HALIFAX, N.S. — Following the immense success of Crave’s LGBTQ+ romance show Heated Rivalry, many brands and institutions have capitalized on the hype, all striving to proclaim, “Hey, we’re cool! We watched the softcore gay porn show too!” Over the last month, Dalhousie University’s marketing team has workshopped ways to hop onto the trend.
“All sorts of ideas were thrown around,” said Topper Bottomson, head of the university’s promotional team. “We thought about milking the fact that the author, Rachel Reid, is from Bedford. We thought she could maybe be a writer in residence for the English department. Then we realized that the school has stopped replacing English profs who retire, so that idea was a bust.”
Bottomson went on to share several other unsuccessful ideas, including reopening applications to study Russian as a major, in celebration of Heated Rivalry character Ilya Rozanov’s background.
“Again, if we had a penny for every hockey scene in Heated Rivalry, we’d still have more money than the faculty of arts and social sciences’ budget. That’s when we thought of the appropriate, adequately funded idea.”
The Dalhousie hockey teams are not on many students’ radars, which may be to the teams’ benefit, as the men’s team has lost almost every game this season. In addition, the low spectator turnout at games has been a major concern for the Dalhousie Tigers, who fear there aren’t enough fans to justify the new $37 million Oulton-Stanish Centre, set to open early this year.
“Look, our men’s hockey team is more ass than those boys on Heated Rivalry have. And that’s saying a lot,” said Jack Cummings, the team’s head coach. “We hope this new marketing plan can spice things up and get more people excited for our teams.”
As part of the Heated Rivalry-inspired promotional initiative, players will now be paid $50 each time they kiss each other, $100 for touching below the belt and $200 for shooting yearning glances across the rink.
“It’s all consensual, of course,” affirmed Cummings. “This will just be a fun way to give people what they really want to see and hopefully distract them from the poor playing. Plus, this new arena has gone way over budget anyway, so what’s a few thousand dollars more?”
When the Mackerel asked the Dalhousie marketing team why they couldn’t have just collaborated with DalOUT, Bottomson stated, “That would be ridiculous, there are no gay people at Dal. That’s what King’s is for.”
By Lauren Sooksom