Talking Tickets 23 July 2021: Back From Vacation! In Boston! NYC! Ligue 1! Rugby League! Recovery and Growth! And, More!
Number 94
Hi!
I’m back from vacation and I’m feeling pretty good after some time away from almost everything.
I am in Boston today. I’ll be going to the Red Sox game tonight so I can get myself one of those fresh City Edition hats.
I was interviewed in Singapore last week to talk strategy and marketing…so give that a look.
If you dig the newsletter, help me out and share this with someone that might benefit from it, learn something, or need to read it.
Also, as a last-minute addition to the newsletter, I was able to fix the file and post my conversation with former Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment CEO, Scott O’Neil, last night. I think it is one of the best podcasts I’ve done and we didn’t really talk sports business all that much.
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To the tickets!
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1. Culture is the key to recovery in New York City:
Big Ideas:
Agility in your business practices is key to growth and survival now.
Demand challenges are real. Not a “the sky is falling” take.
Focus! Focus! Focus! Not “spray and pray”.
This story could be written about a lot of the world’s great cities like London, Paris, Sydney, and others.
As a self-identified New Yorker, this story hits at a lot of the themes that are going to be important to focus on over the next year or two as we all dig our ways back from the pandemic.
In reading the article, you see that a couple of popular ideas are present in the way that folks from the Met, BAM, and the Met Opera talk about their near-term futures:
The challenges of demand in this new environment.
Advertising in a way that breaks through the clutter.
Acting more like a start-up or an agile business.
Let’s look at each of these.
First, we will start with the idea that for all of these businesses they are almost entirely starting over from scratch.
A business like Disney Theatrical is lucky because they have the advantage of having all of the other Disney brands to support their efforts and remind folks that they put on great musicals.
If you’ve never seen The Lion King go and take your family, it is an amazing thing to see live. Also, Beauty and the Beast was so cool.
But for a lot of businesses, they really are in start-up mode all over and this means that they are likely going to need to act much more quickly than they did in the past, adjusting on the fly, making decisions built on less data, and accepting a lot more risk.
Second, there is the challenge of demand.
Demand has been the challenge that I’ve been most concerned with because there was saturation in the market before the pandemic and real attendance for a lot of events was down, even when you’d see higher revenues.
But, the most important reason was, people just assumed that demand would snap back “like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
And, anytime your business is built on prayers and assumptions, look out.
Right now, we are seeing that there are just tons of options for things to do to fill your time and to entertain you.
Breaking through is a challenge.
Take my vacation to Florida.
I swore I was going to go to see the Marlins because I go to baseball games when I am in Miami because I still have an unused ticket from the first game that I bought standing in line at the Blockbuster Music on Federal Highway in Ft Lauderdale.
So many things got in the way like Happy Hour, the pool, the beach, meeting up with friends, an art show…on and on.
That’s just one city.
Multiply that because there are so many people, places, and things asking for attention right now.
That’s the demand issue.
Which is compounded by the challenge of breaking through with your advertising messages.
I don’t know what the exact number is, but in my presentations on the topic of smarter marketing, I like to use the number 5,000 to represent the number of demands and asks for attention the average person is inundated with every day. (I didn’t pull this out of thin air. There was a study a few years ago that came up with that number. I just think it is bigger now.)
I’d actually probably figure it was more since I turn off almost all notifications on my phone and I looked one day and over 100 demands for my attention got through in any given day from texts, phone calls, or other stuff that clears the filter.
So breaking through now is going to be even more difficult because more and more people are going to be trying to win attention, adding to the number of demands that hit out for people’s attention.
It is a lot to deal with.
But deal with it we must.
How?
Three quick ideas here:
One, focus on speeding up your decision-making processes.
I call this developing your “change metabolism”.
In many organizations, decision-making by long gestation is the norm. That likely worked in a world where the only direction for your business seemed like up. But now everyone in the entertainment and arts world is starting from almost zero and some of these businesses, like the Met Museum, were struggling to begin with so they don’t have the chance to just wait around and ponder the best options.
Action will be the mode of the day.
So work to build a bias for action into your new operations plans.
Two, strategy before tactics.
I have been mentoring some marketing teams and the refrain I use is always: “strategy before tactics”.
To put it another way, we can look to Alice in Wonderland for the observation that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
So set up a solid strategy with some research of your market, some targeting, and a good strong position that will help you make better tactical decisions.
