Talking Tickets 10 December 2021: SE Asia is a huge emerging ticket market! Philadelphia's arts customers aren't just running back! Tumblr is Back, Baby! And, more!
Number 114
Hi!
Are you going to be at INTIX? Let me know. I’ve got a great panel with Hayley from Booking Protect, Einar from Activity Stream, and Derek from Project Admission.
I’m continuing to register interest in the pricing course I’m putting together. You need to fill in the answers to four questions and you can share the form with anyone that might benefit from the course.
Some of the stuff we are sharing:
What the Wu-Tang Clan can teach us about pricing power.
How to do proper pricing research.
Why pricing is both an art and a science.
Register your interest and I will let you know when the BETA course gets to rockin’.
BTW, give me the gift of sharing the newsletter with folks that you think will find it useful.
Look for the 10 numbers to guide your sales and marketing on the podcast stream in the next week or so. I am running out of time before the end of the year to do them live, but I’ve got numbers for y’all.
To the Tickets!
1. The Big Story: Philadelphia’s arts organizations are returning…are customers?
Big Ideas:
46% drop in earned revenue is a bad number.
Rebuilding audiences is the right approach, but it shouldn’t have been this long before that question arose.
Strategy is going to be essential.
This is a pretty juicy article for folks that are looking for analysis and numbers because it shares seating, capacity, and revenue.
The reality was that re-opening was never going to be recovery and that this is a long-term project to reclaim market share because behaviors, needs and desires, and buying habits all changed.
There are three trends here that are showing up everywhere, it seems:
Big shows are still selling well.
The coronavirus and fears of illness are still impacting behaviors.
Re-opening hasn’t meant that people just rolled right back to doing what they had always done.
Dealing with this is going to be a challenge.
One thing, this is the topic of the panel I’ve put together for INTIX with Einar from Activity Stream, Hayley from Booking Protect, and Derek from Project Admission.
Looking at the numbers in this piece, the 46% drop in earned revenues is a bit scary and makes the panel I had put together on revenue generation seem like something I should push harder because that’s a lot of money to make up.
Let’s hit on three things here:
Strategy
Audience development
Revenue
Start with strategy.
Let’s highlight three things strategy is and three things strategy isn’t:
Strategy is:
A process of creating focus in an organization.
A challenge to get people to understand the things they won’t focus on because you can’t do everything well.
An ongoing process, not a set-it-and-forget formula.
Strategy isn’t:
A goal-setting exercise or a wishlist of things you hope to achieve.
Tactical tools are being sold as “strategies” like “Facebook strategy,” or “membership strategy” or anything of the sort. Facebook, pricing, membership…are all ways you execute your strategy. These are tactics that help you achieve that.
The shiny ball of new tools, ideas, or actions that show you are “working” on something.
The challenge with most strategies is that they aren’t strategies at all. They are wishlists, guesses, or hopes.
If I had to boil down strategy to three things, I’d say that your strategy is about:
Your ambition
Your market
Your value proposition
Again, “Strategy Day” next week will clear this up. I still have spots available. Email me for information or to sign up.
To recover, you need a strategy that focuses on what you want to be in your market, why people should pick you, and how you are going to execute these ideas.
Full stop.
Audience development should have been a topic of consideration for a long time, but it took a once-in-a-century pandemic for the topic to move past lip-service in a lot of places.
There’s a great book that you could put on your holiday shopping list that is called Soccernomics. It is about soccer, but the numbers and the ideas are applicable across the board like everything I do.
The key point that I want you to take away from the book here is that customers and fans don’t engage with your organization in a straight line or a linear fashion. Their dedication ebbs and flows.
You have to recognize that and address it by always working to develop new audiences, stay engaged with old audiences, and continue to nurture relationships so that you are always a solution through the inevitable ups and downs like new families, job losses, retirement, etc.
It is right there in the research.
Revenue.
Did I tell you about the three kinds of price-setting organizations yet? This comes from my upcoming pricing course, BTW. Share your interest here by filling out the four questions at the survey.
The three kinds of price-setting organizations are:
Agro-Bros
Neville Chamberlains
Wu-Tangs
Agro-Bros, need to win market share at all costs: bad customers, discounts, whatever…win baby!
Neville Chamberlains, they will give in at any moment to the slightest pressure. You need a discount, you get a discount. You didn’t ask, cool…here’s one anyway.
Wu-Tangs are all about CREAM: “Cash Rules Everything Around Me!”
