Hitting a Home Run with the Honus Wagner T206 Card

Client:

Treat Entertainment, a sports promotion and marketing organization looking to increase sales of trading cards (1995–1996).

Assignment:

Treat asked us to publicize a nationwide giveaway designed to spur sales for their primary product, trading cards. The promotion’s grand prize was a $500,000 baseball card, the 1909 Honus Wagner T206 — then and now considered the most valuable baseball card in the world (it recently sold at an eBay auction for a record $1.265 million).

Strategy/ Implementation:

Our main goal was to drive sales for Treat’s special “2 for $1” packs sold at Wal-Mart stores nationwide. That promotion was an attempt to recoup loses from the 1994 strike-shortened baseball season, which had caused trading card sales to plummet. We also created a publicity strategy that would maintain the contest “fever” throughout the four-month promotion, which included monthly card prizes valued at $5,000 each. To publicize the contest, we created multiple publicity opportunities that would appeal to a diverse audience ranging from sports fans to avid Wal-Mart shoppers. With Baseball Hall of Fame member Brooks Robinson as our spokesperson, we conducted media tours each month in participating markets. We staged events for each of the monthly prize winner announcements (a Chicago Blackhawks hockey game, a winner’s house in North Carolina and Wal-Mart stores in Wisconsin and Maine) and extended trade media interest by publicizing the next month’s prize as well as the monthly winners. To maximize publicity generated by the grand prize, we arranged for the Honus Wagner card to be given away on an exclusive edition of CNN’s “Larry King Live” right before the 1996 spring training season.

Results:

At the end of the promotion, card sales at Wal-Mart were up 418 percent from the previous year. Our celebrity spokesperson had appeared on CNN, PrimeSports and multiple local TV news programs in Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta and Dallas. We generated more than 2,000 newspaper articles nationwide. Members of the card trade applauded the publicity generated by the promotion as a “boost to the hobby.”