Talking Tickets 8 July 2022:
#143
Hello from Miami!
The Wakeman summer tour continues. Where will I go next? No clue. It isn’t out of the question that I’ll be in Las Vegas or Los Angeles next week.
No matter what, you sign up for a weekly newsletter…you get a weekly newsletter.
I’ll be back in DC from 23 July forward and I’ll have some updates on stuff I’m doing for the rest of the year and into 2023 including a return to London, NYC, Australia, and a few other places.
To the Tickets!
1. The Big Story: Another week, another list of things I’ve noticed in my travels.
Big Ideas:
I’m in Miami this week because I like to move myself to the summer office.
While I’m out and about, I like to take notes, have conversations, and think about where I should point my attention.
If you share your ideas or lists with me, I’ll try and include some of them in next week’s newsletter. (Some restrictions, of course.)
Here’s the summer office:
I didn’t even need a filter on that one.
Since 2019, I’ve taken a week during the summer in Miami no matter what I do. I don’t call it a vacation. I call it a working retreat.
I need the time to get out of DC, think, and come up with new ideas for the value that I can offer my clients, y’all, and the rest of the folks that I encounter.
Last week, I jotted down some ideas that I had been keeping in my notebook for the last few months.
Today, I’m going to jot down some ideas that I’ve come up with in Miami. Let me know what you think.
In looking at the changing world, you need to think about your approach to your market through “The Triangle of Change”: attitudes, desires, and actions.
A real challenge in many places is dealing with the pragmatic medium. It isn’t doom and gloom all the time, but it isn’t puppies and rainbows either. This piece from Brian Morrissey helps me frame this idea.
The idea of each event being like a startup is something that has stuck with me since I had my conversation with Paul Williamson. This week, I had someone send me a note that mentioned the same thing. Great minds think alike. But thinking of each event through the lens of what do you need to do to achieve success is a lot like a startup.
Louis Brandeis said, “states are the laboratories of democracy.” Obviously, Brandeis was an optimist. But that idea stuck with me as I looked at some markets that people might consider “smaller” like SE Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Not that you shouldn’t bring your best thinking to those markets, but that the thinking they are doing in these smaller markets likely informs how we can think about the larger markets as well.
With the news leaking or breaking or something about the potential move of USC and UCLA to a new Big Ten conference that will have like 20 teams, I continue to think about the idea that too much of a good thing can be too much. I also think about the idea that just because you can do something that doesn’t mean that you should.
2. The Road to Recovery: STAR takes a look at whether or not ticketing policies for the 21st Century:
Big Ideas:
Customers have been taking up refund protection at a greater rate: I told you so!
Staffing levels are a challenge worldwide, not just in the UK.
Demand generation is going to take a concerted effort.
STAR does great work!
I’m a big fan of the people involved and the work they do…if you don’t know what they do or haven’t checked them out, give them a look.
Your homework for this week is to check out the report and make some notes that you can apply to your own business, for sure.
To me, the big ideas at the top stand out because they show you that consumer behavior has changed and that people have definitely been impacted by the pandemic, even when we think otherwise.
First, is the big data on refund protection.
The data I’ve seen has shown fans taking up refund protection at a rate that is double the rate that they have been taking it up before the pandemic.
I’ll note that on a market-to-market basis, the numbers may vary. But the trend line is consistent, people like the sense of security that refund protection provides them.
Second, staffing levels around the world are a challenge.
I’m not sure I have yet to talk with someone that hasn’t struggled in some form with staffing shortages since lockdowns have eased.
Not just in tickets, but all over the world.
How are you going to deal with this?
You need to spend a bit of time thinking about how to make your jobs more appealing to people. Even with a potential recession, you are going to see people be a bit pickier about what they do with their time.
Third, demand generation is a challenge around the world as well. And, folks are going to need to really do some serious work on reconnecting with their audiences, building new customers, and getting people back into the building.
Obviously, call me if you are trying to figure out what to do.
More than anything, the need to step back and look around is more important than ever before. Because just throwing open the doors has likely hit its limits and now the difficult job of marketing and selling is back in play.
