MLB All-Star Game Reaches New Records

The 2013 Major League All-Star game has proven to be a great success for baseball. This year’s Mid-Summer Classic delivered as a social media showcase and provided fans with more engagement than ever.  The statistics from twitter have shown that this year, fans wanted to have their opinion heard about who made the team and who the winner would be. This growth of interest in the All Star game demonstrates how the game has become important to the fans again. Gone is the time when the American and National league teams would approach this game as a friendly and throw out every position player and pitcher who made the team regardless of the score, and the fans have responded demonstrating their growing interest in the game through social media and television ratings. They care about who makes the team, who wins this game, and how their favorite players perform.

Major League Baseball was able to come up with a marketing strategy where they could effectively market this game to millions of fans and keep their fan base engaged up until the All Star break. Yasiel Puig the Cuban phenom provided an excellent starting point for MLB to market the voting leading up to the game. Local, Regional, and National media outlets hyped the young players’ ability, which created a stir towards whether the rookie who had only been in the league for a month deserved to be an All Star. This provided MLB with extra attention to the game as well as brought up strong feelings from fans and players which lead to increased fan retention and engagement to the latest news regarding the game. The Final vote for the All Star game proved to be marketing genius by major league baseball. Fans were given a pool of 10 players of which the 2 with the most votes would be rewarded with a spot on the All Star team. Major league teams partnered with one another and campaigned for players to win the fan vote and MLB saw more than 79 million votes through online, phones, texts, and twitter. While this number of votes shows how committed fans were towards voting in their favorite player into the All Star game, what is more impressive is that in the last 6 hours before the vote closed 13% of the total votes were cast through twitter. The voting program which MLB instated for the game was so effective that on the last day they saw 63% more votes per minute than last year and in the last hour reached a peak of 24,660 tweets per minute. This engagement not only led fans to want to vote but also to want to watch the game.

This year’s All Star game experienced a large increase in both television ratings and viewership from past years. The game was FOX’s highest-rated and most watched broadcast since the American Idol finale in May. FOX held a 44% higher viewership over its nearest competitor on the night. This allows MLB better leverage when negotiating new television contracts and also allows to TV Networks to bargain for higher advertising revenues for major events such as the Home Run derby and All Star Game. Major League Baseball also saw immediate revenue in sales from merchandise. All-Star merchandise sales exceeded every other year in history with the sole exception of 2008. Fan engagement for the Home Run Derby and All-Star game was higher than ever as the Home Run Derby generated 868,878 social media comments from 496,458 unique users and the All-Star game telecast generated 851,192 comments from 477,795 unique users. The information Major League Baseball can get from these unique users can allow for them find out how to better reach their audience and measure whether they are continuing to keep their fans interested.

The All-Star game has also provided players with a way to market their abilities to a National audience. Jose Fernandez saw a 77% increase in Twitter growth. This provides teams in small markets with an opportunity to sell more jerseys and grow their marketing reach as well as the players from these markets to increase their exposure and also have an opportunity to make money off the field through national sponsorship's and advertising opportunities. Major League Baseball has brought this game to new horizons and 18 international broadcasts sent crews to report on-site at the All Star game nearly double the year before. This demonstrates the growth of interest in the game by the rest of the world and shows that Major League Baseball has been successful in their goal to spread baseball around the globe.

Major League Baseball was successful at marketing this year’s All Star game. What they were able to do was strengthen their brand so that they can build expectations, memories, and relationships with fans. This is a will drive ticket sales and bring fans to the ball park for a game day experience. This gives teams the opportunity to turn single-game ticket buyers into the long-term fan. Marketing plays an important role to increase ticket sales, and when events such as the All Star game draw attention to the sport, every team benefits.

Written By Thomas Breslin