Some of the best promotions are those that don’t cost anything out-of-pocket. Parks and FECs have long been getting “free” promotions by swapping admission tickets with local radio stations and other businesses in return for promotion of the park.

For the past two seasons, Six Flags Over Texas in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has run a promotion similar to this, yet on a vastly bigger scale. It is a promotion that costs the park nothing up front, costs its partner next to nothing up front, builds business for both the park and its partner, and gives literally thousands of individuals the guarantee of receiving a free ticket to the park.

To accomplish this, Six Flags Over Texas partners with a local daily paper that agrees to run advertisements for the park on seven consecutive days, says Tom Williams, the advertising and promotions manager for Six Flags Over Texas. Each advertisement has a coupon that must be clipped out.

“The first advertisement is a full-page, four-color ad,” Williams says. “The ad has a form at the bottom with places to put the coupons that run in the subsequent ads. . . . They look like little certificates. When people complete the form and have all of the coupons taped in place, they mail it to the paper and they receive a free ticket in return.”

After the first full-page advertisement, subsequent ads are smaller. All of the ads are run at no charge. That’s because, although the advertisements are for Six Flags Over Texas and it appears to be a Six Flags promotion, it’s really a promotion for the paper, too, Williams says. “The idea is to get people into the habit of reading the paper every day, and hopefully the paper will gain some subscribers.”

Just as the park pays nothing up front for the promotion, the newspaper is not out any cash, either, except for the cost of rack cards and other point-of-sale materials it prints to advertise the promotion.

Six Flags Over Texas got the idea for the promotion from its sister park, Six Flags Great Adventure. It has run the promotion four times in the past two
seasons, Williams says. “We’ve done it with three newspapers in three markets. We did it in our home market with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Austin American-Statesman, and with the Tulsa World (Okla.).

“Those are all important markets to us. In the Dallas-Forth Worth area, we did it in the winter of 2001 to promote our Christmas season. In Austin we did it in the spring of 2002, and in Tulsa we did it two years in a row, in the spring of 2001 and 2002.

“Each of these were structured in carefully chosen markets for a lot of different reasons,” Williams says. “But mainly it helped us supplement our advertising at a time when we needed some help in the way of a promotion.”

The park used the promotion for its summer season in markets that are some distance away, Williams says. “Tulsa is a fairly distant market for us and a fairly competitive market, and so is Austin, so we wanted to put out a big push in those markets to see if we could capture some of that market, and we were able to tell that it aided our attendance out of those markets.”

But in the park’s home market, Williams says, “we felt that to do it in the heaviest part of our season would be giving too many free tickets out there, so we did it in the fall and the tickets were valid through December 31.”

To limit its exposure, the park offers a fixed number of tickets to the newspaper. If more coupons are redeemed than the newspaper has tickets, the newspaper can buy them from the park at a heavily discounted price, Williams says.

“And the promotion is structured for one ticket per household,” he says. “I’m sure some people were able to get more than one—they used a different address or something like that—but it’s structured for one per household, and that’s part of the rules.”

The newspapers have been pleased with the results, Williams says. “Basically, they said it was one of the greatest promotions they have ever done.”

And for the park? “Interestingly, we did this with three different papers and they all used approximately the same number of tickets—about 20,000 per paper.”

Of course, no one likes to go to an amusement park alone, and with one free ticket per household, the park figures that many of those free tickets brought paying guests with them, not to mention the per caps generated by the free-ticket holders.

Williams says that the promotion was a hit, “but it is a little bit difficult to determine paid attendance generated by it. And especially in the core market, the risk would be that you are converting paid attendance; therefore, timing makes a big difference.”

—Frank Elliott