Talking Tickets 5 March 2021: 170,000 Tickets Sold! $67M in losses! $12M in NFTs! Australia's Theatre! And, More!

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To the Tickets!

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Before I start, I realize I use a term in the newsletter this week a couple of times, “The Discipline of Marketing” and it isn’t something I normally have used lately. So I put together a checklist of items I feel account for this.

1. Ticketmaster sells 170,000 festival tickets in 3 days!

Let’s start with something hopeful this week, tickets selling!

There should be tremendous optimism as we see announcements of festival dates, dates for the re-opening of the UK, and we start to see the vision of lots of big shows coming together in 2022. (Check out the handy calendar.)

I hear from folks that have received a dose of the vaccine that they had a real sense of relief and optimism when they got the shot! So let’s hope we are getting shots in arms fast!

As much as this is a story of optimism, we do have to continue to be cautious because as good as it is to see demand for these festivals, we can’t just assume demand is a long-term given.

If you remember, demand for a lot of events was a struggle before the pandemic.

And, as was mentioned this week, acts are lining up to go on the road in 2022. Which means that competition is going to be tremendous.

How will you fight the tendency of the last few years to let your events and tickets become commodities?

Three things here:

First, be excited. Tickets for festivals are for sale and selling! In Massachusetts, the governor said Fenway can open with 12% capacity. And, as mentioned above, the UK has a calendar for things opening up.

Second, jump on the excitement where you can. Because the future is uncertain even as events open up. You are going to want to capture sales now, no matter what. You can’t guarantee demand in the future will be stable or consistent.

Third, work to avoid “The Commodity Trap”. Check the link above but don’t assume demand, focus on the customer, get “The Discipline of Marketing” into your organization, and recognize that every product and service can be differentiated.

And, like Klaus-Peter Schulenberg so aptly put it, “Re-opening isn’t recovery.”

2. GameStop looks a lot like what the secondary market had become before the pandemic:

What comes next in the secondary market has been on my mind a lot lately.

Michael wrote this about a month ago and sent it to me, but I’d been trying to collect my thoughts on the piece and get a better feeling about what the future will look like in the secondary market before I said anything.

First, Michael’s analysis of the situation is pretty thorough and pretty good. The notes I wrote as I was reading the piece look like this:

• Shorts/longs/speculation/volatility

That’s sort of been too much of the secondary market over the last few years.

One of the folks I know in the secondary market said, “It has been an ugly place. And, not sustainable.”

I tend to agree.

Second, we don’t know what the long-term impacts of the breaches of trust that have happened between ticket companies and platforms is going to mean to the different businesses and how a change in buying patterns is going to change the way that folks buy tickets off the secondary market.

The change could be big! It could be small! It could be something else entirely!

Seriously, we just can’t know for sure. And, until we know how consumer sentiment plays out after the pandemic, we can’t know what impact, if any, these platforms and their decisions are going to impact what had become the traditional business of a lot of brokers.

Finally, no matter what happens, demand generation is going to be a key differentiator for businesses going forward.

I keep coming back to the way that things were just “hot” or not. To an extent, that’s always been the case, when the Knicks, Rangers, or Yankees are doing well and they play a big game, demand is outrageous.

This drags demand up for a lot of places.

But we also saw that starting to break in a lot of places before the pandemic and we can’t just take people’s “love” for sports for granted. We have to earn their attention, their spending, and their following.

The challenge of demand generation will be the responsibility of the entire ecosystem. Again, back to “The Discipline of Marketing”.

What I do believe very strongly is that we will see the business of the secondary market change and the folks that are constantly looking at the concept of “value” and how to fill a role that reflects value in the future are going to have an advantage.

That could be insights, data, demand building, pricing, or something else. Add value. That’s the key now, going forward, and always!

3. NFTs and funding the arts? I bought Bitcoin!:

My feeling on some of these new tools, technologies, and funding methods is: why not give these things a try?