Third, don’t “spray and pray”.
Early in the pandemic, I advised people publically and privately to continue to advertise if they could.
Why?
Because the data shows that the businesses that continue to market throughout a recession or a down period come back stronger and faster because they are having a bigger impact from their advertising during the downturn because there are less people advertising, they are able to get more ads for the same spend because prices are cheaper, and there is a halo effect that carries over after the downturn because people have continued to see you.
Right now, businesses are going to be looking at the opposite challenge. Your money will go less far if you are just buying now. Your message will struggle to get through because of saturation in the market. And, you are going to have to fight to gain mental space because you weren’t communicating with your audience throughout the downturn.
This might sound like a reason to dump even more into your advertising, but it isn’t. Instead, it is an argument to spend even more time on your strategy so that you can target your communications at the market segments that are likely to yield the best results for you.
Strangely enough, this seems like another instance where doing the basics well is good business.
2. Recovery for the UK’s entertainment industry is expected to take until 2025:
Big Ideas:
Volatility + Recovery = Opportunity
The recovery will be long, but that means there will be new opportunities.
Strategy before tactics, y’all.
The first thing you see when you look at the article and report is the cliff that events in the UK fell off of last year.
But, hey, who didn’t see that same cliff in 2020?
The flipside of this is that due to the severe retraction a few things are possible now:
Entertainment businesses can rethink their approach to marketing and selling to their audiences.
The volatility opens up opportunities for businesses that weren’t able to break through in the before times.
There will be tons of room for growth, opening a door for innovation.
Let’s not skip the bad stuff. Live entertainment and attractions around the world have struggled, continue to struggle, and will have a tough go of recovery.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that a lot of industries and businesses are going to be in the same situation.
This provides opportunity.
A formula I’ve been using with my clients is:
Volatility + Recovery = Opportunity
How is that likely to look?
Only time will tell, but let’s think on these ideas today.
And, they apply to every market, not just the UK.
First, if the first story had “strategy before tactics” as a key idea. This story of recovery in the UK is about the dominance of the idea of putting “strategy before tactics” no matter what.
The core of strategy is answering two questions:
Where will you compete?
How will you win?
So, right now, if you haven’t already done so…take a step back and look at where you want to go and how you will win business.
One thing that is certain about periods of volatility and uncertainty, it shuffles things. The opportunities look different. The challenges are different. The things people value are different.
We are already seeing signs of that in a number of markets around the world.
Second, opportunity creation is all about focus!
The United Kingdom is set to become the biggest entertainment market in Europe and the fourth largest in the world.
That means that there is a lot of opportunities there.
But you can’t just stick out your hands and wait for this stuff to rain down on you. You’ll need to focus on the opportunities where you have the greatest likelihood of success.
This is one key reason I harp on putting strategy before tactics so much. Because strategy is about choice and you need to know where you are going to be successful at achieving your goals.
So do your research.
I’ve been moaning about folks not doing research and I get the fact that it is “basic” thrown at me enough to know that despite me moaning on the topic, y’all ain’t doing enough research.
You have to know what the market looks like. You have to segment your market by behavior because just having a list of 700 or 1000 prospects is useless because they all don’t act the same way even if they look relatively similar.
And, you can waste a ton of time on stuff that is never going to come through.
But that’s also a core competency of a lot of sales folks I see.
Finally, build a stronger metabolism for change in your organization.
The ability to move quickly can cut both ways. You can end up rushing from idea to idea without making much progress and that’s the downside. The upside is that you don’t get stuck beating your head against the wall or stuck in place due to “the way things have always been done”.
In my experience, you can encourage folks to act more quickly by putting the right incentives in place, rewarding the behavior you desire, and modeling the behavior you hope others will show.
But the big key here for all markets is that the recovery process will be longer and longer than most folks hope it will be.
The length of the recovery will be tough, but it also provides opportunity.
So keep your eye on where you can compete and where you can win, but be open to the opportunities created by volatility.
3. Rugby League is at a crossroads:
Big Ideas:
The first step in any reinvention is a step backward to understand the environment you are really operating in.
You don’t define value, your customers do. Trying to impose your idea of value can be dangerous.
Look to your non-customers, they can teach you a lot.
Over the last few years, I’ve become a fan of Rugby. I got a chance to hang out with Vinnie and some folks from Stimare in London to watch Ireland v. England in the Rugby Six Nations Tournament in 2018 and I was hooked.
