Talking Tickets 18 September 2020: Yankees! Bubbles! Revenue! And, More!
Episode 51: Next week we celebrate one year of this!
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I’m both a 5th-grade teacher and a chauffeur travel soccer now…the boy is prepping for his future role as the star center-back for Tottenham Hotspur on both of his league’s travel teams. He is definitely a Jose style player.
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To the tickets….
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We are seeing a lot more stories about revenues and ticket sales and things of this sort now.
It seems that on the whole, we are turning another corner in our thinking on when events and fans are going to be able to come back.
There are quite a few things to notice here and that can show us a few things about revenue and sales heading forward:
If revenues from having fans in the stadium are going to only recover to 2016 numbers by 2024, how are folks going to rethink their revenues to create new streams or capture different opportunities to make up for the shortfall?
If this is the situation in NYC, what does it look like in other markets? What sense of urgency will be created by this situation around changing the way that sales and marketing operate, the sales funnel to drive folks to spend money on other things, or adding value to partners to ensure that sponsorship dollars are kept in line?
One place to look is England as the FA is working towards having fans back in stadiums in October. This decision is still up in the air, but the cost to the sports economy of soccer in England comes to around $125 million per month that teams aren’t allowed to have fans.
We are also seeing some positive impact and positives coming out of Australia with the NRL.
In my opinion, stories like these highlight three things to think about:
First, how do we expand our ability to deliver value to our fans as a platform business? I’ve highlighted the work done by Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City in the past, but I also have a podcast episode going up with Colin Lewis an Irishman that does a lot of work around travel and hospitality. And, he is keen on the power of platform businesses to drive more growth.
Second, we are going to have to rethink the way that the in-person experience is marketed and sold.
The ongoing jokes about “tickets distributed” are funny, when you see all of these numbers, you also have to ask how long can these revenues be sustained if folks aren’t coming out?
Brokers aren’t going to buy tickets if they don’t have a chance to make money.
Corporations aren’t going to buy if they aren’t seeing the value of their investment.
People aren’t going to go just because it is sports.
Third, the Yankees used bonds backed by the City of New York.
This means the debt is still going to get paid off and is likely more secure, but when does all of the debt that is flooding into sports right now create a problem?
More importantly, will the debt lead to a lot of unintended actions that have consequences no one planned for?
2. Are the solutions being offered right now enough to save the arts, theatre, and culture?
There was a twitter thread going on this week between me, John Locken, and Tony Knopp where we were laying out the importance of the live entertainment industry.
Folks all over the world have heard me talk about the power of community that is created when we get folks together to cheer for our favorite footie team, share the experience of a magical theatre experience, or sing along to one of our favorite songs.
I’m an OG in the game of the arts and culture are important.
Friends of the newsletter, Tim Chambers and Derek Palmer, are among the folks working on efforts to help ensure that the economy around the live entertainment business survives. Tim in the UK, Derek in the US, and you should look to my friends in Australia like Angela Higgins and Jo Michel, and all of the stuff folks at the We Will Recover project are doing to support the industry now.
I like the article at the top because it also shares some actionable items that are being taken and that folks can take now to support the arts and live entertainment economy.
This article from LA also shares some ideas about supporting comedians that can be applied in some fashion to any artist or industry you are working to support or want to support as well.
I like the efforts put together by organizations like INTIX to support workers and if y’all have any efforts that you have been putting together, send them my way…and I can highlight them.
3. Whatever recovery looks like, there isn’t one path forward for any of us:
I think it was the great British advertiser, Rory Sutherland, that said something to the effect of “the opposite of a good idea can still be a good idea.”
That’s important to keep in mind right now as we are hearing so many hot takes and ideas about the way things are going to turn out or not turn out over the next twelve months or so.
The article above points to the theatre in the UK, but the questions that David Reece raises and the ideas he offers are applicable in any area or any part of the live entertainment industry.
David points to a few ideas that are super important to think through right now:
First, what can we learn from the past?
We’ve had pandemics and financial crisis before. What do they teach us about what we are dealing with now?
How have we recovered in other challenging times?
While different, maybe there are lessons in NY from the September 11th attacks.
Possibly, we can look at the things that German football clubs learned in the spring when they led the way back for professional sports in Europe.
Second, the best way to predict the future is to create it.
Abraham Lincoln or Peter Drucker…someone very smart said it.
Even when you are completely stuck in place like right now, you can still think through how you want to create your future.
What do you want your value proposition to be?
What do you want to change about your business?
Had you been trapped in patterns that you don’t want to repeat?
Think through these. Figure out an action plan to change them or take action on them.
Finally, test and measure everything.
If you don’t look at the cause and effect, you might just go crazy with a term that I’m sure David put in because he knew it would tickle my fancy “indiscriminate discounting”.
Now more than ever, you need to have a hypothesis and test that hypothesis using real, relevant data, and real-world customer experiences.
4. Pairs are more important in a socially distant environment:
I was confused as to why this was such a big discovery.
Before the pandemic, how many folks were buying their tickets in groups of 6-8?
