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davewakeman · 4 years

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Talking Tickets: 7 February 2020--Come See Me In NYC! And, London!

Hey everyone!

Thank you so much for being here. Every week the community around this newsletter grows larger and larger all because you are sharing this newsletter with your friends and colleagues.

There were a few challenges with the link to the new ebook I produced with Booking Protect. So we worked up a fix. We are also putting together a special FREE webinar on 26 February 2020 at 1500 GMT (10 AM Eastern) with ideas, takeaways, and actions we felt were compelling from the ebook.

I’m in DC this week on a bit of a holiday with the boy. It is a winter break for DCPS. But I do have upcoming trips with details in the footer!

To the tickets!

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1. Are diversity programs failing?

This is an idea that is really close to my heart because it was a really huge issue that I ended up spending a lot of time on when I was going to Australia in November.

The term that people would whisper to me was “older and whiter”.

The idea of diversity popped up a lot lately as well with the Oscars.

In many of my recent talks, I’ve been focusing people’s attention on the idea of empathy as a competitive advantage when trying to reach and serve an audience.

But more widely, as marketers and sellers, we have to continue to try and juggle two competing ideas: building new audiences and keeping the old audience.

I think we should look at diversity as an opportunity and understand that reaching and cultivating is an ever-changing art form and one that we will always be revisiting.

This white paper is from 2014, but I think it still offers a lot of value to folks thinking about the makeup of their audience.

2. West Ham’s finances and relegation fight open an interesting window into the business of a sports’ club:

Blame Simon for my almost all-consuming attention to the Premier League and Tottenham Hotspur.

But following the Premier League and European football so closely has helped me shift my thinking about revenue generation, ticket sales, and the role of fan development in the success of a team, especially long-term.

If you aren’t familiar, the bottom three teams in the Premier League standings are relegated to the Championship. The top two Championship teams are automatically promoted and the teams in 3-6 play a tournament for the last spot!

It is a truly fascinating system.

In 2016, West Ham moved from their traditional home ground, Upton Park, into London Stadium. Most of us consider it conventional wisdom that you are going to make boatloads more money if you move into a new stadium.

West Ham is challenging that convention.

If you read through their revenue numbers over the last few years, you’ll see that the revenues aren’t really all that different than before they moved from Upton Park, except in the TV money.

In the case of West Ham, we see rising attendance, new stadium, and investments in players, administration, and the venue…but no more money from the in-game experience.

I’d point to two things here that are worth our attention:

The fans seem to be ambivalent, at best, to the experience at the London Stadium and even with more fans, they aren’t as compelled to spend money as they might have with their destination location at Upton Park.

We have to continue to always test our assumptions about things that are conventional wisdom or that everyone is doing. Due to the nature of reporting from Premier League teams we get a clearer financial picture than would ever happen in the US, but I like to offer the thought experiment of thinking through “what if what we know is wrong?” This is a great example of trying to think beyond conventional wisdom.

3. The Super Bowl was a hot ticket!

Ticketmaster reported that the average ticket price for Super Bowl LIV got up to $8507!

This is a really big number.

I remember being in NYC for the Super Bowl between the Broncos and Seahawks when on the Friday before the game, I had many brokers offering me tickets for less than $1,000.

QZ wrote up a nice piece about how the Super Bowl came to dominate our culture.

And, I think we can only look on at the people that were saying the NFL was over and roll our eyes.

I think the NFL does the big marquee event as well as anyone could, but I think you can still question how that can and should translate to the 16 regular-season games, preseason, and playoffs.

But you have to continue to be amazed that over 100 million folks will tune into anything.

One word of caution, the Super Bowl has really been a bucket list item for a lot of folks and I think that will continue for a while.

I do think that this year’s Super Bowl still highlights how much of demand and excitement is still driven by things that are outside of the NFL’s control and that is a dangerous place to be if you allow that to always be the case.

Demand generation and audience maintenance have to always be top of everyone’s mind.

