Footy Marketing Disasters
April 6th, 2007Footy is here.
With it comes TV ad blitzes, membership drives, footy player PAs at kids hospitals and a major upturn in the fortunes of Melbourne brothels and Perth crack houses.
Footy today is a professional, polished sport behind the scenes and on the field. The marketing and PR departments are much more advanced and promotional events are more sophisticated than the traditional free club flag with every pig’s trotter sold from the pie van.
It wasn’t always this way. In times long past footy club marketing exercises were often ill-considered and sometimes life-threatening. Ejacunation takes you back in time to relive some of footy’s greatest marketing and PR disasters.
The Cats are On Fire
One of the earliest marketing exercises involved the Geelong FC. The tagline “The Cats are On Fire” was floated for the 1978 season. Innocent and blandly exciting enough to have the club president pause snorting lines of battery acid off the buttocks of Chango, his Philipino lady-boy, and nod his agreement the campaign was approved.
Unfortunately the pitch left out one of the major planks in the strategy: the launching into the crowd, by trebuchet, of dozens of cats on the opening siren of the season’s first home game. All of which were first doused in kerosene and set alight.
To the delight of the newly appointed Manager of Brand Communications, within seconds the crowd were screaming “The Cats are On Fire”. Then “the stand is on fire”, “my child is on fire” followed by the arrest of the marketing department.
The only Bombers I want to see are from Essendon!
Riding the coat-tails of Australia’s love affair with cashed-up Japanese tourists the Essendon Football Club decided on a novelty, vox pop ad with staged interviews on the streets of Nagasaki featuring the tag line “The only Bombers I want to see are from Essendon!” Objections were howled down as political correctness gone mad.
Hilarious when we look back at it now, but at the time the the repercussions were far-reaching, including a Japanese ban on export to Australia of anime tapes and used schoolgirl panties. The ban is technically still in place. Kevin Sheedy was given a pay increase.
You Love the Tigers, the Tigers Love You
Raffling off the stripper at a bucks night was common enough in the 70s, but the Richmond Football Club took this one step further in their attempt to place the fan back at the centre of their promotions and raise the profile of selected players.
Back strain and venereal disease eventually put a halt to the weekly raffling of invitations to days-long clubhouse orgies featuring a different player at each event. This forced fans back to pubs and nightclubs for a shot at a getting into a player’s dacks.
Sydney or Bust
With the simple brief that the Swans wanted to “hit town with a bang”, the Sydney Swans marketing department planted explosives on the Harbour Bridge, Sydney Tower and the opera house.
The slaughter of 8,000 people in a new team’s home town is a PR disaster on a scale second only to the unveiling of Port Adelaide’s mascot Tommy ‘Thunda’ Power, The Super Charged Super Tradesman.
Derryn Hinch and Melbourne FC
In answer to Collingwood’s Pink Pies initiative which embraces the club’s gay, lesbian and transgender followers, each year Derryn Hinch is given a free Melbourne FC membership and free beer at all games. While at games he usually spends the time contemplating the blackness of his soul.
Beauty Over Substance
It wasn’t all disaster for footy marketing’s early years. Oh no.
Many years ago the marketing whizzes at Whitten Oval brainstormed several new slogans.
A collective sigh of relief greeted the news that the slogan “Glory is fleeting, Passion is forever” beat out the synonymous but less poetic “We’re going to be crap this year, but you should be used to it by now”.
I’m thinking the summer holidays in high school, before people had the internet in their homes. I’m thinking late nights because there was no reason to get up early. And I’m definitely thinking SBS.
This 70’s Italian horror flick does little to disguise its true intentions: To show us the boobs and nipple of twenty year old women, all of whom are rediculously hot in spite of their funny haircuts. In the opening minutes of the film, the heroine gets her dress cut so her brests are showing. For the rest of the film, her tits hang out from that rip. Everyone has sex with everyone, even when it makes not sense to what shred of a plot was dreamed up. This is as good a starting point to sexy SBS films as any.
To be honest this film is only included to bring some semblance of culture to the list. It is not a Horror with Tits, nor is it a Comedy with Tits, or indeed a Horror/Comedy with Tits. This is a drama, a story of love lost and… look I can’t remember what it’s about. Something sticks in my mind about a count selling his butterfly collection, but mostly I remember the handful of hot sex scenes with the main actress who was stupidly, stupidly attractive.
Look. This film begins with a shot of a girl masturbating in the ladies room before she begins work for the day. Apart from that, the best thing about this one is it has somehow been classified as ‘kooky’, ‘guilty pleasure’ and ‘disarmingly exhuberant’. So you can watch the lesbian bath sex scene without fear of being uncultured.
LESBIAN VAMPIRES GET IT ON. GET IT ON. Er. It’s another 70’s italian horror film with naked women and shit. Use your imagination. Also, like Weatherwoman, it’s become a cult classic, mostly thanks to creepy nerds like us justifying our shortfalls as human beings. Giddy up.
Two years ago SBS showed a rerun of this classic on a Saturday night. I hadn’t seen it in years, and I was not going to miss out. Only problem: A friend of mine from the Army was on holidays and on THAT VERY NIGHT he had organised a drinks evening out on the town. I know it was going down, so even though I had barely seen this mate in a year or so, I avoided him like the plague.
I parked in front of Lleyton’s house and wept a little, fondling the Adelaide Crows jersey I had found in his car last year. I recalled how I had seen Bec and the baby while I checked the car’s glove box. I waved but Bec mustn’t have seen me and went back into her house. I went up to the house and banged on the window but she just lay huddled on the floor, crying and dialling someone on the phone. A bit rude but I didn’t make an issue of it. I knew that women got a bit vague and emotional for the first year or so after giving birth.
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1337 Haxxer: If any server issues arise, will wait 39 millionths of a second before denouncing the sites technical support as complete amateurs and giving his own unrequested and impractical advice. Usually a high school virgin. If this is you: stop doing this annoying shit or I will go into your WoW server and stomp your puny level 20 Gnome into the dirt with my level 40 Orc. You fucking nerd.
Bastard Admin: Kicks any user who gets the better of him in an argument. Thinks he has a cutting, ironic wit. Claims to own the internet rights to all of his users and nukes competing sites by running to their web-hosts or geek mates who know a thing or two about DDOS attacks. Stays up until all hours drinking Irish whiskey and handing out infractions. Hates everyone.