CREAM means skimming the part off the top that keeps the business going, profit.
That was a cheap plug for my pricing course, but I want you to keep in mind that you don’t need revenue, you need profits.
(Update: someone I know actually used this description in a meeting with her sales team at a professional service firm this week and folks totally got the challenge of pricing. So take that!)
It isn’t what you make, but what you keep.
That’s important to consider when thinking about rebuilding your audiences because just getting people in the door isn’t a recipe for success, despite what a lot of the denizens of discounts will tell you.
You’ll know them by their trumpeting of the idea: “If we just get them in the door, they’ll know the value.”
That’s not necessarily true.
Actually, I’ve never seen too many examples of this kind of discounting strategy leading to long-term success.
Okay, you’ve pushed me. I’ve never seen any examples.
What I have seen over and over again is that you start by understanding the customer. You do research on your market. You build a good segmentation based on behaviors. You target the juiciest opportunities. Then, you position against the competition or about yourself…ideally, you do a bit of both, but never sit stuck in the middle as a big nothing burger.
After that, you execute your vision tactically using the four Ps:
Product
Price
Place
Promotion
The Dave broken record idea is essential though because you are really starting over in your market in a lot of cases so expecting that the old ways are going to work could be dangerous.
So you need to get back to basics.
Know your market.
Make your strategy choices.
Deliver on that strategy through your tactical choices.
There isn’t a magic wand. It is hard, consistent work.
(This was totally going to be the road to recovery story…but this is too important.)
2. The Road to Recovery: Jammcard opens up new opportunities with creativity:
Big Ideas:
Being creative should be a baseline skill in a creative industry.
Coming up with new ways to meet and engage an audience is helpful in looking at Jammcard.
Premium experience/access/opportunities are rebounding faster than other areas.
I like the story about Elmo Lovano. He plays drums, he makes stuff happen.
The idea at the heart of JammJamm and Jammcard is that the business around music is awesome. The people are awesome and the fans are awesome.
If I’m being honest, I think it is the power of bringing all kinds of people together in ways that move them that got me started in the world of entertainment, starting with nightclubs in South Florida, then expanding with museums, theatre, and sports.
The heart has always been the people.
As we look at the recovery of the live entertainment industry, the big point I want to highlight here is that Elmo has been really creative in how he has built a business, turning JammJamm from something in his living room to something that he has been able to bring to audiences all over the place.
He’s also now used Jammcard to create a social network, but one that doesn’t actually exclude the fans, but offers them new ways to access talent, learn, and be a part of the industry.
The beauty of the plan here is that Elmo has latched onto the idea of premium experiences, premium access, and premium opportunities. As I mentioned last week, premium is moving better than other stuff…and it makes sense that with musician’s most valuable resource, time, that the Jammcard experience is a premium one as well.
If I’m not wrong, Elmo has just taken what was already floating around in the ether and applied it to his ideas.
That’s wise and we should all be learning that lesson now.
Let’s not get stuck in our old ways. Let’s see where success is happening and ask how we can apply that to our own situation.
I’ve been screaming that from my digital and physical porch for years.
BTW, Elmo, can I be invited to the next party!
3. How-To: Reach new audiences using different platforms:
Big Ideas:
Do strategy and you might find that a different media is where your focus should be.
Don’t make assumptions. Follow the data.
Just because something doesn’t have the hype, doesn’t mean it isn’t effective.
So Tumblr, huh?
The OG Dave Wakeman website was hosted on Tumblr back when I first put up a website when I was working on a presidential campaign in 2012 and thinking about what I wanted to do after that.
So seeing that Tumblr has a place in the ecosystem of audience development is kind of cool and brings back feelings of nostalgia.
Not too many, but I have no beef with Tumblr.
This thread highlights a few key ideas to help you develop your audience. Let’s run through them very quickly.
First, do your research.
The reason a lot of these athletes and sports are getting results from Tumblr is that they did their research to find out what the market really looked like.
I don’t know exactly what their segmentation showed, but I’d love to see it.
How do I know they did their research?
Because no one is talking about Tumblr.
So there is obviously something in their segmentation that others are missing.
Second, this idea of fandom is everywhere.
I know y’all have heard me talk a lot about the work that Zoe Scaman does and how she is really on top of the fandom idea.
So when Lona writes about using Tumblr to build fandoms, that got my attention.
The big thing on fandoms and how to develop an audience is that you start with a core group and expand outwards. It is a bit of the flywheel effect in action.
