Professional arena football team LA Kiss, with less than a month till the start of its inaugural season, has a flurry of marketing activities in the works.
The team’s owners, a group that includes Kiss rock band members Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, have hired Miller PR in Los Angeles to promote the team and bring audiences to the Honda Center in Anaheim.
The agency has attracted the “attention of national media outlets from the likes of USA Today and the Today Show to ESPN, Rolling Stone and Hollywood Reporter, Variety and hudreds of others,” said Schuyler Hoversten, president of LA Kiss. “That has been a key component of building our brand awareness, because we are a new team, and we can’t even come close to the marketing budgets of the many other pro sports teams in this market. We rely heavily on publicity, as well as the celebrity appeal of our owners to get ourselves unpaid exposure.”
A three-member in-house creative team put together ads running on what Hoversten said are “[hundreds] of bus shelters and 75 billboards” in L.A. and Orange counties in an outdoor media buy from Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc. in Los Angeles.
LA Kiss has also brokered a deal with KCAL 9 and CBS 2 that gives the TV stations broadcast rights to five home games and three road games through July. The stations will also air the team’s first 30-second TV spot this week, and according to Hoversten, it will feature “Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley having a baby.”
“The rationale behind that is we can do your very traditional, ‘Hey, pro football is back, you wanted it, you got it, season tickets are $99, call here,’ ” he said. “Those messages are going to get lost, because we don’t have millions of dollars to run the repetition in terms of something that will get remembered.”
The TV spot will run during “male-oriented” programming on ESPN and possibly during the March Madness NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It will also have social media and online components.
LA Kiss also forged a promotion deal with several national and local businesses, including the Spartanburg, S.C.-based Denny’s restaurant chain, Santa Ana-based Freedom Communications Holdings Inc. and London-based Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.
Got Sure-Fire Pitch?
“Got milk?” isn’t going anywhere, at least in California.
The San Clemente-based California Milk Processor Board announced it will stick with the popular slogan, even though a national milk trade group has decided to move away from its “Milk Mustache” campaign, which employed the slogan, after more than 20 years and develop a new tag line.
The slogan was created by agency San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in 1993. It was adopted in 1995 by the national Milk Processor Education Program in Washington, D.C., for use in its campaign.
Now the national group has switched to the new “Milk Life” slogan to “promote increased consumption of milk” and is spending $50 million on an ad campaign that will include print, digital, TV and retail promotions.
Steve James, the Milk Processor Board’s executive director, issued a statement to reassure “got milk?” slogan fans that all is well in California.
“To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the end of ‘got milk?’ are greatly exaggerated,” James said. “ ‘Got milk?’ and its consumer equity continue to be very much alive in California. We wish [the Milk Processor Education Program] luck, but the fact remains that the California board anticipates using our beloved slogan for many years to come.”
The first “got milk?” commercial, “Aaron Burr,” featured a history aficionado listening to a radio call-in show while eating a mouthful of peanut butter. He’s unable to answer the $10,000 trivia question because he runs out of milk.
The commercial “remains one of the most popular and easily recalled spots in advertising history,” according to the Milk Processor Board.
Huntington Beach-based agency Grupo Gallegos handles the Latino market campaign, titled “¿Toma Leche?”
Bits and Pieces
Irvine-based Auction.com hired David Thompson as its chief marketing officer. … Adaptive Medias Inc. in Irvine hired Kevin Yamano as its new vice president of product marketing. … Ian Foulke has joined Electric in San Clemente as global lifestyle and surf marketing manager.
