Market the A's Better, Part II

Last week, we started our series highlighting the many ideas that the A's owners could be doing -- but, sadly, have not done -- to market the team better to Bay Area baseball fans.

Here is Part II:

Foreign-language highlight shows: Take a simple version of your monthly "All A's" program that airs on CSN California and translate it to Cantonese or Mandarin and air it on the Bay Area's many Chinese-language TV channels. There are many predominantly Chinese neighborhoods around the Bay Area, and those residents could be contacted via their TVs with this idea. The Chinese-language program will be 30-minute advertisement reaching out to that community. If it proves popular, it could be expanded for other Asian languages. A Spanish-language version also should be done, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands of Nor-Cal's Spanish-speaking residents. This can be simply accomplished. It might be as simple as finding one person to rewrite the English version into the foreign-language version and then narrating the script himself or herself. It can be done cheaply and quickly. Again, it's all about reaching out to previously untapped markets.

Set up small ticket-selling kiosks where there is high foot traffic: BART stations have a ton of wasted space. In San Francisco BART stations, Peet's Coffee and the Chronicle have set up spots to sell their wares. The A's should do the same, especially in the well-traveled BART stations along Oakland's Broadway Street, which have a lot of available room and open wall space for an enterprising business willing to think outside the advertising box. This can also be done at shopping malls in Walnut Creek or San Leandro, or at Oakland's Kaiser Center office building, which has thousands of employee foot traffic by Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland.

Send ticket salespersons to knock on business' doors in the East Bay: Not residential homes, but rather visit merchants during business hours to sell discounted tickets. It may sound outdated and intrusive, but the Giants did this in the '90s in San Francisco and it just helped plant a seed of thoughts in potential customers’ minds: "The team has a presence. They want to be here. They’re trying."

It’s the "small ball" version of business, but it all adds up.