How do you turn a collegiate summer baseball team with 24 home games a year into a 365-day multiplatform brand? Putting a marketing agency in charge doesn’t hurt.
When the Portland Pickles were sold in 2017 after just two years in existence, the headlines generally featured new co-owner and former Seattle Seahawks punter Jon Ryan. Hidden within those announcements was Alan Miller, founder of the Travel With Purpose media network, music magazine Filter and, more recently, the Collide Agency.
The acquisition launched the agency’s sports marketing branch, Collide Sports, and the Pickles and their Portland market became an incubator. It broke the minor league bobbleheads-and-fireworks template for promotions, populating the Pickles’ calendar with events including Tattoo Tuesday, Exploding Whale Night and Karen Night. Instead of using mascot Dillon T. Pickle to hug and distract kids, Collide gave Dillon a complete and often PG-13 social media narrative.
When fans raise their chairs over their heads for every run scored, it isn’t a tradition: It’s a tattoo-and-merch-worthy meme.
“Part of the reason why I love Portland so much is that people will support each other’s eccentricities and passion points more than a lot of markets do,” Miller said. “That’s a really valuable asset for us—[the ability] to try things.”
As a result, a team that plays in a 2,400-capacity stadium in a public park has more than 125,000 followers across all social media channels. By comparison, the Worcester Red Sox—the Boston Red Sox’s AAA affiliate that plays an hour from Fenway Park and features players a step removed from the major leagues—has fewer than 90,000 on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok combined.
That not only helped the Pickles create a national and international presence, but allowed Collide to expand its sports empire.
In June 2020, during the first summer of the pandemic, the Pickles established the four-team Wild Wild West League for collegiate players and held games at one site in Portland. By March 2021, with pandemic restrictions still in force, the agency acquired the Cleburne Railroaders of the American Association of Professional Baseball and expanded the Wild Wild West league to Texas. In February, Collide launched Official League, its own merchandise label for the agency’s teams and other sports partners.
Whether the Pickles are in Mexico playing exhibition games and recruiting talent, or at South By Southwest mingling with Collide’s media and music clients, they’re providing the agency an outlet for ideas that are both hyperlocal and nationally replicable. As marketing agencies and sports marketers attempt to personalize their messages and explore narrower subsets of broader sports audiences, Collide and the Portland Pickles provide a course in sports for non-sports fans.
“If you go to a [Pickles] game, not a ton of people are actively keeping score,” said Ross Campbell, Pickles general manager and Official League’s director of business development. “We have those fans and need those fans, but more so people are going just to enjoy themselves, bring coworkers or friends and and get away from all the crazy stuff that’s going on in the world.”
Dillon with the public
Before their 2022 Opening Day on May 29, the Pickles hadn’t played a game in the U.S. since August 2021. During that time, Dillon T. Pickle:
- Feuded with online trolls
- Got into trouble for a questionable pic (he claims it was a thumbs up)
- Went to the Dominican Republic
- Was misplaced by Delta baggage handlers on the way back and stolen off a porch
- Was recovered with the help of various Portland brands
- Went to SXSW
- Endured a terrible bout of “allergies” on 4/20
Like many who killed time during the pandemic, Dillion and Pickles staff were extremely online as variants appeared and Covid infections spiked. However, that prolific online presence boosted the Pickles’ profile both at home and farther afield.
“We had a lot more spare time when the pandemic first hit,” said Campbell, who’s also one of the voices behind the Pickles’ social media. “When you have that much spare time, and you don’t really know what the future is going to look like, you sort of need to adapt and figure out a way to either maintain relevance or just do things that are productive.”
While Campbell said just about “everyone” at Collide Sports determines Dillon’s narrative and social media presence, he notes that Kayla Knapp—Collide’s social media and content director who filled a similar role for Portland’s soccer teams, the Timbers and Thorns—joins assistant GM Parker Huffman and director of operations Colleen Schroht in formulating strategy. When an idea comes up, it’s put to a vote and the group decides if it’s “adapting to what’s happening in culture, media and our sport.”
Even Miller occasionally weighs in with ideas.
“It’s a great sandbox to play with and try things, and not just for the things you see but from an analytics perspective, from a social media buying perspective, from a digital perspective,” Miller said. “I’ve always said from a marketing perspective, ‘You tell me one brand that’s gone out there and been brave in culture marketing and failed.’ It’s very, very rare.”
Miller cautioned that what works for the Pickles won’t work in every market. Few know that better than their partners in the West Coast League. A 16-team league that spans the Pacific Northwest and portions of British Columbia in Canada and includes markets as big as Victoria, British Columbia on Vancouver Island and as small as Walla Walla—where total annual attendance (15,708) is roughly half the city’s population (32,951). The league’s commissioner, Rob Neyer, worked for premier baseball statistician Bill James before writing for ESPN, SB Nation and FoxSports.com.
Neyer noted that Miller has been named his league’s executive of the year in previous years and is uniquely suited to building its brand, given that it’s what he does for a living. He suspects the team has greater national reach than any collegiate team in the country, which requires a social media presence that pushes boundaries and employs top-tier talent.