Since I seriously began traveling for business, I have had a chance to meet and get to know folks from rugby teams, leagues, and organizations around the world.
So I’ve been following the ways that the rugby competitions in the UK have been going for a few years now.
It is a challenge.
In looking at this story and another accompanying one about the challenges facing Rugby League and potential solutions involving the Super League, a couple of ideas pop up that are important for us to think about:
Again, strategy before tactics.
Looking at your non-customers.
Focusing on value.
Let’s take a quick look at each of these areas.
The big refrain this week, “strategy before tactics”.
I’ll go back to the research that drove the redevelopment of the Dave Wakeman website, specifically the point where 40% of businesses were willing to admit to not really having a strategy, and my discovery that about 80% of the strategies that folks called strategy wasn’t really a strategy but a wishlist or a bunch of random ideas.
In these articles, you see that a lot of things are being thrown out there to constitute research, focus, and strategy like the idea that there needs to be a certain mix of teams to attract broader media audiences. Or, that it is only feasible to have 10 teams around right now.
All of this might be true, but it might not be true as well.
The key here is that to make certain the process moves forward effectively, the first step that the folks making these decisions need to do is to take a step back and do some market research.
Because out of doing your market research, you are going to be able to develop a picture of the market.
In the United Kingdom, rugby is probably the number three sport behind football and cricket. And, wisely I think, one of the big areas of attention seems to be focusing on growing the game at all levels to ensure that success is sustainable.
By looking at the statistics, youth play rugby at a pretty good clip, especially in age from 11-15. With the right research, it might be possible to even narrow your focus in the way that the NFL did when they focused on the age of 18 as being pivotal in developing football fans.
The key here is to do your research, draw a map of the market, target the juicy opportunities, and position effectively. That’s strategy and that’s the foundation of stabilizing rugby and getting the game focused on growth.
Second, looking to your non-customers is always a great idea.
In thinking through a lot of the ways that people can get back to growth, one idea is true no matter what industry you are dealing with: you always have more non-customers than customers.
Let’s use China’s broadcast of CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala to illustrate our point. Around 700 million folks watched the last broadcast compared with around 100 million watching the Super Bowl.
That’s a lot of attention for both events, but with 700 million folks watching the Spring Festival Gala, that still leaves around 700-800 million people not watching the program.
What are they doing?
Any answers, Greg Turner?
The point here is that even the most popular events still have tons of folks that aren’t paying attention to them. The most popular services don’t have 100% usage. And, your non-customers always outnumber your customers, even when it comes to the most popular show in the world.
The point here in regards to rugby is that sports participation in the UK is around 64%. A 2018 survey of the UK population showed that 40% of the population spent 2 hours or more watching sports each week. And, the average British home is spending about 99 pounds on recreation each week.
What does all of this tell you?
There is opportunity for the growth of rugby across many areas and the challenge here is threefold:
Strategy and knowing where you will focus.
Positioning: for or against the competition for attention, spending, and participation.
The call to action to get people to tune into rugby or pick rugby over football and cricket. (I couldn’t keep calling it soccer. That’s too American!)
This leads us to our ultimate point, value.
One thing I’m trying to do a bit more of is share real-world examples so you can see how this stuff plays out in my work and not just in theory. Since these lessons, all come out of my work with folks.
The simple thing is that value isn’t defined by you and your organization, value is defined by your fans, customers, and patrons.
A few times lately, I’ve had people tell me that they hadn’t done market research and they’d set their price by “gut” or “cost-plus” or, worse, by making it up by what they thought made sense.
This is wrong on many levels.
Most importantly because you haven’t done your research, so you don’t know what the market wants or needs. You haven’t done your research so you don’t know if your product or service fits their needs. You haven’t done your research so you don’t have any clue if someone is going to be willing to pay for the solution you are offering or pay an amount that makes the attention and effort worthwhile.
Why am I beating this idea to death?
Because research points the way to value which you can’t know if you assume you know what your market wants.
You don’t.
In fact, this is one of the primary reasons people end up coming to me to help fix a marketing issue is because they’ve spent so much time focusing on their assumptions and guesses that they have no idea how to figure out what their market might really find valuable.
Back to rugby.
The danger in these new plans to get the sport pointed in the right direction is that you run the risk of trying to impose what you consider valuable on people that don’t find what you think is valuable, valuable.
