said.

"There are an awful lot of people in Atlanta who have affinity for Kobe [bryant] and the Lakers," Mullin said. "They come to see them, and sometimes, even within the game, they turn around and start supporting us."

When he was hired by the team's new owners, Mullin says he was told by an executive with another NBA team "to get the most money and the longest contract I could get, because the Hawks brand had been so damaged that I'd never work anywhere else."

Yet, after 2 1/2 challenging years here, Mullin maintains: "We start to put on the court a perennially competitive team, I don't think there's any doubt we will sell out every night."

"I think people have been waiting," said Hawks fan Kremer. "I think they'll embrace the team [when it wins]."

[Sothron]

That is a great article, thanks for sharing. Atlanta has a very good fanbase ready for a good Hawks team for it to embrace.