NHL Winter Classic=Marketing Brilliance

Happy New Year's Day to you all.  I hope the new year finds you in good health and good spirits  While many of you today will probably be enjoying the spectacles that are the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl, I will also have an interest in a sporting event of a different kind.  The 3rd annual NHL Winter Classic on NBC.  This year the Philadelphia Flyers will face the Boston Bruins from Fenway Park at 1 PM ET/10 AM PT.  That's right, the Winter Classic is an outdoor hockey game!  The modern day version of the Winter Classic was introduced in 2008 when the Pittsburgh Penguins battled the Buffalo Sabres at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo, New York.  Let me tell you, it was a sight to see and is a perfect example of effective sports marketing.

                                         2008 Winter Classic at Ralph Wilson Stadium.

Today, the NHL is probably the least popular of the four major North American sports.  One major reason could be the scarcity of the networks which many of the games are available on.  Some of the regular season games are shown on Versus Network, which many people don't have access to.  There are also regional games available throughout the country on regional sports channels for a certain area, such as Fox Sports West which carries Los Angeles Kings games.

Based on what I just described, you would think the NHL is in big trouble.  That's not so however, with the Winter Classic.  This is the one regular season hockey game you can look forward to each year.  Like the football games on the NFL Network, the Winter Classic is one of those unique sporting events that to my knowledge, is only shown on one network: NBC.  What also makes it special is that it only occurs once every year in a setting that is completely different than a normal hockey game.  It's as if this is the way hockey is supposed to be played.  So before you settle in to watch the latest edition of the Rose Bowl today, I invite you to experience a unique sporting that is unlike anything you will ever see.

                                         Fenway Park (below)-site of 2009 NHL Winter Classic.

Photos courtesy:

Wikimedia Commons and Falling Heavens under CC-BY license
Wikimedia Commons and Jared C. Benedict under GNU Free Documentation License