Talking Tickets 29 October 2021: Arts Marketing Doesn't Have to Suck! Developing Audiences, Yeah! The NBA Wants To 3x Media Money! And, More!
Number 108!
Hi Oh!
Happy Halloween, y’all!
I’ll be getting the results of the Talking Tickets surveys I’ve run throughout the year out in the next week or two. Some totally great insights and feedback from people. I want to thank the folks that helped me out for their transparency and honesty because I know that isn’t always the way things work.
I am still accepting answers to the 100th edition NPS survey so that I can deliver some better content and ideas. Hook me up with about two minutes of feedback.
If you enjoy the newsletter, find it helpful, and know someone that should read it…sharing is caring!
Send me your Halloween photos and I’ll consider sharing any really funny ones or amusing ones on social media.
1. Developing your own audiences is a good call, yeah?!
Big Ideas:
If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times: make sure you own your audience.
When people tell you what they are measuring, you can learn a lot about their strategy.
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
In the way that sometimes there is too much going on, I had to put this one off a week because it highlights a real issue that I know I moan about regularly: owning your audience.
A few weeks back Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went down for most of the day.
I didn’t even realize, but that’s because I have the Talking Tickets Slack Channel, newsletter, and other lists and groups to keep me connected with my audience! (Also, I’m totally doing more in the Slack Channel now…so you might want to get in there if you aren’t already.)
This outage highlights the dangers of having a third party control the relationship between you and your fans.
I’ve often termed this “owning your audience”, but however you’d like to frame it, the core idea is the same…you want to have your audience reside in a place where you control the relationship as much as possible.
I get it, I hear all of the “we have to do this” arguments and my argument is not an excuse to not invest in social media if it works for your brand, but I am telling you that you need to invest in the direct relationship with your audience, driving them to your site, your email lists, and the places that you control.
Why does this matter and what does it mean for all of us?
First, if someone tells you what they are measuring and what they are looking at, you can learn about their strategy or lack of one.
The example that Johan shares of Man U highlighting their growth on TikTok tells me that they are likely focused on being an advertising tool, a lot of stuff is secondary to growing the size of their “fan base”.
Is that the right measure of success or failure?
That’s up to them.
But it does show the importance of these social media platforms to them and can help you understand their strategy better.
For y’all, make sure you know what you are measuring and why so that you can focus on the things that are important for you…not for someone else.
Second, create an ownable asset.
Again, I come back to the idea that you need to make sure that you control the relationship with your audience.
I’ve harped about the continued relevance of email for a long time now. Let me do it once again with some numbers:
4.1 billion people use email
The predicted growth of email over the next few years is almost 4% annually.
You’d also be correct in asking how many people use social media because globally the numbers are slightly higher with 4.8 billion people using some form of social media, but the downside comes down in the way that someone like Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok can change their algorithm and bury your content, making your audience disappear with a few taps.
Don’t think it would happen?
So focus on a controllable asset like an email list. Within the email, you can use written content, video content, CTAs, and more. The key is that you have a relationship with your audience, you can learn about the audience, and you can add value and grow an audience that can follow a journey between you and them. Not you, them, and Facebook.
Finally, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
I’m telling you to control your audience, absolutely.
But this doesn’t mean to ignore everything else unless that’s what your research and strategy tell you is the right course of action.
Remember this formula: A+B > 2A or 2B
This means that when you combine media, you get a better impact than just doubling down on one media.
So if you have an email, you might want to look at some social media supplementation. You can have your website and supplement it with YouTube. The key idea is to not put everything on one bet. The impact of your message showing up in multiple places is greater.
2. NBA expects $10B in revenue:
Big Ideas:
NBA hopes to triple the size of media rights, but viewership has been trending down for years.
No guarantee that fans will go to games.
A DTC offering sounds good in theory, but most of my experience shows that they don’t really make money.
David Silver did a good job of managing the NBA’s business through the lockdowns and the bubble, saving the league a lot of money and acting in a way that felt responsible and wise.
Now that things are opening up more, the NBA is finding itself in the position a lot of businesses have found themselves in: dealing with changing consumer tastes, trends that were impacting their business before the pandemic began, and the need to keep their brand relevant in the market.
