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When the marketing team of AA baseball team the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp steps up to the plate, they swing for the fences.
The theme of this coming Thirsty Thursday is “You Might Be the Father’s Day,” and the team will be distributing pregnancy tests to fans so that, according to the promotion, “you’ll know if you need to return for Sunday’s Father’s Day game.”
The promotion goes on to promise, “It will be an evening filled with suspense, intrigue and manila envelopes.”
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Entrepreneur spoke with Harold Craw, general manager for the Jumbo Shrimp, about this — yeah, we’ll say it — genius idea.
How are the Jumbo Shrimp doing?
On the field, we’re having a rough first half of the season. We were eliminated from playoff contention for the first half of the season, but the second half starts anew soon. But off the field, we’ve been great. Attendance is up compared to last year and we’ve seen a lot of new fans come through the gates in the first 30 games of this season.
So tell us about You Might Be the Father’s Day. Where did this idea come from?
The idea was born in a weekly brainstorming meeting of front office employees. In our meetings, there’s no such thing as a bad idea. It’s freeform and we encourage everyone to take part. We try to do a lot of tongue-in-cheek things on our Thirsty Thursday game nights, where we get a lot of older college students and young professionals who enjoy some drinks at the game. We generally do things that play off of pop culture songs and funny video clips. So this idea kind of came out of the fact that when you’re a college student, you tend to watch a lot of these shows like Maury Povich and Jerry Springer. At least I did when I was that age!
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So how does it work?
You come to the game on Thursday, and there will be a table set up where you can get your pregnancy test. It will be discreet. We won’t be in your face with a pregnancy test! You can come get one if you want and what you do with it when you leave is completely up to you! Then all night we’ll be playing songs like “Papa Don’t Preach” and “Billie Jean” that touch on that theme. On Sunday, Father’s Day, we’ll focus more on family fun for the whole family. But Thursday will be more for that crowd that likes to have a good laugh with these crazy plays on pop culture.
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Sounds to us like you have a hit on your hands.
I think so, we’ve had a lot of great response from it. I’m sure they’ll be people who will come just for the promotion, and we like to think that we build an atmosphere of fun and energy that will bring them back to see what we’ll do next.
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