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Date: December 5, 1988

Location: TRENTON

Title: Hibbert Finds Plenty of Profits in Professional Fun and Games Author: George M. Taber

Subject: A chance conversation after church led to a successful venture in sports promotions

When Jimmy, a 12 year-old football fanatic from Akron, writes a letter to his beloved Cleveland Browns team, the letter is answered from Trenton by the Hibbert Group. When Bob, a certified baseball nut in Seattle, wants the latest World Series program to continue his collection, he writes to the Hibbert Group. When Joe Sixpack, the Los Angeles Laker fan, wants an All Star pro basketball program, he writes to the Hibbert Group.

Hibbert, an old-line Trenton printing firm, has turned the American love affair with professional sports into a big time business. This year some 10% of the company”s $25 million in revenues will come from sports sales. Four years ago, sports accounted for only 5% of company business.

The Trenton company provides a wide range of services for a wide range of professional sports teams. It does not matter whether the team passes, dribbles or hits. This year Hibbert will distribute some four million copies of Monday night football promotion material for companies like Miller beer. It also sells programs for the baseball All Star Game and World Series, the football Super Bowl and the basketball All Star Game. It answers the fan mail for all 28 professional football teams. In addition, Hibbert handles special promotions for companies like RJR when it wants to sell Superbowl hats. Says John Arnold, director of sports marketing: “Not many companies can provide the across-the-board services that Hibbert can.”

Hibbert has been doing business in Trenton since 1881, when it was founded as a print shop by William Hibbert. The privately held company came into the Moonan family in 1936 and was headed by James J. Moonan from 1936 to 1966. His son Robert has been running the firm since then.

Although it began in business as simply a job printer, Hibbert now calls itself a “marketing support” firm. It still does printing, but now the firm also runs direct mail campaigns, fulfillment services and meeting planning and support. Today only about 15% of the company”s revenues come from printing. The rest is from a variety of marketing services.

The venture into professional sports started with casual conversations after Sunday church. Some 12 years ago, Robert Moonan began talking one morning after church in Morrisville, Pa. with Bernard Koehler, vice president and treasurer of NFL Properties, the organization that handles licensing, programs and other services for all professional football teams. NFL Properties was uphappy doing business in New York City because of high taxes, steep rents and the trouble of getting reliable workers. Moonan and Koehler soon struck a deal for Hibbert to take over the job of warehousing, printing and mailing products for NFL Properties.

The sports marketing business quickly began gathering force like a wave cheer at Shea stadium. In 1976 Hibbert began producing football viewing guides. These are four page or so mini-programs that give fans at home a rundown on the two competing teams and the coaching staffs. Such firms as The Travelers Insurance and Oscar Mayer use the viewer”s guides as sales promotion material and distribute them to their dealers, salesmen or favorite clients. The sponsor can also put its ad on the back cover. The first guide was produced for the 1976 Super Bowl. Hibbert now prints and distributes guides for all 16 Monday night games plus a season kick-off guide and one for the Super Bowl.

Six years ago, Hibbert got into the program business. Ads aired during the World Series or the Super Bowl offer fans the chance to buy the official program of that event if they write to a post office box in Trenton. The name Hibbert is never mentioned.

Last year the company sold 36,000 World Series programs, 18,000 baseball All Star ones and 54,000 Super Bowl programs. Other printers handle the actual production of the souvenir, which is exactly the same as the one sold at the stadium right down to the last beer advertisement. Hibbert merely takes care of the promotion and handling. This year for the first time the company sold the program for the basketball All Star game by mail.

For next January”s Super Bowl game in Miami, Hibbert is also offering a special service that will get the program to fans in front of the TV set in time for the kickoff. Many firms hold staff sales meetings or other promotion events around the Super Bowl, and Hibbert will make bulk air shipments to them so that the program is included in the football festivities.

Hibbert responds to some 130,000 letters a year from happy and irate supporters alike. Faced with the impossible task of personally answering all the mail, NFL Properties turned to Arnold for help. He studied the mail and discovered that the vast majority involved questions on about ten basic topics (example: how big is the stadium). Hibbert now puts together an information package that is sent to anyone who writes. This gives basic facts about the team, including recent first draft choices, previous records and, yes, the seating capacity of the stadium. It also contains pictures of key players, a team decal and a schedule. Fans seem to be overwhelmed that someone responded, and they forget that their question may not actually have been answered. In addition to handling the fan mail, Hibbert puts out the post-game press releases for seven professional football teams.

Hibbert will also take care of special sports promotions for companies. For the past four years RJR/Nabisco has offered a Super Bowl cap to people who send in a certain number of cigarette packages and a cash payment. The first year RJR charged only $1 dollar plus ten package wrappers for the cap. It expected to get about 20,000 responses. Both RJR and Hibbert were overwhelmed when 192,000 people wrote in asking for the hat. The company has since increased the price to $5, and sales have fallen.

Up until now, Hibbert has concentrated on the big three sports, but it has plans for moving onto other playing fields. It is now distributing the All Star Game program, rule book and annual guide for the National Hockey League and doing some work with the PGA golf tour and the Thoroughbred Racing Commission.

All this sports business has kept John Arnold out of retirement. Arnold used to be president of a Minnesota company that made such promotion material as political campaign buttons (including the infamous McGovernEagleton buttons for the 1976 presidential election) and sports pompoms.

At age 60 Arnold retired and began teaching a college course in marketing. Spending most of his time on the golf course, though, turned out to be something less than challenging, and so in 1981 when NFL Properties asked him to sign on as a consultant to help solve the problem of how to answer fan mail, Arnold jumped at the offer. Later that year NFL Properties gave the fan mail job to Hibbert, and Arnold moved east to work in Trenton. Now at age 67 he has no plans for retirement. “This is a wonderful opportunity for me. Here I am in the the middle of the professional sports world. I”m having a great time.”