Group sales are great and they happen a lot in sports, especially baseball. But those groups are often over 10.
In all the years I spent selling tickets daily, I’d say that the most common ticket grouping I sold were pairs. I’d peg the number at somewhere around 80% of the sales I was making were pairs.
Next would be 4-packs.
What I like about this is that at least folks are opening up about where they made an error and showing how they are adjusting their strategy going forward.
That’s a big step in the right direction.
This article also points us to a few things we should be considering when we can sell tickets normally again:
First, how can we test our assumptions?
Big groups were making up too much of the inventory at some of these games, the data was available to show that the pairs were more likely to sell.
Depending on what you are doing, are you ensuring that you are setting up a way to test your actions and the reaction of your market?
Second, use logic.
If you are asking folks to buy tickets with groups of trusted folks or family members…think about your own actions, are you doing something similar?
If you are, ask what that means.
If you aren’t, also ask what that means.
Then take those insights and figure out what they mean for your customers.
In this regard, I’ll say that if I had to have a quarantine bubble, it is probably 7 folks. My family and one other.
What does that mean, maybe 6 or 8 isn’t a good cut off because if you include a kid and its an only child, you may struggle to sell even number tickets under the guidelines.
You can go on from there.
Finally, pricing is likely still an issue in some of these cases because despite being pretty responsive, in many places, the pricing seems to be out of line with the temperament of the country right now.
In a lot of places, instead of prices going down to deal with the economic reality of recession, job losses, and uncertainty around the pandemic, prices were up and were up significantly.
Again, don’t just base your entire decision-making process on what you would do or what you think…put yourself in other folks’ shoes and figure out what is going on.
That’s empathy and that’s a big key to being a successful marketer.
5. Bubbles, fans, and revenues:
The NBA looks like they are making every effort to find a way to make the bubble concept a one-time thing by pushing their season back until Christmas or beyond.
At the same time, MLB is looking to have fans at the World Series in their bubble.
And, college football is doing something to have a season, even though the more information we get about it, the worse it looks for a lot of coaches and administrators because in quite a few places it looks like the mouths were saying, “safety” but the actions were saying, “herd immunity”.
Adam Silver talked about 40% of revenues coming from fans in arenas. We’ve seen the Cowboys numbers and the reported number of them losing, reportedly, $77M a game if fans aren’t there.
I showed the reports of the money the soccer clubs in England lose every month that there are no fans in their stadiums, we all recognize the importance of having fans engaged and in attendance now more than ever.
This situation captures a few of the initial notes I’ve made from the things I’ve learned running the Talking Tickets survey and they are things I’ll dig into more in the coming weeks in the newsletter, in writing, and a few other ways, but these ideas are going to be essential to long-term success going forward.
First, moving from being product-focused to customer-focused in the way we design our experiences and market and sell the product.
Currently, folks lead with the product. They create a package or a price or an offering and try and find folks to sell it to.
The more profitable way of approaching this is to look at your market and your potential market and figure out what they value and how you can create value for them. Then design your marketing and sales process around showing them that value and how they can use that to add value to their lives, their business relationships, or their business.
Second, revenue generation and expanding on current thinking in regards to revenue is going to be more important than ever.
For years I used the branding “The Revenue Architect”. I moved away from that but revenue is where you find me.
As this pandemic continues to play out, it does show the weakness of some of the business models and the overreliance on certain things that may be slow to come back or may not come back at all.
Like Scott Galloway says on his podcasts, “We’ve jammed 10 years of change into 10 weeks.”
This means that we are going to have to rethink our revenue models, challenge our ideas, and push forward to create more and different revenue opportunities.
Finally, finding ways to engage our fan bases, no matter where they are, will be more important than ever.
As I mentioned, I did a podcast with Colin Lewis. The joke is Colin is “Ireland’s most famous marketer.” But we talked about platform businesses and his examples skew towards Formula One racing and the individual racers, but I’m going to spend some time focusing on how we can apply this platform model to theatres, teams, and other performing arts venues heading forward.
I think staying in contact with your fans and finding new ways to grow your salience with your target audience can give you a big jump on things for when fans can come back and it can give you the ability to stabilize your business now…but I’m on my marketing stump again.
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Check out the podcast. Tons of great episodes and I’m adding one where I was interviewed by a young guy that interviews folks in tickets and sports and one with Aaron Knape in the next day or so.
The episodes with Zoe Scaman, Dorie Clark, and Oli Shawyer are awesome! But so many great old and new ones…check it out!
Chatting with the other big Spurs fan, Simon Mabb, he shared a few of the cool things Booking Protect is working on right now including a partnership with We Are Well Being. I did a podcast with Andy Birbeck-Romero and he taught me a lot about mental health and keeping a positive mental attitude early in the pandemic and those ideas have paid tremendous dividends over the last weeks and months. Check them out!
Look at what the We Will Recover kids are doing! Einar, Martin, the Activity Stream team, and 20+ organizations from around the world are putting ideas, classes, webinars, and more together to help you and your organization recover. Check out the site and see what’s coming up in the next few weeks.