In the mid-1980s spectators at Aloha Stadium and television viewers across the nation tuned into a curious sight at the annual Christmas Jeep Eagle Aloha Bowl.
Tethered in the grandstands were large, inflatable Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade-type Jeep vehicles while large Goodyear Eagle brand tires were positioned in the spaces between the then still-movable seating sections.
What made for a good laugh back then might just become the new normal in this pandemic-cursed year.
As the NFL, Major League Baseball, colleges, stadiums and others look to try to salvage some revenue from what are expected to be empty or, at best, seats with sparsely distributed fans, advertising and marketing frontiers are expanding.
Who knew that Aloha Bowl owners Lenny and Marcia Klompus would be decades ahead of their time?
Back in the 1980s, the Aloha Bowl held a pre-event Christmas parade and the Klompuses asked the game’s title sponsor, Jeep Eagle, if it wanted to add anything to the event. “They said, ‘Oh, yeah we have these inflatables …’ ” Lenny recalled.
With Notre Dame-SMU (1984) and USC-Alabama (1985) matchups, the Aloha Bowl filled a lot of seats, but in 1986 with a Arizona-North Carolina pairing, Lenny said, “Well, we told them, ‘we’re not gonna sell all these seats in the end zone, so maybe we could put some there, too. And, their marketing people loved it.”
The Aloha Bowl and its doubleheader cousin for a time, the Oahu Bowl, featured an array of promotional items (some of which had to be hurriedly changed out between games). Bunting with the sponsor’s name in a wreath printed into the turf even stretched from one 42-yard line to the other.
Lenny said, “I think it was (sportscaster) Tony Roberts or Brent Musburger one time who said, ‘the ball is lost somewhere in the wreath.’ ”
These days, Aloha Stadium manager Scott Chan said the stadium would like to follow the proposed NFL model whereby if there are to be vast unused rows of seats, they might feature advertising. “We had some conversations” about possibilities, Chan said.
Deputy manager Ryan Andrews said, “Nearly everything is on the table.”
The stadium currently allows its clients, such as UH, to sell advertising space at rail and field levels for their games while the facility, through its agent IMG, retains the rights to elsewhere on the premises. But Chan said, “Knowing that we are all faced with challenging times during the pandemic, we are willing to have discussions and work it out with some of our major clients.”
For all their promotional zeal, the Klompuses had one overriding rule: “We didn’t want the stadium to look like an ice hockey rink” ringed with wall-to-wall advertising, Lenny said.
MLB, however, is talking about lowering the bar considerably. Not only do its owners want to sell every available inch of space available to them (Pesky Pole and Wrigley Field ivy beware) in their stadiums, they have designs on putting ads on their players’ uniforms, a la race car drivers.
While COVID-19 is changing the way we look at sports and how they will be presented, hopefully MLB isn’t going to clutter up its classic uniforms. Siome things, such as the St. Louis Cardinal and Detroit Tiger uniforms, among others are best left alone, even in a pandemic.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
