Talking Tickets 21 August 2020:
Hey!
Thanks for being here! Thanks for reading!
If you haven’t had a chance to check out the Slack Channel yet, give it a look.
Once we hit Labor Day here in the States, I’ve come up with a plan for a few educational ideas like a class on rebuilding your sales funnel, strategy, and rethinking your sales process.
I’ll announce them here first! So tell your friends and colleagues to subscribe!
To the tickets!
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1. Hmmm…the ratings for the NBA have been on the decline since 2012?!
As my buddy, Derek Palmer would say, “that’s a number.”
45% drop since 2011-2012.
I know for sure that there are a number of factors driving this like chord cutting and folks being able to watch on other means, but that’s a lot of folks not tuning in and that means that the CPM on the customers is likely hitting an apex.
A lot of the yammering and justifications here are banal and pointless. The 18-49 demographic number is pointless because as has been pointed out for a while now, millennials haven’t been able to amass a lot of wealth because a lot of them came into the job market at a time where the economy was in free fall or recovering from free fall.
The reality of this demographic data is it is garbage because most of the discretionary spending has been coming from folks 50+.
What does this mean?
While the ratings for MLB have been up a bit, they aren’t great. Golf seems to be doing better and the Champions League is drawing a lot of attention. So, overall, it is a bit of a mixed bag.
What does this mean for all of us?
A couple of things come to mind:
First, this shutdown, social distance, uncertain period would have been a great time for building and pushing folks into the top of the sales funnel.
I’ve been thinking the sales funnel and the business of the world of sports wasn’t as stable as we’d hoped for a while, but the more I see…the more concerning it is.
If you can’t get folks to tune in in huge numbers when so much of the country and the world is apprehensive and limiting their activities due to a pandemic, you might want to reconsider what you are doing to drive awareness and build the top of your funnel.
Second, if ratings are down or slightly up or flat, not booming, how long can things go where more and more revenue per person is squeezed out of fewer and fewer people?
In other industries, disruption comes quickly.
You are the king of the hill and then you aren’t.
I don’t know how great a strategy charging the folks that have stuck with you ever-increasing prices is.
I’m spending a lot of time thinking and putting together ideas for filling the top of the funnel and driving sales more effectively. Obviously, there are some serious top of the funnel challenges for folks that aren’t being solved by big rights packages and large deals with merchandise companies.
If people don’t pay you any attention, there’s a limit to how long you can stand out against apathy.
2. College football, basketball, and 2020…who knows?
The story about what is going to happen in the fall continues to drag on.
I’ve been hinting at it and talking with folks about this for months, but this ain’t going down, kids. And, the fact that the ACC and SEC keep kicking the ball down the road has likely made the end result worse than it could have been.
My belief in these things is if people had been willing to deal with the realities earlier, explain them clearly, and take action in March or April, we’d be more likely to have college sports in the fall.
Which makes the quotes from Georgia Tech’s football coach rich: “We try to control what we can control.”
That’s not saying that anything would be different now, but it means that we would likely be closer to the ability to have a season than we are now.
The story of this pandemic is folks doing the thing you try to avoid making a tough decision.
Again, I want my Alabama football as much as anyone wants their college sports. And, my lady and son want their Villanova basketball, but Coach K., things ain’t looking good.
That’s why I like the video Coach Cal posted this week.
A lot of folks already lost jobs due to a lack of leadership during the pandemic. A lot of folks are going to continue to suffer. Then we are going to get to the other side and it is going to be tough there too.
As far as action items here:
Rethink how you are going to offer value to your fans, donors, and customers.
Rethink the way that you are pricing and asking for money. I mentioned a few weeks back that the athletic departments weren’t in a position of strength to make demands at the start of this period. They will be less able to make demands now.
Work on rebuilding relationships and building a bridge from where we are right now to the point where we can welcome folks back to the stadiums and arenas.
Unfortunately, I feel like this is the kind of work that folks should have been doing and pushing from the start.
But I deal with the world as it is and not how I want it to be.
3. Eric Chou has 10,000 folks in Tapei:
This article has some really good pictures and I love the description of the smell of hairspray!
What does this show us?
If we can get our act together, folks can return to big events.
And, we are actually seeing a fair amount of positive stories about things coming back like plans for having 30,000 at the AFL’s Grand Final. (I’m sad that I will miss it! I was going and 2020 took out my trip! Boo 2020!)