“Every team targets their social media, their messaging, their merchandise, to their market,” Neyer said. “So I think that most teams would say, ‘We can’t all be the Pickles, but we sure love what they do.’”
Even the Pickles exercise caution before letting their mascot enjoy Oregon’s legal cannabis or take compromising photos. From repeated interactions with fans both online and at events, the Pickles social media team has developed a formula for flexing the public’s patience without breaking it. Even before making simple gestures like supporting the Calgary Flames’ pickle-juice-drinking player Blake Coleman during the National Hockey League’s playoffs, the team asks if it makes sense for the brand.
“Just try to be as smart as you can,” Campbell said. “Don’t take unnecessary risks, and then also think about, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and ‘Is this important to people?’”
Putting a lid on it
During the pandemic, Downtown Portland emptied its office space and many of its venues and restaurants as the city struggled to halt the spread of Covid-19. Boards went up on vacant and derelict commercial properties as services of all sorts diminished.
Then, in 2020, the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis resulted in weeks of protests along a six-block radius near Portland’s Justice Center and federal building. Local and federal police unleashed copious amounts of tear gas in response, driving away what few visitors the area had. In November 2021, after the nation had turned Downtown Portland into its sounding board for political grievance, the Pickles opened a store and bar a block away from the protest grounds. The team dubbed it The Pickle Jar and used it as an extension of the merchandise strategy it adopted during the pandemic.
Coupled with the Pickles’ social media, online merchandise sales represented a tether to its fans in Portland and a means of welcoming new ones across the globe. Seeing a dearth of quality merchandise for fans of not only the Pickles and collegiate baseball but Mexican baseball, lower-tier men’s and women’s soccer, rugby and hockey, Miller and Collide began making hats in February and releasing them in limited-edition drops.
“We’re really trying to create energy and create moments for the teams to be able to increase their visibility in the marketplace, and to also create a product that their fans are going to love,” Miller said. “It does a lot of things for them that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to activate on their own: Each one of these hats tells a really great story that the team is very proud of.”
Their Official League merchandise brand now has nearly 20 team partners and has worked with South by Southwest, artist NBA Paint and rockabilly punk band Social Distortion.
“[Miller] really wanted to create Official League to marry art and music and sport and really connect the lifestyles; they don’t have to be siloed,” said Monique Gilbert, vp of account management at Collide. “If these are the same people that have a lot of the same passions, then sports doesn’t need to be over here and music doesn’t need to be over here and art doesn’t need to be over there. We can bring them all together.”
A pick of barrels
At Walker Stadium in Portland’s Lents neighborhood, the Pickles’ promotions have also aimed to combine Collide’s cultural touchstones. The team has invited Collide-connected bands to play its Rockin’ the Walk event and gave Grammy-winning Portland band Portugal the Man its own day at the stadium. It serves cheesecake to fans who dress as Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and Sophia on Golden Girls-themed Shady Pines Night and hands out free rugs to the first 200 fans on the Big Lebowski-inspired Dude Night.
The National Basketball Association’s Portland Trail Blazers show up for their own night in July, as do Portland-based professional wrestlers and members of the Thorns and Timbers. The team even invites representatives of other brands and their social media teams in for Friends of Twitter Night in June. When faced with doing a fireworks night or commemorating the day in November 1970 when the Oregon State Highway Commission opted to remove an eight-ton beached whale from the coast with dynamite, the Pickles crew will choose vengeful flying whale blubber every time.
“At the end of the day, we’d rather do Exploding Whale Night. Because that’s something that’s very specific to the community to Oregon,” Miller said. “It’s a funny story that some people know and some people don’t, and it gives us an opportunity to activate something really fun and interesting.”
For their efforts, the Pickles drew an average of 1,833 fans per game over 24 West Coast League games. That was not only the highest attendance in the league, but roughly on par with the 1,871 drawn each game by the Hillsboro Hops, a Single A affiliate of Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks that plays in a suburb 20 miles from the Pickles’ stadium.
But Lents, Portland and the Pacific Northwest aren’t the only places the Pickles have left their mark. While Collide and its clients generally make annual appearances at South By Southwest in Austin, this was the first year that it brought Collide Sports and Dillon with them.
The agency threw Dillon his own party at Idle Hands on Rainey Street. The St. Patrick’s Day affair made Dillion a favorite of the local press, but it also clarified the Pickles’ place among other agency clients. The Pickles and Collide’s other sports properties share space in the portfolio with Hard Rock Hotels, Doc Martens, Silver Oak Cellars, StubHub, Showtime and pickle-friendly industry group The International Fresh Produce Association. Dillon made appearances with each of the brands, even jumping on stage with Portland band Surfbort before heading into the mosh pit.
Gilbert runs Collide’s SXSW efforts and has known Miller for roughly 20 years after working in the music industry with him. During that time, she said, he’d always talked about wanting to own a minor league baseball team and talked about its romantic, community-oriented appeal. With Miller predicting a growing presence for his teams at SXSW in future years, Gilbert sees potential benefits for the agency.
“With a minor league team, and having it be part of an agency, it gives us the opportunity to be really creative and the opportunity to be hyperlocal,” she said. “It’s not always like bigger is better: It’s sometimes about getting right to the communities.”
