Talking Tickets 17 December 2021: Sydney and a Theatre District! Dave in Atlanta! Lots of VC money! And, More!
Episode 115: Boom!
Hey There!
I’m heading to Charlotte and Atlanta for the next few days.
What should I do in either city?
The boy has been asking to go to the World of Coca-Cola and the College Football Hall of Fame. So we will be doing that.
You may get a slightly shorter or less rigorous email next week, but don’t worry…I’ll get y’all a Christmas Eve edition of some nature.
I’m taking sign ups to be notified about the pricing courses BETA version. I’m looking to hit the magic 50 number of signups for more information. You should want to take this course when it goes live!
To the Tickets!
1. The Big Story: Sydney plans to create a theatre district like Broadway or the West End:
Big Ideas:
Strategy before tactics. Sydney said, not me.
A theatre district in Sydney is part of a revitalization and recovery idea that is slowly emerging.
Like I need another excuse to go back to Sydney.
Let’s get the obligatory Dave loves Sydney stuff out of the way.
Top highlights of Sydney include:
Bondi Beach and the surf shops looking over the water.
The Sydney Opera House.
Visiting Angela and Richard for a barbie!
The parks.
The CBD.
The water taxis.
Walking along the waterfront.
It is a great place. If you’ve always wanted to go, go.
I’ve got no beef with Melbourne, but there is this really big rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney that doesn’t exist between places like LA and NYC.
I’m a fan of Melbourne as well.
So I’m not picking sides in this fight.
But I do want to highlight the importance of strategy to deliver recovery from the pandemic.
First, to get it out of the way, the article talks about how Sydney’s theatre planning has been all tactics and no strategy.
Second, Sydney is a magnificent city with one of the most iconic buildings in the world, great views, and a great vibe.
Third, bringing a theatre district to Sydney would really make Sydney a one-of-its-kind destination. If Sydney is already unbelievable, it is almost unfair for the city to get a theatre district.
Anyway, I only want to highlight the need to think strategy first this week because it is going to be the bulk of my focus next year and I’ve been working on ways to share with folks how to use strategy effectively from diagnosis to formulation to execution.
Let’s begin by the proper order of looking at your strategy.
Yes, even your strategy needs a strategy or framework.
I put it out there like this:
Diagnosis
Formulation
Execution
You have to diagnose the situation, to begin with. This is where most strategic thinking starts and stops with frameworks that help you decipher the situation.
The second step is to formulate a strategy to tackle the issue you want to solve.
You might want to grow your business in a certain sector.
This is where your SMART objectives, your goals, and plans come together.
Execution is the final stage and it is how you make your plans come to life.
Most of the strategic thinking and content revolves around 1 & 3. 2 is most important and often gets left out.
What frameworks should you be using for diagnosis?
There are any number of them, I like to lean on the “Power Framework” from my professor at Cambridge, Dr. Kamal Munir. His framework says that a strategy makes sense if it gains power over customers, competition, and suppliers.
You can also look to the work of the Blue Ocean Strategy folks as well.
Another resource I use is the teachings of Michael Porter.
Analysis is something you get better at through practice, no doubt.
As far as execution, folks seem to have a good grasp on that. In my work, it is often easy to get folks to do the work.
So, look at the specific challenge you are dealing with or the solution you need, let that guide your execution activities.
But formulation of a strategy is where it is at.
An explanation of this is going to take a long time and it is hard work. It is why I have run strategy days for folks this week.
You have to make decisions about what you won’t do, where your focus is, what success looks like, and how you’ll execute.
I’ve joined the board of my son’s soccer club. The framework I’ve been teaching and that’ll I’ll share with members of the board is:
Define your Destination
Understand what your market is
Articulate and understand your competitive advantage
Identify and accumulate the right resources
Take action
Each of those is a process in formulation and execution that is essential.
We could go on here for days, weeks, months…but the big thing is that strategy is the difference in a lot of businesses succeeding or failing.
Back to Sydney, recognizing that they’ve been acting tactically for too long is a first step…even, a big one, in getting things fixed and building what will be a world-class theatre district that I can’t wait to visit!
I’ll see y’all in the CBD before the show!
2. The Road to Recovery: Barcelona, Athletico, and Real Madrid want to challenge La Liga’s PE deal:
Big Ideas:
La Liga’s issue is attached to the fact that Barcelona and Madrid have too much power in their relationship to the other La Liga clubs.
These deals almost always end up torching the content producer.
YOLO!
For the record, I studied marketing and strategy at university. So having to gain an understanding of finance has been a bit of an unexpected form of fun for me.
I remember when I was working in the secondary daily and I was at the peak of my secondary market career, I went to dinner on the Upper East Side with a PE guy, married to one of my lady’s friends, and he sat next to me explaining how the world of tickets worked for 3 hours.
3 hours of my life I’ll never get back. And, not enough booze in Manhattan to solve the problem.
I am almost always skeptical of these “new” models and ventures because the content producer and business getting the investment is almost always put into a position where they are getting a bad deal and the deal almost always go south at some point, leaving the content producer to clean up the mess while the PE firm has taken profits out and run away to turn another fundamentally sound business into a shell of itself.
That being said, the deal with La Liga and the two big clubs: Barcelona and Real, has always been one with a lot of friction.