The downstream impact of this is that you can turn them off for years or forever without even realizing it. Or, worse, you have screwed up by trying to impose value on folks and you make the observation that “they just don’t get it.”
A good example of how this can look in real life? Arsene Wenger’s claims that a club World Cup is “what the fans want”.
He may be right, but from the research and feedback I’ve seen, he isn’t.
So keep this in mind, value is defined by the audience, not you.
The first step in any growth or reinvention is a step back to do research.
And, look at what non-customers are doing. There are clues there.
4. Ligue 1 is facing a summer of uncertainty:
Big Ideas:
Your price is about the value you create.
Rethinking the way you sell your product can lead to a lot of opportunities now.
Having a strong brand can provide you cover and opportunity to rebuild your business or establish new opportunities.
We have a heavy international bent this week because around 50% of the readers of this newsletter, visitors to my website, and followers on social media are from international clubs, organizations, and operations.
Hello friends!
The other reason I’m leaning heavily on my friends around the world this week is because of the formula we talked about at the top:
Volatility + Recovery = Opportunity
And, when I look at the world of French football, I see a lot of opportunities.
The foundation of the challenges facing Ligue 1 is money. In no particular order, the French league has struggled with:
Mediocre broadcast rights and now a broadcast disaster.
Huge stadium costs.
Middling commercial and matchday revenues.
These are the root causes, but as this article from The Athletic points out, the Premier League dealt with a similar crisis and point of uncertainty by reimagining itself.
That’s where I want to point my attention today: leveling up and not fixing remedial issues.
To begin, everywhere we are looking we are seeing signs of struggle for leagues, clubs, and businesses around the world.
A shortlist of places that have announced that they are struggling or are looking at an extended period of recovery include:
I could go on, but I think you all get the point.
I get all kinds of objections or huffs when I do talks, take meetings, or offer advice and they boil down to:
We’ve always done it this way.
We are limited in the things we can do.
No one will go for that.
All of them have fear of change as the common denominator.
But the thing about a crisis is that you can’t run from the fear and the rock and the hard place you are stuck between don’t care which way you go because if you don’t get moving you’ll get crushed.
To me, we can think through the situation in France and anywhere you might be stumped by a slumping business, crashing revenues, and a troubled outlook and that’s by looking at three places that have a big impact and that in the case of a sports team or live entertainment property, can be activated quickly:
The brand
The product
The price
Let’s begin with the brand because the brand is the accumulation of everything you do. In this regard, Ligue 1 has a strong historical brand to build off of due to the way that they have developed talent and some of the league’s most iconic players have become world-famous ambassadors for French football. And, that attachment to French football as a whole gives the French a chance to build a cycle of success that builds and reinforces.
On the topic of the product, this is the most interesting to me because the way you package and sell a game, a ticket package, hospitality, partnerships, etc. hasn’t changed nearly enough over the years and in some places hasn’t changed at all in a long time.
Begin with ticket sales.
How much innovation can be created in the way that tickets are sold?
Three places I’ve shown y’all in the past are good places to start by looking at the work that Life Blue is doing with some MLS teams in the States. You can go to the membership model that teams are using in the AFL including my side, Melbourne. (BTW, who can get me a Melbourne KeepCup?) Or, you can look at the way that clubs in the Premier League like Tottenham and Manchester City have built their membership programs and use tickets as incentives inside of their membership programs.
The thing is…the possibilities are endless.
When you look at activations, there are tremendous opportunities there as well.
An earlier version of Dave had the chance to work with Yellow Tail Wines’ advertising agency on an experiential campaign to bring tailgate parties to 36 locations around the United States.
The exact numbers are lost in a haze of time, history, and happy hour but the impact of that campaign was pretty great because it was part of a plan that helped increase pallet deliveries by over 600% in one year.
It also was a key in executing Yellow Tail’s strategy to position their wine as the alternative for folks that like to have a drink at a party or event, but didn’t want spirits and didn’t like beer, but were afraid of wine.
I’ve also been a part of activations with Coca-Cola that brought new products to endurance races; Nike that brought new shoes to new audiences; and activations that launched new artists and musicians using unique locations.
The key point here is that rethinking the integration between the team, the sport, and the product to be sold or advertised opens the door to a lot of opportunities and a lot of it hasn’t be explored or revisited in a long time.
