A 1977 promotion in Washington DC where customers could dial a number and hear a recorded pitch from Iggy the elephant. Wonder why Iggy got the job...and how many tickets she sold? |
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
From Don Covington #3
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4 comments:
This promo was conceived to encourage people to purchase in advance via phone. They would call the number and get some recording that encouraged them to purchase tickets by pressing a code and getting switched to a live operator.
We had another version with and Elephant holding a telephone in the trunk and some word play reference to a "Telephant or Elephone."
At the time patrons customarily purchased at the box office or thru one of the three new electronic ticketing systems, Ticketron, Ticketmaster or Select a Seat. I cannot recall which system was in use at the Cap Center at the time but they eventually ended up with a Ticketmaster franchise.
Phone sales were a relatively new marketing avenue in 1977 and we were exploring it with some success.
The phone operators were all housed on a dungeon like room at the DC armory. We used to send new promoters to the dungeon to test their mettle. We figure if they could make it thru 6 weeks in the room they had some fortitude. I recall that Art Ricker's wife Joan managed the room and Shirley Feld was the box office manager.
This may have been the first time we played the Cap Center after the circus war was settled. I recall many problems with the ticketing system and many late nights reconciling the box office statements. We had numerous ticketing problems with duplicate seats being sold due to tickets being pulled for groups and phone sales. Every night we would use a large conference room to reconstruct the seating chart of the arena using the drop count to identify duplicate tickets.
Eventually all the ticketing issues were resolved and we settled into a dual run at the Cap Center and Armory.
Bill Powell
Thanks Bill!
Don Covington
As I recall Bill Ticketron was
bought out by Ticketmaster and
Abe Pollin bought out the whole
shooting match and I believe his
estate still had control over it
after he died but it has become
a part of Live Nation recently
Ticketmaster grew thru franchise arrangement in the early years much like McDonalds and Coke.
As the markets matured they re purchased the franchise rights from the original holders.
Abe Pollin was an early franchisee, as was University of Texas and a handful of others.
Pollin and University of Texas maintained their franchise status and have not sold the rights back to Ticketmaster. To this day the Verizon Center in DC (Pollin's Arena) is a franchise.
Bill Powell
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