Finally, the big thing is that you have to be Market Oriented. You need to know your market, not just guess about them.
There is this myth about Steve Jobs that he didn’t do market research.
Wrong.
Mark Ritson swats that away here.
The same applies for every situation. You might not be able to go to market with some incredible leap forward because people often can’t imagine what that leap forward really means to them, but as soon as you have something that you can show them…they can tell you everything.
Going back to last week, remember the words of my buddy, Frederic: “Your customer will always tell you everything.”
4. Profile/Tech/Tools: SE Asia is an emerging market with technology to teach us things:
Big Ideas:
SE Asia is an exciting place to watch the business of tickets evolve.
Super apps are going to be a big thing in the West in 2022.
Adaptability!
Ilya Kratsov and PouchNation have a really cool business they’ve set up in SE Asia. The location matters because, for many folks, SE Asia doesn’t even register as a destination.
Someone talked with me about Mongolia the other day.
I realized I had truly gone global at that point.
Ilya opened a really interesting door because he was able to show us that:
SE Asia is full of emerging markets.
Technologies that are common in SE Asia are likely the future of our experience in other parts of the globe.
The next phase of the industry is likely to include exposure to new ideas in new locations.
First of all, this is the first time the podcast has been dedicated to a guest from SE Asia. We’ve had Martin Haigh and Greg Turner on before. They opened up Asia to me, but Ilya has given us a new perspective.
The sheer size of the market is the first thing I noticed because Indonesia has around 270M and about 10% of the population jumps to middle class each year, opening the door to new experiences, spending power, and wants and needs.
Outside of Indonesia, you also have interesting things happening in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand.
Some of this revolves around serving folks that have never even been able to bank before.
Which highlights a second aspect of the conversation worth paying attention to, technologies being used in Asia that are emerging here or not even on a lot of people in the West’s radar like Super Apps.
I posted a note about Super Apps in the ‘Talking Tickets’ Slack Channel and the first question was: “What is a Super App?”
The short answer is that it is an all-in one solution that might include communication, finance, commerce, and more. Look at WeChat or Alipay.
All this travel is finally paying off!
This brings me to the final aspect of the conversation that stuck with me and that is that the next phase of the live entertainment industry is likely to focus on opportunities and places we might not traditionally look at for opportunities.
Ilya highlights the unbanked. He highlights Super Apps. He also brings up emerging markets and expanding middle classes throughout SE Asia.
In SE Asia, there is no dominant ticket company. Like Ilya points out, that’s a great opportunity for consolidation because there may not be enough market share for everyone to make a go of it.
The unbanked have money because folks are rapidly moving into the middle class just like they did in China around 10-15 years ago. Don’t wait for the market to mature, meet them where they are…that’s what Ilya and PouchNation are doing.
These few examples should be lessons to all of us because there will be opportunities going forward, but they are unlikely to look like the opportunities that were present before the pandemic.
How will you deal with that?
5. Links and Blurbs:
Sinclair Broadcasting wants to bring the NHL to fans using a D2C model: Ahh, the famous Direct to Consumer (D2C) model comes to broadcasting sports through regional digital rights. I’m torn on the D2C model because it is often waved around as a fix-all and a company like Nike uses it with great effectiveness with their SNKRS app. But for most D2C efforts, they don’t make money, they lose it.
Does Rory Smith think that Juventus’s creating its own font is a bad thing?: Um, codify everything, Rory! This is just smart marketing by Juventus and it makes them one of the most recognizable sports brands in the world. The J is now more readily seen around the globe than the NY of the Yankees hat, the star of the Cowboys, or Lakers across someone’s chest. This matters because you shouldn’t be looking at your team’s brand as just whether or not you are winning or losing…a brand is more than that.
BTS releases rows of tickets at the last minute: I’m including this because some of the screenshots on Twitter show how bogus some of the justifications for the holdbacks are when they are announced. It seems like a lot of these tickets could have been released from the jump and to call them “production” releases is trying to pull the wool over your fans’ eyes. This I don’t like. Respect your audience.
You can find me everywhere with my special Linktree! It is all my links!
Check out my friends at Booking Protect! Customers have been taking up refund protection at a rate that is double what it was before the pandemic began. This is a great opportunity for you to offer more value to your customers in a way that they want while also creating a new revenue stream for your organization.
Also, you’ll be able to see me and the Booking Protect team at INTIX in Orlando. I’m going to do some podcasting from the booth and we will have a grand time. Let me know if you’ll be there.