GAA must make the most of their old 'product'

ON GAELIC GAMES:Enhanced awareness of the requirement to promote and market is important for the GAA, but there's only so much even the most ingenious campaigns can achieve

IT WOULD be incorrect to say that the concepts of marketing and promotion were for a long time treated with hostility within the GAA. In fact, the attitude tended to the opposite extreme.

The science of stimulating, managing and facilitating demand often assumed the status of voodoo.

Here was an arcane activity that could transform things by manipulating the mechanics of desire. Hence the old refrain about marketing our games like Sky do with the soccer – despite the obvious discrepancy

in the respective games calendars in those pre-qualifier days, most obviously that the previous year’s champions mightn’t survive the first match of the summer.

You still hear reproachful reference to the interprovincials, the Railway Cups of old, along the lines that were they given some of the attention bestowed on the International Rules series they too would summon vast crowds to Croke Park.

But they wouldn’t because not enough people are interested in the idea no matter how alluringly the details are disseminated.

Even in the heyday of the 1950s, they were never viscerally engaging contests with what is known as “emotional buy-in” (allowing for the enhanced sense of identity in Ulster) for the crowds but rather spectacles, exhibitions by the greatest players of the day at a time when not alone were there no live Gaelic games on television but there wasn’t even national television.

There is a separate argument that if players genuinely want to play for their provinces the GAA should continue to subvent the competitions but that justification isn’t concerned with providing audiences but based on more private human activity, governed by the principle of consenting adults.

More recently there have been Olympian leaps to conclusions about the role of provinces in rugby. They used to attract no-one, now they fill Europe’s biggest stadiums.

Why? Because they were marketed and promoted by a brewery, which has hyped up a competition with no history or traditions?

No. It has actually taken nearly two decades during which time rugby went professional and discovered that the optimal vehicle for this new reality was the all but disused provincial structure, previously as in the GAA an administrative system with a rather muted representative playing function.

More pertinently the current prosperity at that level of Irish rugby is based on unprecedented success in an international context, an important aspect of competitor sports that the GAA can’t exploit. No one gets to see what the English papers made of a particularly entertaining All-Ireland semi-final.

Last week the GAA released its promotion plan for this year’s championship and it’s an energetic document, incorporating conventional advertising campaigns with new media and importantly, an increasingly more streamlined ticket distribution system.

The core priority adopted by the GAA in relation to the championship has been the protection of, and if possible an increase in, the numbers attending. Various promotions in respect of ticket packages appear to have played a role in maintaining a surprisingly – given the economic backdrop – buoyant number of spectators even if gate receipts reflect a consequent fall in revenue.

Many GAA followers dislike – and with some reason – the idea of the games as “product” but that’s one of the essential differences between Gaelic games and soccer and rugby. Professional sports have to engage the interest of the public or they’ll fail commercially. As a result they make sure to optimise what they’re offering, which is largely a product.

This entails playing matches when they’re most likely to get a crowd, enhancing the match-day experience and, above all, planning a programme of fixtures that can generate revenue. When Dublin launched the Spring Series nearly 18 months ago, Dublin CEO John Costello articulated his frustration at the lack of standardisation of fixtures, which would make competition fairer and facilitate better marketing of the games:

“The system at the moment with 11 teams competing in Leinster, nine in Ulster and so on is a crazy system. If you asked an outside consultant to come in and design a competition they wouldn’t come up with the current format and that is an obstacle.

“Personally I’d be in favour of an open draw for the championship where you would have dedicated dates and teams and a straightforward draw and the same number of games being played. Now you have teams in some provinces that win two games and get into an All-Ireland quarter-final.”

Dublin occasionally get scratchy (as in last year’s bizarre scrap over who owned the blue jersey that stopped short of seeking copyright on captains called Cullen) about comparisons with Leinster rugby but they are inevitable seeing as the teams occupy much of the same geographical space and, of late, win things. They are also – in the above order – the two best supported teams in Ireland outside of the international arena.

The idea of their competition with each other is overdone. As former international Hugo McNeill said on RTÉ radio on Monday, rugby is in the happy position of complementing Gaelic games, as their busy seasons are different. Anecdotally, the cars that drive around the city with Leinster flags during one season look the same as those sporting Dublin colours during the high summer.

Yet, Costello’s concerns are obvious. Leinster rugby sell in the region of 13,000 season tickets, mostly because they’re successful but equally importantly because they’ve 11 home league matches, three guaranteed home European fixtures plus the possibility of a couple more.

Dublin – like other counties – get three or four home league matches, which like their championship schedules are determined by the luck of the draw.

With public funding slashed, the GAA are even more reliant on gate receipts, which on most recent figures yielded six times more than they did 20 years ago before Croke Park was refurbished and the qualifier system introduced – and five years ago at the peak of the boom, that multiple was closer to eight.

It’s obvious that there is a significant material interest in keeping attendances as high as possible but proper marketing would require an input into the final product.

Given that there’s going to be no change to the provincial system for all sorts of administrative reasons nor any budge for the foreseeable future on the question of amateurism, which rules out any shift towards an insulated elite, the product isn’t going to change.

Enhanced awareness of the requirement to promote and market is important for the GAA but there’s only so much even the most ingenious campaigns can achieve. Within those parameters they’re not doing badly.