I don't get this at all.
Surely NRL (and other codes) looks at AFL in awe in terms of how they get such big crowds and popularity. How did that happen in Melbourne? How is it the Swans went from 8k crowds to 40k crowds? Why haven't the Storm done the same? How do the Lions get a comparable crowd to the Broncos?
Here we have an incite into the type of thing they do and it gets dismissed. Something is working for them. They don't get big crowds by accident. Did they always do this kind of advertisement in Melbourne and is that why (or partly why) they are so obsessed with AFL?
NRL should want to know the answers to these questions.
I am in the camp of demanding the NRL copy everything the AFL do.
Anyone who thinks that advertising doesn't work is a massive fool.
TRILLIONS of dollars are spent on it for a reason. I remember when I was a young wee fella at school our teacher showed us how MacDonald's when it first launch its American nation wide advertising campaign they were spending $1m a day(back in the 70's) an unheard of figure back then. This was done with an overhead projector and slide presentation. The before and after figures were amazing. Needless to say they ended up blowing all their competitors away and the rest as they say is history.
Every majorly successful corporation in the world spends tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions a year on marketing. Any fool can deduce that if it didn't work they would never spend that sort of money, would they?
The NRL have rocks in their heads with the way they promote(don't promote) the game. Huge folly and playing right into the hands of their major competitor. Which within a decade or two, will be so far in front of the NRL and all other sports in this country that it won't even see the NRL as any sort of major competition anymore. They will own the major sporting landscape in this country with out fear or favor.
I predicted all that is happening right now years ago, and the same blind and in denial fools tried shutting me down back then. Well we are well on the way to being the second string banana of the football codes now by any unbiased measure. It is only a matter of time before we will be so far behind that 1. we will never be able to catch up and 2. most (young) Australians won't want to and won't care because they follow the number 1 sport in the country which they know as AFL. League will be that sport that their father or uncle followed and when they themselves have children, league won't even be a factor in most Australian household lives.
See how it works? League won't ever die completely. It is just a slow withering to the point of irrelevance for most Australian. Sure it will have it's followers, but only as Union is today with most Australians. If there is some big game on with a bit of hype, people will tune in, but then go back to their number one love...their AFL team.
Not all that hard to see what is coming in a few short decades. Pretty straight forward really, just as night follows day.