To begin, we start with the brand. The 75th anniversary of the NBA is a good story and a good way to do some of the positive actions around brand management.
One key thing you need to always manage when you are dealing with a brand is to look at its legacy. Jump back a few months and I spoke with Alex Chang, CMO of the 49ers, about how the team is managing the 75th anniversary and the way he laid it out was a good example of building the brand for the future while paying attention to the past.
The current state of the NBA at 75 actually gives the league a great opportunity to stitch the past, present, and future together as the NBA announced their 75th-anniversary team which enables the NBA to highlight the stars like Magic, Michael, Kareem, Bird, Oscar Robertson, and Wilt the Stilt.
They also have all-timers still in their primes like Steph Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant.
And, a promising new generation of talent in the form of Joel Embiid, Trae Young, and Bam!
The challenge the NBA will have to deal with is the handoff from one generation to the next.
The handoff from Magic and Bird to Michael Jordan, smooth.
The handoff from MJ to the next generation of stars, not as great.
What will the handoff from LeBron, KD, and Steph look like?
Second, changing behaviors and trends.
Behaviors were changing before the pandemic. And, they’ve changed since the pandemic.
In fact, the surveys I’ve been running in the newsletter and podcast have shown that behaviors have shifted tremendously since the pandemic began, highlighting some of the ongoing challenges that the NBA will need to deal with like:
Customers desire different things.
Purchases are happening later than ever before meaning it is much more challenging to estimate and plan attendance.
There are more no-shows.
Pile this on with other challenges that were ongoing like:
Corporate buyers beginning to question their investments in tickets.
Lower ratings and viewership.
Attendance is an issue in many markets.
This all points to a need to take a step back and do some proactive market research. In thinking brand, the first step is always a step back.
Now more than ever, we all need to keep this in mind because the path to recovery is through the desires of the customer.
Finally, changing revenue streams and customer tastes.
This is a constant.
For all 100+ issues of this newsletter, I’ve been telling you that customer tastes are always changing.
You have to stay in touch with the customer at all times.
My buddy, Shan, shared a quote that goes to the effect of “a dashboard is a terrible way to see a market.”
He means that you have to get out there with the customers.
That’s the key here to understand how to build new revenue streams amid changing customer demands.
The rush to jump on the latest bandwagon through NFTs, crypto, or some other new fad is appealing. The same as waving the wand of a DTC product.
The challenge isn’t that any one of these ideas works or doesn’t work. The experimentation and willingness to try new things is the key positive. The big challenge on developing new revenue streams and meeting customer demands is to always be in the market, testing ideas, learning, shifting, and testing again.
That’s good marketing.
And, that will help make the next 75 years of the NBA a success.
3. Broadway ticket buyers are waiting until the last minute:
Big Ideas:
Buying patterns have changed!? Who would have thunk it?
Fewer tourists, less international travelers? You don’t mean to tell me that your market segmentation should be different to reflect that?!
Every show is performing differently?! Wait?! What?!
Okay, I’m a little snarky in the big ideas up there because this is the stuff I’ve been telling you about the entire time we’ve been dealing with this pandemic. And, it shows up over and over in the survey feedback from the surveys I’ve been running.
So I really won’t spend a lot of time rehashing this stuff today.
The first big thing to note is that Wicked and Hamilton are bucking the trends of sales on Broadway, performing strongly and selling at what may be considered a normal rate.
What does this tell us?
You need to take a step back and look at YOUR market. The market and segmentation for a show like Wicked are much different than the segmentation of Bruce Springsteen or David Byrne’s shows.
Do your research.
Trying to rely on an average of what consumers want or the average across Broadway/West End/sports/US/UK/Australia/France/whatever is going to give you a false feeling of understanding.
Do your research.
Second, you need to segment the map accordingly.
I’ve talked about running my clients through a meaningful/actionable exercise to help draw up a good segmentation.
This just helps you figure out what is driving people to take action and allows you to pick real meaningful reasons to target a certain segment.
In this case, we are seeing that meaningful and actionable dynamic play out in the decline of the tourism business in NYC and I’m sure that is playing out in many places where tourism drives a lot of activity.
What does this mean to y’all?