We are going to get through this and you will be able to go to a honky-tonk type bar soon enough.
The key for all of us to remember the Stockdale Paradox:
We will get through this
It will suck
We must continue to move forward
While we wait, let’s all commit to doing things that have been proven to be effective like wash our hands, wear a mask when we are close to folks, and like my neighbor that works at Johns Hopkins tells me, “Don’t do anything stupid!” (I want to ask if he can define stupid for me…but I figure that might tip my hand.)
4. Funding to support the arts shouldn’t just be about survival:
An unpopular opinion is that if you just prop up businesses, you’ll have zombie businesses floating around, not dying and not making way for healthy businesses to replace them.
That is an idea that Professor Scott Galloway talks about regularly and an idea that seems to be the heart of this piece.
In my conversations with folks over the last few months, a common refrain is “new normal” and “getting back to normal.”
The reality is that the new normal we all hope for looks a lot like the old normal a lot of times. And, in the case of many of the businesses in live entertainment, is getting back to normal the best to be hoped for?
I’ve talked about industries being ripe for disruption before and the key indicators of being open to disruption look something like:
Consumers don’t trust you
New tech isn’t used
Prices are too high for average customers
Buying is inconvenient
So as I read this piece and thought about the state of the industry in general, I realize that this is a grand opportunity to rethink the value proposition, focus on lessons that can be learned from other industries, and finding ways to engage and grow new customers.
I’ll tell you from my point of view working on revenue with folks in many industries, I’m thinking through 3 things right now because the challenge shared in the above article isn’t unique to the theatre in the UK, but is almost universal.
What business should we be in now?
How do I get attention and market effectively now?
How do I make my sales process meet the needs of a modern buyer?
There’s a lot to unpack, but the big idea is to make sure you understand who you are aiming for and why they should pick you as a start. Because as I mentioned in my podcast with Dorie Clark, “Strategy today is about differentiation because in a world driven by algorithms and overwhelmed with noise, not standing out and being unique is likely a death wish.”
5. Let’s take a quick look at the secondary market around the world:
I’ve been tough on some of the companies around the ticketing world as the pandemic has played out because I realize that if you do wrong by your customers, they are not going to forget it.
In fact, there is a long history of companies doing things that were in the public interest during a war, pandemic, or other crisis, and having that establish their brands for decades with competition almost unable to break the grip that these companies, like Wrigley gum held after stopping sales of their gum to Americans during World War II to send all of their production capacity to military personnel on the front lines of the war against the Nazis.
So seeing the Seattle Kraken relax a resale process that might have ended up turning off fans in the long-term is a good move to establishing a good relationship with their fan base from the start.
Who knows what the ticket situation will look like after the pandemic, but one thing is sure…telling folks they can’t resell tickets to recoup some of the cost of tickets right now would have been a bad PR move.
Trust is at the heart of the punishment that was levied against the folks behind the White Sox broker scandal and also drives this story from the UK about StubHub being required to share a warning with ticket buyers that their purchase might not be valid.
Maureen Andersen said it on the NATB virtual conference, “if you don’t treat your customers well now, they will not forget.”
All of these examples highlight that need and this isn’t something that is specific to the secondary market but everyone in the world of live entertainment but make sure we tighten up our relationships with our customers because without them…we have nothing at all.
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What am I up to?
Check out new podcast episodes with Zoe Scaman and Harold Hughes. I’m just showing off now after I’ve had conversations with Mark Fowlie, Oli Shawyer, Nicki Purcell, and so many others since the podcast has been in regular production the last two months.
I was quoted this week in a nice piece on online event streaming.
Come meet with me, Ken Troupe, and Matt Wolff for Happy Hour tonight at 5 PM EDT.
I’m going to try and take some time off this coming week and go to Philly to get the boy a cheesesteak or something. But I’ll still be around! So don’t be a stranger.
Visit the We Will Recover project at www.wewillrecover.live and find ideas, classes, and information to get you rolling again.
If you have been thinking about offering your guests refund protection, talk with my friends, Simon and Cat and the team at Booking Protect. While you are there, visit the blog and find some information on revenue, relationships, lessons learned during WFH, and a bunch more.
If you are in America, no matter who you support make sure you register to vote and VOTE! I’m involved with #IVotedConcerts and you can register, donate, and get involved by visiting their site.