What’s up, everyone?!
Welcome to February. For me, January 2022 was a bit of a bust between the Covid, the cold, and the snow.
February can only be on the way up.
BTW, I’m planning a pod-ference for April which is an idea that Hannah Grannemann shared with me that I’m stealing to create the first-ever pod-ference for the world of tickets focused on ‘The Road of Recovery’.
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1. The Big Story: UK audiences for sport are coming back, fast:
Big Ideas:
- In the UK, attendance is up to the same levels as 2019 in the UK…led by soccer!
- To make sure this recovery sticks, let’s focus on the long-term.
- Now, more than ever, we need fan engagement.
Ahhh…returning to normal.
The only thing keeping me from going on a crazy soccer trip to London for spring break is my son’s passport is too close to expiration and there is a backlog of passport renewals in the States.
My passport is still totally valid!
At the start, there is a really great data point that attendance is returning to normal-ish levels.
This is a really great sign because the return of fans has been a bit up and down from market to market. So seeing all of the soccer fans and sports fans return in the UK is HUGE!
Moving beyond the good news, we do need to spend a moment or two looking at two ideas that are going to be important to long-term recovery:
- Fan engagement
- Long-term focus
First, let’s look at the fan engagement.
Last week, I wrote about the rise of NFTs and what they will mean.
In the past, I’ve hit upon the idea of fan development.
That’s where I want to point you now.
During the Super League mess, a term popped up called, “Legacy Fan” and it was dismissive of fans that are long-term followers, supporters, and ticket buyers because right now the focus has shifted to clicks, eye-balls, or some other digital metric that may be important at the moment, but which may also fall away.
I’ve pointed y’all to the book, Soccernomics, in the past.
The important idea in the book to me is that fans don’t stay with you in a straight line. A fan’s lifetime following is usually up and down, it ebbs and flows depending on the life stage that you find a fan in.
The thing about fan development is that you have to take a long-term focus on this stuff, recognizing that there are windows when someone is going to be a huge fan, heavily engaged, and there are times when that engagement will fall away.
If you are only managing your fandom for the huge moments, you are missing out on opportunities because it doesn’t help you develop a long-term connection, engagement, or brand loyalty.
The other point is the need for a long-term focus on growth and recovery as well.
Hand-in-hand with the idea of fan development, the recovery isn’t going to be something that happens quickly and moves on. It is going to be something that we have to manage and develop over a period of years.
This is true for any number of reasons:
- Economic recovery
- Changes in behavior
- Migration patterns
I can go on, but you get the point…I hope. The environment is different now and what worked before isn’t guaranteed to work now.
How do you focus on the long-term?
I talk about strategy through the long and short idea, slightly different from the long and short idea offered up by Les Binet and Peter Field when it comes to marketing and advertising.
In my take on strategy, long-term and short-term means that you need to consider your choice architecture for your organization beginning with your ambition, moving into your market focus, capturing your value proposition, covering your resources, and finally into your actions.
You have two tracks with your strategy. In the long term, you need to understand your grand ambition of where your organization is going. In the short term, you’ll adjust your market focus, your value proposition, your resources, and your actions to help you fulfill those plans.
They work hand-in-hand.
The long-term might be 5-10 years. The short-term, often one.
Right now, we all need to keep this in mind because we need to know where we are going in the future to keep our business-oriented in the right direction, but recognize that if we don’t do a good job in the short-term that we might fail miserably and there won’t be a long-term.
2. The Road to Recovery: Managing the Omicron wave:
Big Ideas:
- In a lot of places, the Omicron wave seems to have peaked.
- Looking at this as a part of long-term recovery is helpful.
- Managing uncertainty is key these days.
This won’t get a lot of time today because we’ve been covering recovery and keeping our focus for a while now.
The good news is that the Omicron wave seems to have peaked quickly. There is a new variation on the Omicron theme, but no one knows what that means just yet. Talking with a doctor friend of mine, he told me that the bad thing is that a lot of people got sick over the last month or six weeks, the good news is that this might help provide a higher level of immunity to enable greater protection to the healthcare system and enable a bit more of a recovery and lessening of restrictions.
He also asked if I was fully vaccinated…so I don’t think the take was a YOLO one.
I bring all of this up because the data throughout has been clear that when people feel afraid and the virus is running wild, people stay away from events and crowds. There are exceptions, but the virus running wild lessens movement.
After the peak, it seems that people are cool with moving about the world again.
To manage this, we still need to keep in mind the concept of long-term recovery because this isn’t a short-term fix.
We need to recognize that there might be ups and downs for a while and that we are going to have to manage them. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that we have nothing to worry about, not going to solve the problem.
So, be aware. Manage the situation effectively.
Because uncertainty is still going to be with us through 2022, at least.
3. How-To: Do STP right!
Big Ideas:
- STP is the holy trinity of marketing: segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
- The Hundred has opened up a new market for cricket with the proper work of marketing.
- The idea of building off of success is really at the heart of marketing strategy.
I wrote about The Hundred a few months back and I wrote about the AFLW a few times here because I think both of them highlight the importance of doing your marketing work well.
In this case, I like to highlight how much focus The Hundred put on young audiences as a gateway into building out a cricket competition. With the AFLW, they went for non-traditional fans, ones that the AFL might not have touched or targeted at all.
These are wise because it highlights the value of the holy trinity of marketing: STP.
Let’s look at this:
First, segmentation is just the art of drawing up a map of the market you are playing in.
You need to segment your market based on behavior.
You want to know what people value and why they are or aren’t taking action.
It is often missed because too much focus is put on demographic segmentation which is akin to doing up your market by star sign.
