Without Fans, the Raiders Put Allegiant Stadium

If a team plays a full season in an empty stadium in Las Vegas, did it really happen? The National Football League’s Raiders brought their iconic 60-year-old brand to their new home stadium in Vegas last year. But Covid-19 didn’t care. After declaring their move from Oakland in 2017, the Raiders played their inaugural Vegas season in front of empty seats at the $1.9 billion Allegiant Stadium in 2020. As players prepare for their first season in front of Vegas fans, the Raiders' marketing efforts serve as a reminder that no new organization —homegrown or transplanted—is owed a fan base. Especially in a pandemic year, you have to work for it. Brandon Clark was the Raiders’ marketing director from the time they broke ground on Allegiant Stadium in 2017 until about a month into their first season. For nearly two years, Clark had a clock in the Raiders’ temporary Vegas offices counting down the days until the new stadium’s completion on July 31, 2020. Personal seat licenses had been sold, Allegiant Air had paid to put its name on the building, and the Raiders ranked fifth in NFL sponsorship money after running dead last for nearly two decades. On March 11, 2020, Clark’s countdown clock nearly stopped. “The NFL season was over, the team headquarters were about to be finished… we've got the table set, and everything's ready,” Clark said. “And then we were obviously blindsided by world events.” Fueled by the Pandemic, Buy Now, Pay Later Is Reaching an Inflection Point Shutdown defense According to Clark, the Raiders debated their marketing efforts amid Covid. Owner Mark Davis ultimately decided to pause marketing activities, public relations and even football news. The move wasn’t unprecedented. Brian Killingsworth was the CMO for the Vegas Golden Knights during their first season as a National Hockey League expansion team in 2017. Nine days before their first game, a gunman killed 58 people attending a concert on the Las Vegas Strip. Killingsworth and his staff immediately halted team marketing. Players, staff, coaches and executives visited blood banks, hospitals, and police and fire stations. The Knights' first game was played as a tribute to victims and first responders. “The game became secondary,” Killingsworth recalled. For the Raiders, it wasn’t certain that there would even be a first game. Team and stadium sponsors were offered new deals. Events for owners of personal seat licenses and suites were put on hold. Still, Clark was tasked with building an avid Raiders fan base in Greater Las Vegas, the state of Nevada and as far afield as Utah. Ideally, Clark would’ve used Raiders players and coaches for events around the region. By comparison, at the same stage, the Golden Knights had launched their “Vegas Born” campaign locally, did a bus tour with players throughout the broadcast region, worked with the Clark County School District and introduced youth hockey clinics throughout the community. “We were able to get a stick in the hands of kids that had never played the sport before,” Killingsworth said. “Those events helped us introduce the Golden Knights to families throughout the region.” Covid-19 made all of that impossible for the Raiders. In a pinch, Clark expanded local television partnerships from an exclusive deal with a Fox affiliate to all four local broadcast channels. The team leaned on stories about stadium construction as it spread billboards throughout the suburbs and sent email updates to ticket holders. However, Davis eventually announced that the Raiders would play their 2020 campaign without fans in the stadium. Personal seat license owners had contract terms reconfigured as Davis fumed. “The optics are terrible: advertising on top of seats belonging to people you're telling they can't come to the game," Davis told ESPN. "I've got to make it up to them, and I will.” NFL Supports LGBTQ+ Communities by Declaring ‘Football Is Gay’ in Pride Ad Making good By the end of the Raiders’ first season, Clark had moved on to Las Vegas-based brand marketing firm ASTOUND Group as chief marketer. The Raiders and Allegiant Stadium are among the group’s clients, and Astound still works on projects within the arena as well as hospitality and entertainment brands. From working with both ASTOUND and, previously, UFC, Clark discerned that perhaps best way to fill Allegiant Stadium isn’t the product on the field—a team that’s had just four winning seasons in the last 20 years—but the amenities off of it. At the no-frills Oakland Coliseum, fans had the game and not much else. In Las Vegas, they have a resort that just happens to host football from time to time, including a Modelo Cantina with three bars, a Twitch lounge filled with esports streaming stations, a Wynn nightclub with live DJs and an MGM casino lounge. “You had an iconic club who had been in Oakland, which is a wildly different market from Las Vegas... whose expectations for entertainment, and what they value, is going to be extremely different from that same constituency that regularly attended games in Oakland,” Clark said. The Raiders’ first preseason game this year drew just over 50,000 fans to a building that seats 65,000. By comparison, the Concacaf Gold Cup soccer final on Aug. 1 drew more than 61,000 and produced aerial shots of Allegiant Stadium that Clark said “gave me chills.” Before the Raiders’ first regular-season game, the stadium hosted the WWE’s SummerSlam event and will host a Guns ‘n’ Roses concert. As Killingsworth and the Golden Knights discovered, the Raiders’ first season with fans—and their stadium’s first year in the public eye—will likely feature plenty of tourists checking out the newest off-strip attraction. If the trend holds, some of those first-year gawkers will turn into local die-hards filling the stands. “I thoroughly enjoyed building and launching the Golden Knights brand in the entertainment capital of the world,” he said. Clark didn’t get chills last year watching the Raiders play in front of an empty stadium. It just felt surreal. He also didn't expect to be at ASTOUND working on the stadium before the Raiders' first regular season home game with fans. But during Clark’s 10 years in Vegas, the rumors he’d heard about the stadium weren’t about the team or the league in it. They were about its potential as a showcase. The Raiders marketed their new home to save their Covid season, and that stadium may be what ensures the franchise has a long honeymoon in Vegas. “I'm sure when the season starts—hopefully, again—it's full of fans,” he said. “And there's aerials, and there's wide shots of the work done in there, and it'll undoubtedly be fulfilling.” Reddit, NFL Extend Their Content Partnership

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NFL's Raiders Rebuild Their Fanbase After a Lonely First Year in Vegas

Covid-19 kept crowds away in 2020, but local marketing and teamwork may fill Allegiant Stadium this season

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Jason Notte