I could be wrong here, but considering the attractive and effective rl your side is currently playing, your attendances seemed to have remained fairly stagnant. So aside from a few more vape smokers and a few more extra saints folk owing money to Cash converters, I fail to see promotional success in any other areas as a result of Mcmanus' alternative branding.

Lmfao!
That's funny.

Which fans exactly are Wire appealing to by flying a plane over another town?

Do you think more Saints fans will attend as a result? Is it meant for floating Wire fans (who had an actual home game to watch at the HJ as the plane was flying overhead but would rather watch Saints on telly instead?)

I'm a bit confused as to how it's going to boost your attendance for the fixture but happy to admit I may be completely wrong.

It might lead to a few more watching the telly to see what the bluster was about I will admit.

I suppose had Saints lost it would have been a bit more interesting but we were racing into a early lead before it arrived overhead, to maintain a six point lead plus 100-odd points difference.

Felt oddly small time to me but that's just my view and I admit it has got people talking!

McManus is in 3rd year of branding within the community to make the club very much part of the town. Its been very successful and the RFL have given us awards 2 years in succession on its promotional foundation to RL.

The club goes into schools, hospitals, care homes, war veterans, autistic and mental health care as very much as an image brand by the first team players. We've got a great young mental + physically impaired rugby team now. Same for ladies rugby McManus has invested money into this venture and beat Leeds in the next round we will be in the Challenge Cup Final and is promoted in the mens semi finals venue at Bolton.

We've also worked hard in the service areas to get a good quality young player into the scholarship programmes, some parents from Warrington and Widnes have allowed there kids to come to Saints and Wigan because the development program is more structured and has a quicker tier. The Saints brand for youth development in rugby league has got great recognition.

The club is well known in Australia for its Academy product brand with seasonal tours with the NRL counterparts, I think the academy team have always come home with a lot more wins than losses. This is one of the reasons you see the first team with a very heavy weighted home product and we could probably compete well with just an academy produced players in the first team.

All this branding is done at grass roots level first with progressions to the super league levels, promotions of the games are through social media avenues with regular networking across the existing and future fan base.

We have copied the Wigan and Warrington Big Game Image Profile but its not really had much impact on drawing in a lot more fans, its the quality and entertaining playing standard which is doing that at the moment.

100k+ people saw that plane on Sky, plus those inside the stadium, plus those outside the stadium, plus the WolvesRL twitter feed, plus the Saints twitter feed, plus the local paper(s) plus those that got sent it via text msg, plus Facebook etc etc.

This isn’t about a one off ‘let’s see if we can get a few more bodies though the gate at the HJ’ for this specific fixture, it’s part of a season long campaign, which I’m sure will go into next season building interest, building the event and reaching out to as many RL and non RL as possible.

'it's got people talking' ergo it's done the job it meant to do. I don't think we thought it would have an effect on the attendance more promote a game to the TV public which should be a good advert for the game, full house, good players etc... We'll 17 of em will be undeniably world class. Like it or not our marketing is getting on sky sports news regularly and even sky news at times and I think its actually making our game NOT look small time. Cash Converters and Totally Wicked do that.

Our average in 2018 was up 7% on 2017 (and 3% on 2016).

Not huge strides I'll admit but better than being down 8% over the same period like Warrington I suppose.

Not sure where Saints or Wire sit this season with attendances - I'd guess we're down given we played Wigan at home on a Thursday night as the opening fixture. Trick for us is to try to get the extra 2,500 or so that regularly watched in our first season in the new stadium in 2012 when we averaged 14k or so.

Edit - Saints are up about 5% on last season's equivalent fixtures, pretty good given we lost out on a GF home game to a Thursday night season opener in January and had London at home instead of Widnes.

All very laudable, but they don’t need to be exclusive!

All the above you mention Warrington are doing too ( with the exception of the overseas tours for the youth team I expect ). We just had a community day for the Catalan game whereby every youth team player from a community club got a ticket for a quid. This was preceded by four or five coaches and players going into the community clubs and delivering training sessions. They did a similar event with schools earlier in the year. Blake Austin organised weekly sessions for kids on his local park to help promote health living etc etc.

Warrington’s ‘gimmicks’ are getting the club regional recognition, and mentions on Sky when they aren’t even playing. That has to be positive surely?

It is but its short lived. If you are doing something similar to us at ground zero community level but maybe at a lesser promotional expanse then thats good for the game, its certainly not exclusive but its need to be far reaching to the max.

If this was a one off, I’d agree, but it’s part of a much bigger campaign from planes, vans in Pieland, open press conferences, spy gate etc etc. They all have a compounding impact, so the impact i’d argue would increase with each individual ‘gimmick’

The biggest difference in our game attendances have been the away fans thats well down this season. We only get Warrington and Wigan occupying the 6 sections of the away end, Hull sometimes fill 4 sections but the majority struggle to fill 2 sections.

Leeds use to fill 4 sections but on Friday I estimated they brought only 280 fans, Castleford and Wakefield have gone the same. Some games the away stand is closed off because of that situation.

We also did a promotional game in the social media think it was against the catalans and we half filled the away stand with home fans.

Our attendances are up with the Impairment, Academy and Ladies teams. Its not always about the 1st team playing its the club involvement overall.

Possibly, but it was the Stobart campaign that put me off with that method, it took me 6 months to see a "Saints Lorry" with Wilkins mugshot on it.

We're also the current Club Year of The Year for, mostly, off field stuff. We're excellent in the community so we're going at it on all fronts. Current PDRL world champs as well.

To be fair, who’d want to see that?!?

Was that the PDRL festival at Victoria park last Saturday.