How a mayor’s crazy idea put a Chicago suburb into the bowl game spotlight

The timing was perfect. Not only did the Cubs blossom into a perennial contender that would set record ratings on its way to the 2016 World Series crown, but a guy named Donald Trump would make each news station must-see television each night.

Elk Grove Village’s name was out there. And over the next three years, the park’s vacancy rate plummeted. It recently checked in at a record-low 2.6 percent in the second quarter of 2018.

“You’re f—in’ nuts”

Johnson isn’t sure how big of a role marketing played in the industrial park filling up. The strength of the economy obviously played the most important part, as did a bevy of infrastructure improvements made to the highways and interchanges that surround Elk Grove Village.

He was certain, however, that the village would have to remain vigilant in keeping that rate low in future years, which meant maintaining a vital marketing presence.

The only problem was that rates for the nightly Trump and Cubs shows had skyrocketed. Continuing on the same path didn’t present the same value for Elk Grove Village as it once did.

So Johnson started doing some thinking outside of the box.

“I get bored and I think of different things,” Johnson said. “I drive [my staff] nuts with some of the things I come up with.”

Johnson knew he wanted to make a big splash. He looked into running an Elk Grove Village ad during the Super Bowl or Oscars, but both were cost prohibitive, running millions of dollars the village didn’t have for just 30 seconds of airtime.

Then, one day last December, he and his wife were at their second home in Wisconsin. The weather was unseasonably warm. Johnson couldn’t snowmobile or ice fish, so he sat on the couch watching bowl game after bowl game.

During one of the games — he can’t remember which — an idea popped into his head.

“Look at the television,” he said to his wife, who was sitting nearby.

“Yeah, another bowl game,” she said. “What about it?”

“Look at the logo on the 50-yard-line,” Johnson said. “Can you picture ‘Makers Wanted Bowl’ on the 50-yard-line?”

“You’re [bleeping] nuts,” she said.

“That’s all I wanted to hear, thank you,” Johnson said.

Return on investment

Though he faced initial skepticism from his wife and co-workers, Johnson found that his enthusiasm was shared by a few marketing experts whose opinion he values.

From there, they started looking into sponsorship options. ESPN Events manages 15 different bowl games and Elk Grove Village zeroed in on three of them: the Hawaii, New Mexico or Bahamas Bowl.

Johnson didn’t like Hawaii’s late-night slot and New Mexico wasn’t a warm-weather locale like Johnson was picturing in his head, so the Bahamas Bowl — a game previously sponsored by Popeyes Chicken — ended up being the choice.

For $300,000, about half of the village’s annual marketing budget, Elk Grove Village would make sponsorship history as the Bahamas Bowl title sponsor. The village board approved the deal with a unanimous vote at a special board meeting at the end of July and a public announcement was made.

Johnson was staggered by the response.

“Our goal all along was that we wanted 95 percent of the benefit by kickoff,” Johnson said. “In the first 24 hours, we got five thousand times the return.”

The Associated Press wrote an article that landed Elk Grove Village in three of India’s largest newspapers. One of Johnson’s friends was traveling through Berlin and saw his hometown mentioned on “SportsCenter.” All of Chicago’s television stations came out to interview him for the nightly news.

They all asked: Is this really worth it?

“You’re out here, aren’t you?” Johnson asked right back.

In the middle of the initial rush of attention, Johnson took a call from Elk Grove Village’s most famous resident. John McDonough is the president of the Chicago Blackhawks and is known as one of the best marketers in town for his decades of work with the Blackhawks and Cubs.

“Craig, you’re a genius,” McDonough said, according to Johnson. “You got all of this for just $300,000? We have to win the Stanley Cup to get this kind of attention.”

’This is not a junket’

Three weeks before the game, Johnson sits in his office doing yet another interview about the Bahamas Bowl. Framed printouts of internet articles about the game hang on the walls.

The reception from Elk Grove Village residents has been a good one, he said. The news channels and Cubs sponsorships got them used to the idea of advertising the village as a business destination, plus property taxes are staying flat.

Additionally, Johnson has made a point of stating in every interview that any village official wanting to attend the Bahamas Bowl will foot their own travel, hotel and food bills.

That includes him.

“This is not a junket,” Johnson said.

Elk Grove Village has an option to extend its Bahamas Bowl sponsorship to the 2019 game for the same price and must do so by March 1.

Since the novelty of a suburb sponsoring a bowl game will have worn off, it’s unlikely the village will draw the same sort of attention from the media. But Johnson is open to renewing if he sees results from an advertising campaign done by Banner Collective and a six-week internet advertising campaign that is targeting business owners who are also sports fans. If those owners click through to see what Makers Wanted and Elk Grove Village are all about, it will be considered a success.

Even if it doesn’t, that’s OK, too.

“Everything we get from here is gravy,” Johnson said. “[The sponsorship] did everything we wanted it to — it got our name out there, it got our community out there. If you go and Google ‘Makers Wanted,’ Elk Grove Village is going to come up.”

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