Charlie Callahan and Brian Spanier, creative directors at a Minneapolis agency called Periscope, spent the winter preparing an advertising and marketing juggernaut designed to pitch Twins baseball to the sticks.
After several seasons of success on the field and futility at the turnstiles, this year the team scrapped its vaguely self-deprecating “Get to Know ’Em” approach and turned to the pros at Periscope in an attempt to rally its far-flung fan base. The result is a campaign called “Twins Territory.” It ranges from aggressive, hectoring exhortations and calls to arms, to print ads that feature juxtapositions of Twins players with bits of regional iconography (Joe Mauer, crouching in his catcher’s gear, roasts a hot dog over a campfire, for instance, or Torii Hunter leaps from a dock to snare a fly ball). In one television spot a woman scrubs a bathroom floor with a Yankees jersey, and the legendary voice of Bill Woodson intones, “This is your state. This is your team. And this is Twins Territory.”
“The whole idea is really pretty simple,” Callahan said. “It’s about recognizing that this tradition is out there and building on it. This team has now been here for more than forty years, and Twins baseball has literally become part of the fabric of the state. Great franchises are about the relationship between the fans and the team, so our approach has been to encourage maybe a little bit more of an us-versus-them football mentality in our fans.” “The ultimate goal, of course, is to put fannies in the stands,” Spanier added. “In the end that’s what we’ll be judged on.”
The inability of the Twins to consistently post the sort of attendance figures commensurate with their success hasn’t always been the aggravation it has become during the team’s recent run of three-straight Central Division titles. This is, after all, a team that in 1988 became the first franchise in Major League history to draw three million fans. Those staggering numbers, a league record at the time, came on the heels of Minnesota’s first ever World Series championship, yet in the intervening years the team has managed to draw two million fans in just four subsequent seasons.
Last year marked the tenth consecutive season in which the Twins fell short of the two million mark, despite making another trip to the post season. For a little perspective, in 2004 Minnesota drew 1,879,222 fans, which placed the team’s attendance eleventh out of the fourteen American League teams. Needless to say, those numbers continue to bedevil the folks in the front office. Plenty of reasons get tossed around for the team’s inability to draw fans. There’s the monstrosity of the Metrodome, for starters, and the long-running new stadium imbroglio that has by now assumed tragicomic status. Others will point to the general ill will engendered by the forbidding and penurious specter of the team’s owner, Carl Pohlad. Those are certainly intangibles unique to this team and market. Most of the other gripes—from the length of games, competition for fans’ discretionary income, and the general disorder of the league’s economics—are obstacles the Twins share with the other teams that consistently outdraw them.
Anybody who grew up in outstate Minnesota, where Twins radio and television broadcasts have always provided an omnipresent backdrop to the languor of midsummer, likely understands that relying on attendance figures to gauge the ultimate interest in a team is a flawed proposition. This is a team with deep roots in the region. It is also, it is sometimes useful to remember, an organization with a pretty impressive resume, small market be damned—three American League titles, two World Series championships, a trio of homegrown Hall of Famers, and a history that stretches back to the Washington Senators and the earliest days of the American League.
Yet if Twins fans have never quite achieved the legendary (and legionary) status of the faithful in such places as Boston, Chicago, New York, and St. Louis, we nonetheless encompass a broad swath of geography, from border to border in the north and south, sprawling out into the Dakotas to the west and lapping the borders over into Wisconsin and down into Iowa. True, Twins Territory once stretched as far as Miles City, Montana, and Houghton, Michigan, but the politics of cable TV and the debasement of WCCO’s once-omnipotent signal have slowly closed the borders. Nowadays, even box scores in local papers are hard to find beyond the reach of Fox regional sports net.
Still, there is plenty of Twins Territory, and a lot of geography for the folks at Periscope to cover. The team’s television and radio ratings have been strong in recent seasons, which has been encouraging if bittersweet news to the people in the front office. Periscope’s job is to convince those people who habitually follow the team at home that the real action—and the real camaraderie—is in the blue seats at the Dome.
“We all know that this is a society of convenience,” Nancy O’Brien, the Twins’ director of advertising, said. “It’s infinitely easier to go home, park the car, and curl up on the couch to watch the game. But I don’t know if anybody really reminisces about games they watched on TV. Real memories are created at the ballpark.” —Brad Zellar
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