About a month ago, I did a similar thing by spending some money investing in cryptocurrency so that I could speak more knowledgeably about these things and have some skin in the game.

I’m down 15% in a month! So don’t take investing advice from me.

But what does all of this talk about NFTs and cryptocurrency mean to us?

First, big miss not having had Sandy Kahlur on the podcast to talk about blockchain. But I have had Steven Dobesh on.

Back to the story, the first thing here is that by putting attention and effort into NFTs and cryptocurrency, it is really a nod to Market Orientation.

Where are your customers?

I don’t know, but I can find out!

This is a pretty low-risk investment in working to reach your customers where they already are and where they are willing to be met.

That’s the heart of Market Orientation. You don’t set the terms of engagement, your customers do and if you turn your back on them they will go somewhere else.

Second, this is a really cool opportunity to engage new audiences.

Joe Patti writes about the way that these tokens have been used to create new audiences, new streams of revenue, and open the door to new audiences.

The thing about these types of emerging ideas is that in many places as an industry most businesses aren’t doing a good job of segmenting their audiences by behavior. This means that you miss out on a lot of opportunities due to a lack of understanding about the nature of spillover effects and behavioral dynamics.

Segment by behavior and your eyes are going to be opened to the possibilities of new technologies and new ways to reach your audience.

Finally, this once again highlights that you don’t define value, your fans do.

Zoe Scaman is my go-to resource on the current thinking about fandoms.

She talks about the nature of modern fandoms and how brand building has a whole new set of tools to work with now.

That’s what is on display here. Top Shot is a way for the NBA to reach a new audience, an old audience, or an audience that may not have been as engaged in a new way.

This is what we should all be up to.

Connecting with our customers in new ways. If the pandemic hasn’t taught us that, I don’t know what will. To see how you shift and adapt, look no further than the way that Jason Barash and his team have evolved during the pandemic.

Or, look at Mark Cuban’s announcement that the Mavericks are going to take Bitcoin as part of the ticket package…not the first time they’ve tried something with Bitcoin, but by trying it multiple times, Mark is showing us that you figure out where your customers are and offer them value. Not the other way around.

All of these add up to finding new ways to add value and capture value, the basics of marketing. Just because it doesn’t look like what we are used to doesn’t mean it is crazy.

In fact, being a little crazy might be what is required right now.

P.S. Kings of Leon are selling their album as an NFT and 3LAU just sold almost $12M of his album’s NFTs. No messing around here…that’s some decent coin.

P.P.S. Speaking of new, try out this cool tool from the San Francisco Symphony that does cool stuff with your microphone.

4. The Braves lost $67M last year:

That’s a lot of t-shirts in the team shop.

I mention that because the Braves have one of the best team shops going, you can get Hank Aaron shirts, Dale Murphy shirts, Smoltz, Glavine, and current players! In the pandemic, I think my son has worn his Murphy and Aaron shirts 4 times a week.

I highlight this story because as we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, there is a lot of money on the line. It is also not just an American story as the Australian Football League an $A23M loss as well.

This situation has only created more challenges for teams, venues, and content producers and as we move towards a point where people will be able to actually attend events again, we have to be careful to keep a balance between recovering revenues and squeezing fans in an oversaturated market.

I had at a minimum of 3 phone calls this week with folks talking about “getting back to the way things were.”

This is dangerous thinking.

The world has moved in the last 12+ months and it will continue to move as we head out of the pandemic, to act otherwise is putting your business in danger.

Here are three things I can guarantee after the pandemic:

• It will be dangerous to be dumb about the way you operate your business like you are on autopilot and you were just on vacation.

• The Discipline of Marketing is going to be super important because the competition for customers’ spending will be intense.

• Those folks that spent time investing in strategy first thinking are going to do better than the ones that are tactically driven in all their efforts.

If you are sitting with a significant loss on your books and you are looking for ways to start reclaiming your revenue (okay, who isn’t?), here are three steps to follow to dig out of the hole you are in with a focus on making your return turn into a recovery.