Just look at the approach Rob Dyrdek has taken with his shows on MTV. (And, yes, that’s US Weekly making it into the newsletter.)
The final area that has huge potential is the hospitality area.
I had a short conversation about this with an executive while I was on my vacation and we were guessing that the way that hospitality is thought about and offered hasn’t changed much in the last few years.
My observation is that in a lot of places the experience of the game has been allowed to be “good enough” or we have the people making the decisions on what premium is being different than the people that are consuming the product.
Here’s the example I use from my own experience. When I worked with the American Express Centurion Cardmember Concierge program for a few years, I got an insight into true luxury and premium experiences.
Then, over time, I’ve had the chance to do some personal travel of my own and elevate my own experiences to the point that when someone says premium, my expectations are something along the lines of the George V in Paris, the Peninsula in Tokyo, or the Mandarin Oriental in Manhattan.
Don’t even get me started on the best hotel bars and pools. I keep a list.
The key point is that hospitality and executive entertainment is more than just having a plush, leather seat or a private entry to the building. Those are actually just table stakes to get into the game of executive and premium entertainment now.
The bar is higher with more unique experiential aspects such as the private, hidden bar above the Joel Robuchon in London. Or, personalized gifts and travel like the example I used of the Red Sox recreating their Spring Training trip virtually this year. Or, you could work to elevate the experience of the entire stadium when they come to a game to make everyone feel like actually being at the stadium is worth the time, expense, and hassle.
Again, the possibilities are endless. The challenge is setting the ambition and the vision of what success looks like, being willing to try new things and fail, but pushing beyond the “way we’ve always done things”.
Finally, let’s look at pricing.
The price you set is about capturing some of the value you’ve created for your customers.
In a lot of places, the price is set willy nilly by sticking a finger in the air and guessing.
To me, price setting is marketing’s MVP moment. And, right now is a good time to rethink pricing strategies to restructure your prices around reality and the value that folks perceive your events and assets to have.
Another reason I have been harping on research is that in a lot of the places I’ve been working the last few years, the decision-making process really comes down to what’s everyone else doing and what are our benchmarks.
The big opportunity on research and pricing is that by doing proper market research, you can uncover new ways to deliver value and what folks are willing to pay for that value.
This matters because setting the right price is about profit. And, to add some incentive to the price conversation, remember for each 1% in the price you can increase your products by…you gain 10%+ in profit!
Don’t miss my price panel in Las Vegas at Ticket Summit!
5. Let’s do a roundup to end the week because I’ve leaned too heavily on sports business:
Ireland’s president signs anti-tout law: We covered this, but ticket sales are easy to grandstand about and we will see what impact this really has. Because enforcement is the key.
Australian arts organizations create COVID vaccine ads: This is great. It shows the power of creativity and the arts to create positive change. The Australian arts and entertainment world is having a tough go of it right now because their vaccine rollout is still trying to reach a critical mass of folks, but this is one sign that despite everything folks are still creative.
The Olympics could still be canceled: I’m sort of surprised that the Olympics have gotten started at all due to the number of cases in the Olympic Village. But I’m also aware that athletes are going to test positive more often than other folks, even if vaccinated, because the vaccine isn’t designed to make you not get the virus just to avoid the most negative impacts and because they are getting tested all the time.
Fair Ticket Alliance has a vision for the future of resale in the UK: There are a lot of challenges facing businesses around the world. The folks at Fair Ticket Alliance have laid out where they are focused and what they are thinking about the near-term future of tickets in the UK.
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Check out my Linktree. What do y’all think of the new site?
Hook up with my friends at Booking Protect. Here’s a stat to hang your hat on this morning, ticket buyers have been taking up refund protection at a rate twice what they were before the pandemic. That shows the importance of offering people the peace of mind that refund protection affords them. So give Cat, Cath, Hayley, and the Booking Protect team a shout and find out how you can partner with them.
In a few weeks, I’ll run a new NPS survey to find out if some of the tweaks and improvements are paying off here. If you want to find out how I do that and what the NPS score tells me, reply to me and get the worksheet I created in partnership with Eventellect. The Eventellect team shares my love of the NPS score and the information you can learn from surveying your customers.
Check out the new Activity Stream tool, Activate! Just like your data can be turned into magic moments, your data can also make your email marketing campaigns more successful. That’s what Activate is all about, helping you get back into the business of selling tickets successfully using your data to drive sales and connections with your fans and audiences.