Get up and get down to Portman Road

I've been chatting with the recently-appointed director of communications at Southampton football club, Julius Duncan. Their start this season in the Premiership after two successive promotions from lower divisions was not so easy, but they may well survive the drop after some good results more recently.

It brought back to mind the time many years ago when I got involved with Ipswich Town, a club of similar size. We were asked to come up with ways to grow spectator numbers – to fill the ground to capacity. Those were the heady days at Ipswich when Bobby Robson was manager.

We devised a programme of commercials on local radio, specifically targeted at occasionals, and deployed on Friday evenings and Saturday morning – “Get up and get down to Portman Road,” the jingle roared. It was extraordinarily successful, so much so that we won the radio marketing prize that year.

I imagined that clubs would be queuing up to emulate Ipswich’s initiative. Not so. Commercial success in football is generally imagined, then as now, to be exclusively the result of what happens on the pitch.