That you need to redraw your map because if you are relying on tourist business, you’ve lost 50% or more of that travel right now and that might mean that you have to target different segments or change the meaningful/actionable nature of your segmentation.
The important key here is that you have to do this work.
You can’t just assume to know the answer.
That’s dangerous and wrong.
Third, buying patterns are different.
That’s played out in every survey, including mine, that I’ve seen during the pandemic. People are waiting because of fears of COVID, uncertainty about travel, not feeling comfortable. There has been a number of issues that have slowed people down in their buying habits.
The key point here is that you need to understand what is driving people to buy early because there are a lot of purchases at on-sale and a lot of purchases in the last two weeks.
Why aren’t there sales in the middle?
What kind of value can you offer that will help people buy early or throughout the sales cycle and not just wait until the end?
Your research will tell you this or point you towards an answer. Also, your marketing should help you drive more sales consistently.
If it isn’t, you are probably only doing promotions and that will just start me down another road.
4. Does arts’ marketing miss the audience?
Big Ideas:
Market Orientation means looking at what the customer wants, not you!
Target the right market for your message!
Just because everyone is jumping off a bridge doesn’t mean you should as well!
I’m so happy I found this example!
This is the perfect example to highlight a key idea that I share with y’all all the time, no matter what way you like to frame it: Customer Focused, Market Oriented, Outside In Thinking. It all boils down to you aren’t the customer.
I’m totally going to get Ruth on the podcast because this example of a well-done customer-focused ad is awesome, done cost-effectively, and illustrates how much you can do with just a little creativity.
What are the lessons from Ruth’s piece?
First, you aren’t your market.
This is the heart of her piece and the reason she draws the contrast in her two ad examples.
The danger we are all dealing with is that we think we “know” what the customer wants or we “know” what they should want or we “know” something.
That kind of thinking is dangerous and leads us to ads like the one for the Eugene Symphony’s, well-produced and utterly meaningless to the target audience.
Step back, look at the world around you and realize that you don’t define value, your customers do.
Second, Ruth’s “Escape to the Symphony” is a really good example of targeting a specific audience.
She’s picked harried moms that want to have a night out, feel cultured, and swept away.
It is obvious from her mock ad that this is her target and after showing it to a few people that would fit that market, they got it.
What is the point of targeting?
You make a decision about the person you want to talk with.
As a key point to add here, you can also see the positioning come out in Ruth’s ad because she has definitely put a foot down in favor of the position against the norm of the mother’s day-to-day life.
Third, Ruth’s piece and her analysis are a good reminder to us all that just because someone is jumping off a bridge, that doesn’t mean you should as well.
This lesson applies to race to the bottom pricing ideas, discounts, me-too promotion ideas, setting up your sales efforts the same as everyone else…allow me to stop before I list a hundred things.
The big idea that Ruth highlights here is that you have to do what is the correct thing for your organization. You have to know your customers. You have to understand what they want and need, then give it to them.
It is really about doing the basics of marketing 101, but so often the basics get lost in everything else.
5. Links to end the week:
IOC cuts out ATRs for Olympic sales: No more allocations. We will see what kind of unintended consequences this has.
Pricing is a tangible process with a tangible outcome: The OG discounts are for dummies article came out in 2015. It has been translated into many languages including French, German, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, and more. The thing is that the BS around pricing grows.
Coachella and Stagecoach stay through 2050: Stability is good. Watching how Coachella recovers and evolves will tell us a lot about the future of the live entertainment experience going forward.
I’ve got a Linktree with all of my links!
Check out Booking Protect! Since tickets have gone on sale after lockdowns, between 30-70% of consumers have taken up refund protection, meaning that they are yearning for the peace of mind refund protection gives them. Refund protection is a great way to improve your service, add value, and create a new stream of revenue for your organization.
Hook up with the folks at Activity Stream. As I mentioned in the engagement section, email is one of your best tools when used well and the Activate email tool will help you do just that.
Get the NPS worksheet I created with the folks at Eventellect. Like I mentioned at the top, I talked about the topic in detail with Simon Severino on this week’s podcast. That’s three people from different parts of the business world telling you that NPS is important and can help you improve your business. Send me an email and I’ll send you the worksheet.