Steve LaCroix, the Vikings vice president of sales and marketing, had a brief media update about the ticket sales. The Vikings have until 3:30 p.m. Saturday to sell their remaining 3,100 tickets to avoid a TV blackout. Here are excerpts from LaCroix’s briefing:

“We had a good productive 24 hours of about 5,000 seats and now we’re within striking distance,” he said. “We still have a big 24 hours to go but a lot of momentum.”

(More confident now that they will avoid blackout?) “I do. It’s still going to be a short night from that standpoint. But to go from 8,000 down to 3,000 is a big jump. We just need to let fans know, you’ve got to continue to buy tickets because we’re not there yet.”

(Will you get corporate help?) “There’s no corporate buyout in our back pocket, whether it be a company or Fox. It’s got to be through our fans and through our sales channels on that end.”

(So has Fox said no?) “At this point, there’s nothing that they’ve committed. They’re obviously up to speed on where we are numbers-wise. We are not going to pack up later tonight and think that they’re there to help us out. At this point it is not going to happen.”

(What has response from Philly fans been?) Obviously the promotion and exposure has been big. I guess we’ll find out on game day. We’re still concerned there’s going to be a lot of green in the building. That’s why these last 3,000 seats are important that they’re Vikings fans and not Eagles fans.”

(Any unique plans with last push?) There’s no retail promotions or anything. Everything that we’ve been doing this last week and even before that is kind of hitting the peak. Ticketmaster sent out 1.2 million emails over the last 24 hours and all the media coverage is helping.”

(Caused you to rethink how you approach playoffs in the future?) We do it pretty much the same as everyone in the league. The tough part is you’re renewing for playoffs during December when you don’t know if you’re in the playoffs or not. By the time you know you’re in — in our case and a lot of cases — it’s Sunday and you’re going to play six to seven days later. You have to do it before you really know where the season is going to go.”

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.