The phrase is part of the lexicon of sports, signifying a fan’s ultimate expression of devotion to a team: season tickets. For every game, the fan would be there in the same seat, never missing a moment of the action.
To the Oakland A’s, the concept is due for a twist. On Monday, the team announced that it would cancel its current season-ticket program for 2019. Chris Giles, the A’s chief operating officer, said that while many fans still wanted the traditional season-ticket experience, a fast-growing group wanted something much different.
“The whole notion that you would sell them a product that had them sit in a single seat for the entire game was unappealing, let alone sell them an entire strip of tickets for that seat,” Giles said. “They wanted something that was much more social, much more flexible. So we set out to ask: How can we develop a model that continues to serve that core group of fans but is also attractive to this new, smaller, growing group of fans?”
On Friday, the A’s began selling packages called “A’s Access,” which start at $240 and give fans general-admission access to all 81 games at the Coliseum, plus a reserved-seat plan and discounts on parking, merchandise and concessions. Fans can pay more to be eligible for seat upgrades, but they will always be allowed into the ballpark.
“We have to be thoughtful about what their experience will be if they show up to a game in which they don’t have a reserved seat,” Giles said. “So we really have three options for those folks.”
Those options, he explained, are general admission seating; social areas and standing-room party decks; and upgraded seats. Essentially, the program puts the fan in the ballpark, but the fan’s level of investment determines where he or she can sit, and how often.
Giles has marketing experience in several other professional sports, mostly in football; he was a vice president for sales and strategy with the San Francisco 49ers. In the NFL, teams market games as “single-day vacations,” he said, but baseball, with its much longer schedule, should fit a more flexible lifestyle.
“The other really interesting part of our industry, currently, is that a lot of clubs basically only offer an 81-game plan for a lot of the best seats,” Giles added. “If you think about the logical chain of incentives there, a fan will say: ‘You know what, I want a good seat. Do I want to go to a lot of games? If so, I may be willing to buy that package. But my game plan is to go and put the vast majority of those seats on the secondary market.’
“And then you’ve got a whole other group of fans that wants to go to one or two games. So they go to the secondary market and buy that premium seat location, and the ticket is bundled with all of these great amenities: access into a club, all-inclusive food and beverage. So you quickly get to a point where you have eroded the value proposition of actually being a member because there’s no marginal benefit to being a member that you can’t buy on the secondary market.”
The A’s new program, Giles hopes, will match the efficiency of the secondary market while also offering membership benefits to every game the fan attends. The overall goal, of course, is to increase attendance for a team with a spirited, but small, fan base.
The A’s are surprise contenders who averaged just 17,763 fans for their first 50 home games this season, ranking 28th in the majors, ahead of only Tampa Bay and Miami. Their inherent challenges — a low payroll and an outdated stadium, with no hope of a new venue until 2023 at the earliest — offer Giles and the team president, Dave Kaval, a chance to innovate.
“What I love about it is creative freedom,” Giles said. “I mean, if you have an entire business that basically all you have to do is monitor it because you know the organic demand is high, you start to get into a pretty risk-averse mind-set. Whereas Dave Kaval and myself, we love to just push the envelope.”