4. Resale, transparency, and the secondary market get clicks!

The first story in the headline is from November 2019, when I was in Australia. So I don’t think I really got it at the time, but my inboxes kept getting this one forwarded to me over the last few weeks…so why not!

To begin with, Ian Taylor sent me a comment a while back that made a good point about no one asking about inventory and transparency in many other industries.

True!

But I think the continued nature of stories around tickets and people’s questioning of the industry from outside of the industry reflects that the buying experience is often confusing and problematic for people at a point in time where many industries have developed almost frictionless transactions.

If you are me, you ask, “what if this didn’t make sense” and you are reminded that tickets are an easy tool to steal, commit fraud, or launder money from.

Every team, band, and organization should be working their tails off to create and keep customers. That’s the job!

So when Pearl Jam takes actions to limit resale and transfer, I’m sympathetic to their actions because they’ve been consistent in developing a fan base and working to control their tickets to the greatest amount possible.

I’m also not blind in my view of the market and recognize that there are plenty of organizations using the secondary market to their advantage. Which if that is their strategy, good on them.

Finally, I completely recognize that in the States our relationship is different with the secondary market than anywhere else in the world and that there isn’t just one reason behind this.

If I look at the secondary market and some of these things from a global perspective, I’d highlight 3 points:

In the States, we need the secondary market because the secondary market has a lead on digital demand generation, no one is doing a particularly great job marketing, and there are technology gaps between the primary and secondary. Among other things.

If you are a secondary market player in an international market, to establish yourself, stomping your feet about fairness and boohooing isn’t a good look. You need to educate about why resale is important and focus on creating unique value for your market.

Everyone should be focusing on marketing more effectively because as Stephen Glicken mentioned on my podcast and Queue-it points out in their blog post, there are billions of dollars at play…and as Stephen points out, lots of it is left on the table.

5. We should be paying attention to the sports business community in Australia:

Due to my recent trip to Melbourne and my friendship with a lot of folks from the Australian Football League, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the kickoff of this season and the kickoff of AFLW.

The AFLW is setting a good example of women’s leagues around the world because they are focusing on growing the game, taking care of players, and long-term success from the start. Which can be extremely difficult.

At the same time, the AFL’s business continues to grow and their ability to incorporate and activate sponsors is a good example for teams and leagues around the world.

Look at the new deal with Cole’s to be the official supermarket of the AFL. And, what is interesting is that Cole’s will work to actively give back in communities…which may be brand purpose mumbo jumbo, but I think aligning your sponsors with your fans is a smart decision.

In extending their deal with BetEasy, the AFL is pushing responsible gambling efforts and handle a topic that is on the minds of a lot of folks around the world as gambling becomes a bigger part of the sports landscape globally.

Is it a perfect solution?

Is anything?

Finally, looking at the A-League and their conversations about how to grow the game and the sport in Australia has been interesting over the last few months.

This story about the possibility that Hyundai will walk away from their sponsorship of the A-League highlights a bunch of trends that might be on people’s minds everywhere like declining participation, poor car sales, and lack of demand/attention.

These are interesting situations to watch because Australia hasn’t suffered a recession in about 30 years! So they give us a good laboratory for learning about how they manage growth, but also how they fight decline. —————————————————————————————————————-

What am I up to this week?

Episode 100 of the podcast is ME! I wanted to share a few ideas and learnings from the first 100 episodes and use the opportunity to talk about where I’m going next.

Queue-It asked me and a few other folks what we think is necessary to be successful in selling tickets.

I’m going to do a workshop in NYC on Tuesday, March 31st, 2020 on marketing and strategy in any market. I’ll have a landing page posted next week. But if you are interested in learning more, email me.

I’m in London on 13 April and I’m going to see about putting together a meetup at one of my favorite spots in London, Brewdog SoHo. More details to follow, but mark your calendars now if you are going to be in London that day.Ta

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Talking Tickets: 7 February 2020–Come See Me In NYC! And, London! was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

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