AFL Pitching ArenaBowl as Corporate and Fan Incentive
Sponsors of the Arena Football League, and the league itself, are using the league’s Las Vegas championship weekend packages as incentives for corporate customers and consumer prizes.
Sponsors include Spalding, ADT Security Services and fantasy football host Sandbox.com. All packages include tickets to the June 12 game, a pro-am skills competition and a concert. Higher-level packages include passes to the league’s awards dinner.
“We are offering ArenaBowl packages to our partners for use in three different ways,” said Joe Vrankin, AFL’s CFO and president of AFL Events. “They can award them to their customer base as an incentive, internally as employee incentives or use them as an opportunity to enhance their own partner relationships.”
Spalding, for example, through an online sweepstakes, will award a package to one fan in each of the league’s 17 markets, and allow the fan of the winning team to participate in the championship trophy presentation.
Vrankin said ADT, which will host the league’s golf tournament, is using packages in sales incentive programs and as gifts for its VIPs. Sandbox.com is awarding packages as prizes in its Arena Fantasy Football contests. The league offers two fantasy football games through Sandbox.com, in which fans draft teams of AFL players, then compete against other fans to score the most points on a weekly and seasonal basis.
The league announced in October that ArenaBowl XIX would be held June 12 in Las Vegas, breaking an AFL tradition of having the team with the higher record host the championship game one week after the league’s semi-final contests.
Vrankin said the challenge for league partners has always been a lack of time to let them know where the ArenaBowl will be played. With one week to work with, it limited the kind of activities corporate partners could plan.
“Even planning a gold tournament can be a challenge on one week’s notice,” Vrankin said.
Having a preplanned site for the event also builds a better consumer relationship, he said, because fans can make travel plans ahead of time, and more events can be built into the weekend.