Action items:
Check out refund protection and your policies around exchanges and refunds.
Take a look at your jobs. Are you paying enough? Providing advancement opportunities? Creating jobs that are desirable?
Call me for a consultation on your marketing and strategy. I’m offering all of y’all a free 15-minute strategy consultation. Christmas in July!
3. How To: New York State shows how to reform the ticket business:
Big Ideas:
Now you’ll likely see a rush of advertising dollars flood the NY market.
What will the unintended consequences of this be?
I talked about this with Brett Goldberg on the podcast.
I’m sure a lot of us know the example of StubHub offering up all-in pricing in the mid-2010s for that experiment to cost them market share.
So a new law is in place that will require sellers to reveal all-in pricing in NYS.
Will this be a good thing? A bad thing? Something else?
I think we don’t know for sure what will happen now.
There are likely to be unintended consequences in some form here. What they will be, I don’t know.
One thing I do think we will see is that it will become more difficult for smaller platforms and sellers to compete because it is likely that the bigger marketplaces are going to flood the market with more advertising spend to establish supremacy in the NY market. Or, continue their dominance.
The rest of it, we will just see.
4. Tech/Tools/Profiles: The Telegraph looks at why buying tickets is hell:
Big Ideas:
Listen to my first conversation with Richard Howle, we cover this topic. The ideas hold up now.
While this is a UK paper, the idea of two tiers of buyers holds true in most markets.
BOTS needs a wider definition because as has been mentioned to me many times, “Alexa is a BOT. Siri is a BOT. Are they bad?”
Lots of interesting stories flowing through the machine this week.
Maybe I’ll offer up guest spots for people to do an analysis on some of these stories.
This one is interesting for a number of reasons because the idea of the ticket industry not focusing on making the buying experience best for customers goes back to the early days of the podcast when I spoke about this with Richard Howle.
While the overall context of the conversation may be different than when we started, it hasn’t gotten easier for customers to buy tickets since 2018.
On the whole, I think there is technology available to make the buying experience better for customers and enable folks to not have to go for the “instant sell out” spiel.
There’s also the idea that all BOTS end up being bad.
Technology is a tool.
It isn’t good or bad on its own.
That’s true with BOTS and it is true with any technology.
You have to look at the people and the actions being taken.
That’s where the real attention needs to continue to be put.
Reward or punish behaviors…same as anything else.
5. Blurbs and Such:
The Little Book of Scams in Scotland helps customers avoid scams: No mention of Nigerian princes, Trump University, Bernie Madoff, or Rob Blagojevich. So…buyer beware or something.
Let’s start calling it the NFL 2 instead of college football, yeah?: Who needs tradition? Who needs that college aspect? Let’s just make it a pro league and be done with the whole thing, yeah?
Talking about failure as well as success: I think there is extreme merit to letting people know about the things that don’t work as well as the things that do work. By sharing the downs as well as the ups, you can help folks relate to the journey much more. I think if we did more of this, it would make the process of change and innovation much easier to deal with.
Live Nation expands in Thailand: Who was on this SE Asia thing early?! Me! Check out my conversation with Ilya Kratsov.
You can find me everywhere with my special Linktree! It is all my links!
Be a part of the ‘Talking Tickets’ Slack community.
Check out my friends at Booking Protect!
We continue to see the value of offering refund protection in the data. Feedback shows that the most challenging issues since re-opening have been pretty consistent for teams, theatres, and venues:
Consumer confidence
Changes in buyer behavior
COVID policies coupled with refund or exchange policies.
Offering refund protection helps you provide a solution for these challenges.
Hook up with the team at Booking Protect!
I did the FREE webinar a few weeks back but had some technical issues with the live stream on Microsoft Teams. I’m not sure if was Teams or my new desktop computer, either way…I’m going to continue to play with the tech stack and I posted the audio file in the podcast stream. So, pricing ideas to your heart’s desire.
Lots of great podcast conversations: check out recent conversations with Amanda Lester, Paul Williamson, and, Brett Goldberg.
Let me know who you’d like to hear from by sharing your ideas with me here.