Bingo Cards Meet Baseball In Stadium Giveaways
Monday, October 19th, 2009Bingo is about as athletic as we get, but we really enjoyed this story about how bingo card games were introduced at Chicago Cubs games. Winners of the sports bingo game won autographed memorabilia and other neat prizes and the fans absolutely loved it!
This from Matthew Wszolek, Director of sales and promotions, Chicago Cubs:
“Giveaways for us have always been a very important piece of what we do, not necessarily to drive ticket sales but more or less to enhance the Wrigley Field experience. … There’s other ways to skin the promotional cat when it comes to expenses and economic conditions in that you can do something like we did in September of this year where we had Bingo Night. Out of all the years I’ve done stuff here, this is my ninth year, it was the most incredibly well-received promotion we ever did. People received bingo cards when they came in to the game that had one of 51 different elements on it that could happen in a baseball game, not just Cubs-specific. If they covered the card, they won a bingo, which was autographed memorabilia or the chance to throw out a first pitch next year. Fans were interactively playing along the entire game. Instead of just giving them an item that they kept, they got to play along for three hours. People were ridiculously out of their minds, and I got 250 letters from season-ticket holders saying that was the most fun they’ve had at a ball game, especially given the fact that we weren’t playing very well at the time. It made the Wrigley Field experience better.”