First, do some research in your market. Find out what is on folks’ minds, what they need, what they miss, and how you can add value.

I can’t tell you how often I sit on meetings where folks try to pretend like they know exactly what the customer wants because they’ve been doing this for a long time, have a knack, or some other dangerous stuff.

Second, figure out where you are on the foundations of a solid strategy right now.

Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning.

Segmentation is the map and it should reflect behavior. Don’t put together any arbitrary limits or constraints on your segmentation. Just draw the map.

Targeting, pick a destination. Professor Byron Sharp offers up a theory about being able to hit the entire market, but I’ve never been involved in a business that could afford to blanket every customer, nor wanted to.

Positioning, either about you or against the competition. You have to take a stance. Here’s the key, as much as any of us love a good concert, a game, or whatever. Our marketing isn’t for us, it is for our market. And, they may be making decisions based on an entirely different criteria and definitely from a entirely different point of view.

Third, rethink your marketing mix.

The 4 Ps still matter and anyone that says otherwise is blowing smoke up your bum!

The big key here is that you need to focus on a concept called “media neutrality”. This isn’t about the internet, but it is about saying that I’m not going to focus on what I need to achieve before I decide how I’m going to achieve it.

Strategy first, tactics second.

The reality on all of these cancellations and losses is that they are sunk costs in a lot of ways. Most businesses and people get jammed up by sunk costs as well. But we have to find a path forward and not allow past decisions and the challenges we’ve had to overcome set us back even further.

So research, STP, the marketing mix!

Start there and let’s dig out of this thing!

5. Australia and New Zealand continue to show us what comes next:

Y’all know my love for all things Australia and h/t to my friends in New Zealand that I look forward to coming to visit too.

This is an awesome story to end the week on because it highlights one of my favorite places and some of my favorite people.

Here another picture of Australia. Where else can you get a view like that from a neighborhood dinner?

In tagging this article, it was totally a missed opportunity for the Times not to talk with Angela Higgins, Jo Michel, Amy Maiden, or any of my friends in Australia. But I’ll mention them here because they are great and you should know them!

But the story highlights all of the positive stuff that is going on in Australia.

At the start, there was a sense of awkwardness to some of the performances. Now there are likely to still be disruptions as well. I think we are likely to be dealing with some disruptions for the next year or so.

But you are seeing people put on shows, sell tickets, and get back to normal.

I mean, Thor threw a party with no masks!

The important thing here is that as we started the week, we will end the week with optimism.

Shows will come back. People will go to shows, games, and events.

It is just that we have to mix our optimism with pragmatism by focusing on ensuring that we are the first thing people think of when they want to celebrate with friends once things are normal.

We can’t just assume that demand and business will come back like normal.

As I was talking with one of my friends in Australia a week or so ago, he mentioned that folks are begging for data to try and get their productions back to “normal” ASAP, but his comment is that “we don’t have data to support that.”

So be patient.

Recognize the reality of the environment and focus on being better, not just being the same.

P.S. Maybe I’ll buy some shares in the Melbourne Victory so I can say I’m a club owner!?

P.S.S. Check out this cool promotion by my AFL team for 5 year membership commitments!

See you next week!

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Still in DC, but my lady got her first dose of the vaccine on Thursday and I’m eligible to try and get an appointment at 9 AM. I’m ready to bust out.

Go to my website where you will find my blog and more! A few new things are going to be popping up in the next few weeks with case studies, worksheets, and a few other things to help y’all get rolling again.

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Simon Mabb, CEO of Booking Protect, was interviewed for INTIX’s site this week to talk about the future of event cancellation insurance. If you are thinking about ways to generate revenue, give your customers peace of mind, and help ease folks back into buying tickets, check out Booking Protect.

Have you checked out the We Will Recover website yet? You should. Ideas from around the world to help y’all recover, powered by the folks at Activity Stream who are in the midst of rolling out a few new ways to help you clean up your data and make it useful heading through to the other side of the pandemic. Also, that’s Einar on the left in the picture from Sydney!