Barcelona and Real get to negotiate their own deals for a lot of things in a manner that is inconsistent with a league like the Premier League, meaning that there are financial inequalities that make the league less competitive in many cases.
And, leads to something like this.
As La Liga looks to rebound from the pandemic where teams lost over 2 billion Euros, the need for rethinking their financing and revenue is enhanced by the built-in inequalities.
A short-term boost from something like this is one thing, but the long-term health of the league will be by boosting the teams throughout the league such as Villareal, who has moved into the final 16 of the Champions League. Real Betis, who have made trips to the US to build their fan base. And, Athletico, that have built a strong brand to the point that they are getting in on the challenge to this deal with Madrid and Barcelona.
The big idea here is that when you make a deal you want to make sure that you are a real partner.
You need to know your strategy and most “strategies” aren’t strategies, but wishlists, lists of actions and hopes, or just stuff pulled out of thin air.
3. How-To: Get folks to come to shows again with no-shows hitting up to 40% at some gigs:
Big Ideas:
No shows is something we’ve been talking about.
Flexibility and being in the business of “no” is something Maureen Andersen has been talking about even before the pandemic. The no-shows make this even more important to think about now.
It was never about price or anything. It was always about value.
People want peace of mind in their purchases now more than ever. I’ve been going back and sharing some data from Booking Protect with y’all over and over because I want you to see the actual behavioral data and how it is changing folks.
To spell it out with numbers:
Before the pandemic, you’d see somewhere around 5-7% uptake on refund protection. Slightly higher in the United States, but that was the baseline area.
When lockdowns eased and tickets went on-sale, there were months when you might see as much as 30% uptake in refund protection. That’s around 1 in 3 for the mathematically challenged like me.
As things have progressed, we are seeing that people are still taking up refund protection at a rate that is about twice what it was before the pandemic…around 15% in a lot of markets.
Why do these numbers matter?
Because it shows a clear behavioral change.
Before the pandemic, your no-show rates might be around 10%, it is the holiday season…I’m being generous. But they haven’t recovered.
Despite people that seem in wonder that people are making decisions based on the value they put on an experience, the truth was that people had already begun to value the live sports experience differently before the pandemic.
You were seeing the scan issue less often in theatre, performing arts, and concerts.
Concerts get a little more YOLO. Theatre and performing arts might just have to do with percentage of tickets on the secondary market.
I did a little press tour early in the year and I was talking with one journalist that said, “no one really seems that concerned with the ticket buyers…except you, that seems to be your key focus.”
Kids, flattery will get you everywhere!
Before the pandemic, Maureen Andersen would give a speech about how box office folks need to be in the business of “yes”.
That was always the right answer.
Richard Howle was on the podcast and talked about how the business of tickets and on-sales were often set up to maximize the benefit of the ticket sellers and not the ticket buyers.
On and on this idea has gone.
Maybe things have gotten better, but in most cases they are still pretty bad for the end buyer.
So the real lesson from this scan data and no-show story is that everyone needs to get into the business of customer focus.
Without customers, fans, ticket buyers…you’ve got nothing.
Find out what matters to them and find a way to deliver on that.
If not, you’ll see the scan data continue to drop and once you start sliding, coming back isn’t a guarantee.
4. Profile/Tech/Tools: My old buddy, David Fowler, has helped launch a new B2B sports technology marketplace:
Big Ideas:
Y’all ask if I know everyone, the answer is close to it.
David Fowler was on The Business of Fun talking about marketing.
B2B marketplaces will be valuable in helping people connect with each other.
Sports Tech Match is David’s new project.
I like the idea because it can be difficult to meet the people you need to, find the tools that will help your business grow, and we are still dealing with maximum uncertainty with new variants of the coronavirus.
On the road to recovery, it is vital that people spend some time with the holy trinity of marketing:
Segmentation
Targeting
Positioning
David’s new tool is a great way to elevate your awareness. You can look at the ALSD’s partner platform. INTIX’s platform. Or, any of the others in this category.
The important key is that you recognize where they can or will fit into your strategy for customer acquisition.
5. Links and Blurbs:
But the Coyotes did pay their back taxes: The tale of hockey in Arizona is wild, man.
Anaheim’s sales of Angels Stadium is deemed illegal: $150 M for 150 acres in Orange County does seem like a bit of a steal…get it?! A baseball pun!?
NHL allows private equity investment in teams: I had a chance to learn about Senator Whitehouse’s work on money laundering activity in private equity and it gives me even more pause on some of this stuff. It always reminds me of the advice I give to folks when they ask me about something that they say doesn’t make sense. I tell them, “trust your instincts.” If something doesn’t smell right, look right, or feel right: “Trust your instincts.”
Ligue 1 is calling for PE investment in their media rights: A big week for PE stories, what can I say? Eventually, I think that all of these deals are going to have a moment of reckoning that will end poorly for the leagues, but YOLO!
And, the A-League gets in on the party as well: YOLO!
Ruth Hartt highlights 6 assumptions arts marketers are making that are wrong: Ruth is right. We will be doing a podcast this afternoon where I will profess my admiration for her guns blazing approach to highlighting the need for more customer-focused arts marketing, but really more customer-focused marketing in general.
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.