I’m a Scorpio, BTW. Do with that what you will.
When you segment based on behavior, at the end of the practice, you end up with 6 to 8 segments…with cool names like “Mr. Big” or “No Money Honey” that help you describe what it is that causes your audience to act.
From there, you target by looking at the opportunities available to you and picking the big, juicy target.
We hit on this recently.
Best target needs to be defined by what you need to achieve like driving attendance, revenue, or something else.
Know what it is and go forth accordingly.
Once that is done, you position yourself.
You can be for you or against the competition. The best positions include a little bit of both, but never try to straddle the middle ground. A good position is about taking a stand.
This work is all over the work of The Hundred as they saw themselves build a young audience that was largely new to cricket.
Now in 2022, they are going to be able to expand off of their base of success, picking up overlapping customers and segments because one key of successfully using STP is that you are able to connect with other parts of your audience without changing your strategy, your targeting, or your positioning.
It is a term in marketing called “spillover”.
So, go back and think through this case from The Hundred, it highlights the power of proper marketing work and how proper marketing doesn’t shut down opportunities, it creates them.
4. Profile/Tech/Tools: Richard Howle is on the BBC talking about the secondary market, BOTS, and more:
Big Ideas:
- Industrial-scale ticket touts are a problem in the UK.
- High-pressure sales practices can create blowback.
- The point is that just because a ticket is listed on the secondary market doesn’t mean that this ticket is actually going to be sold or sold at that price.
This builds off of last week’s Jamie Webster conversation.
Lo and behold, my dude, Richard Howle was on the BBC talking about the topic right as I was typing up my analysis.
This conversation is interesting because you have a member of the primary, secondary, and an artist having a conversation about the nature of ticketing.
It is always good to hear from Richard because he’s not against a secondary market and he isn’t in the camp that the primary can do no wrong. His take on things is pretty measured as we’ve seen when he’s been on the podcast:
This is an interesting conversation that goes on for about 45 minutes or more.
Three key takeaways for me:
- There needs to be consistency of talking and action.
- Trust is key.
- There probably isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to anything about the world of tickets.
First things, in listening to the conversation with the rep from Viagogo, the panelists and journalists were frustrated because of a feeling that Viagogo is saying one thing and doing another thing.
That’s a bit of a holdover from the way that folks felt about the company before the CMA held up the StubHub merger.
Trust is built on consistent action and language.
That’s kindergarten-level crap, but it holds true.
Second, trust needs to be baked in.
One thing I’ve always been frustrated with is the tendency for teams to be “broker friendly” when things are going poorly and “anti-broker” when things are going well. Now that we are seeing teams struggle to fill seats, the need to have a much more thoughtful long-term strategy is on display.
But the bigger issue at play is the need to build trusting relationships that withstand any up or down in the business cycle…in other words, build relationships and not transactions.
This goes back to the first point, but trust, action, and consistency all run in the same lane.
Finally, there isn’t likely a one-size-fits-all approach to any market. The secondary market looks much different in the US than it does in other parts of the world. And, within the different countries, acceptance of the secondary market is stronger or weaker depending on any number of factors that would be as long as my arm like venue size, fan base, pre-sales, price integrity, the economy, and more.
The reality here is that moving forward the internet makes doing business across jurisdictions easier. But it can also make managing this commerce easier as well. But there will always be workarounds.
The big idea here is that you need to start with understanding your goals and build your distribution strategy around achieving those goals. That’s the best way to manage the secondary market now, but it will take some work.
I guess that’s the key to everything now: it will take some work.
5. Blurbs and Such:
Omicron definitely stopped arts audiences: Follow the data. Look at history. And, realize that you aren’t your audience.
Dutch government re-opens events, cautiously: Not YOLO, but back in business.
Irish ticket revenue is on the rise: YOLO in Ireland with no restrictions, bring the revenue rushing back.
eSports sponsorships have doubled in the last two years: During lockdowns, we saw that 50% of people were involved in video games and 80% downloaded some sort of video game. The attraction was the competition, the lockdown, and the sense of community. So I can see why sponsorships would double.
Comments are open to ban “drip-pricing”: The all-in pricing experiment didn’t work, but the concept of “drip-pricing” is still one that can be problematic for folks. You like to think that people want to know what the price is going to be, but the data shows that people seem to go over and buy from the places that have “drip-pricing”. I guess you need some sort of uniformity in the market, but who knows what that will cause.
ESPN and Vivid Seats renew their partnership: I’m curious about this one. Because in my days working daily on the secondary market, I had a number of these in place and they weren’t huge traffic boosters or revenue generators for us. Times have changed and I’d be curious to know if these partnerships have become more lucrative and valuable. In theory, they should be really great.
The Roarin’ 20s are still coming: I like this prediction because it urges caution with a nod toward being prepared for things to take off. It is also measured in the way that there are definitely challenges facing the industry. If we’ve seen nothing but one thing over the last few years, it is that a hint of caution is probably the wise move.
Scott Friedman has Scott O’Neil on his podcast: I’m name-dropped, so I’m including it! Flattery will get you everywhere! Also, the backbone of sales is “cold calling” and needs to change is pretty relevant.
I was in Sportico with Simon Mabb this week talking about Booking Protect, refund protection, and what customers want and need now. Give it a read.
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! Customers have been taking up refund protection at a rate that is double what it was before the pandemic began. This is a great opportunity for you to offer more value to your customers in a way that they want while also creating a new revenue stream for your organization.
Check out this week’s podcast conversation with Ruth Hartt. She’s really great on the topic of customer focus and customer orientation. If you’ve ever had questions about understanding the customer, this is a bit of a masterclass on the topic!