Lon Rosen on looking for opportunities to serve the Los Angeles Dodgers fans and collaborating with Japanese artists

Los Angeles Dodgers CMO Lon Rosen speaks during the "The Right Stuff - Impact Marketing Roundtable" at the Entertainment Marketing Summit.

Transcript

00:00What is an opportunity to kind of set up a new playbook for you all?

00:05Well, again, we're lucky we have those opportunities quite often.

00:10We, for some reason, bobbleheads are a big fan favorite here in Los Angeles.

00:16You know, other people, other teams come to us and go, why is it so special there?

00:20I've got to admit, I don't know, it's something that fans like here.

00:23Well, when we signed Shohei, we said, we'll do multiple bobbleheads and see how it turns out.

00:30Last year, we did two of them.

00:33And the first one, we said it's for the first 40,000 fans.

00:38And our game started at 7 o'clock at night.

00:41And people were lining up at night in the morning down the streets all around Dodger Stadium.

00:46And within that release, we also did a limited release where in the first one, we did a gray jersey.

00:53Which, within hours, was on eBay for $5,000 a piece.

00:59We did a second release of a bobblehead last year.

01:03And we put a gold one in there.

01:04It was just gold paint.

01:06And people lined up at 9 in the morning.

01:09So we all got together this year and go, oh, we did two last year.

01:13We're going to do four this year.

01:14And so we've taken advantage of that opportunity.

01:18We also have another one because of, really, our Japanese fan base.

01:23And now it's transcended to all our fan bases.

01:26There's a very famous Japanese artist named Murakami.

01:31And about a month and a half ago, before we went to Japan, there was a limited release of Murakami Dodger products.

01:39There was hats, jerseys, T-shirts, hoodies.

01:44And, again, we had the lines at 9 o'clock in the morning.

01:47And it sold out immediately.

01:49So we all put our heads together.

01:51And on Monday night at Dodger Stadium, we have a Japanese heritage night.

01:55And we reached out to Murakami and said, hey, do you want to do a limited release that day?

01:59And, lo and behold, he's putting out T-shirts and hoodies and slides.

02:05And I'm sure people are lining up at Dodger Stadium right now.

02:09Again, we look at the opportunity where we can serve our fans best and what we think they want.

02:14And we do a lot of surveys to try to find out what it wants.

02:17But, you know, for us, we have a program every day.

02:21We have a – our games are almost daily.

02:24We have 162 games and 81 home games.

02:27So every day we have to recreate ourselves.

02:29So what I tell everybody that works for me is I want you to look at 81 separate events.

02:34So we're always coming up with different ways to encourage people to come to our stadium

02:38because it's a big stadium to fill and a lot of dates to fill.

02:41So thank you all if you come.

02:43And if you haven't, buy tickets.