Hey! Hey!
If you haven’t noticed, we have a new home on Substack. I hope this smooths out some of the challenges some of you were dealing with viewing the newsletter on your mobile phone.
Thanks for being here! It means a lot to me that all of you allow me into your inbox each week.
I’m running a survey to help me deliver more relevant content and better ideas. If you have filled it out, thank you! If you haven’t, would you take a minute or two to shareyour ideas with me?
It is Friday, so join me and Ken Troupe for a drink. We’ve elevated Matt Wolff to being on the social media promotions.
How’s everyone holding up? Let me know how you are doing!
To the tickets!
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1. Melbourne without sports just doesn’t feel like Melbourne:
I’m on the record now as being a big fan of Australia!
Within a week, I had two of the highlight experiences of my career when I gave the keynote to open the Ticketing Professionals Australia conference and turned around and gave a keynote to the Australian Football League during their fan day.
I bring this up because when you have the chance to visit Melbourne, it is called “the home of sport” and there are probably close to 50 professional teams that call the area home.
And, while I was in Melbourne, I got a real feel for the sports and entertainment culture of the city and visiting Sydney I got a real feel for the way that Australians experience live entertainment as a country.
I’m taking a long way to get to the point of Melbourne is all of our cities, towns, and countries right now.
Without the arts, sports, and entertainment, all of our communities are suffering. To me, the idea of no Radio City Christmas Spectacular is heartbreaking because it was the first big production I ever saw when I moved to NYC, and less than 2 years later, I had the chance to partner with MSG on the show before…I love it!
Lately, I’ve been trying to think of positive actions and ways we can do something to help keep a positive frame around our thinking now so I’ll ask you to do 3 simple things today, for me:
- Share a special memory have, a photo, or some other cherished thing about working, visiting, or doing something around entertainment, sports, concerts, or whatever. And, I’ll find a way to share them on social media, my blog, or in some form to highlight what we all are missing. Or, even better, share with me something positive that you, your organization, or your community are working on to keep you focused on positive things during this time.
- Take action to support NIVA and the Save Our Stages Act. It takes about a minute.
- Reach out to 2-3 people a day just to check in on them.
As I’ve taken to emphasizing a lot lately, we will get through this. People have been gathering in large groups for thousands of years, we are facing a pause right now, a comma, not a period.
But we need to keep our heads about us, work together, and support each other. I’m here for all of you!
Now wear a mask! Wash your hands! And, stay out of my personal space…for now!
2. Everyone is going to need to be more creative about how they generate revenue coming out of this:
It is an interesting time to be talking revenue and strategy with folks because there seems to be a sense of being caught flat-footed by some of the changes that the coronavirus is bringing upon us.
Over the next week or so, I’m going to have on a great strategist from London called Zoe Scaman that has shared a bunch of ideas around being more creative from the way your business models are structured, how you think about monetization, and what innovation in entertainment looks like.
A lot of the examples she’s been using have been of K-Pop bands, but right now I think we all need to be looking for examples of how we can engage our audience, grow an audience, and monetize an audience.
The reality is that if an organization was understaffed and overwhelmed before the pandemic, that is likely only going to be worse afterward.
The lead article here talks about potential ways for sports to change their monetization models to capture more from other media outlets, but as the pandemic has evolved we have seen how much money comes in due to folks being at games; we’ve seen the tremendous negative impact on economies when there are no performing arts or theatre; and, as I showed above with the example of Melbourne, a city can lose a bit of its soul.
Monetization has been on my mind since I started out because growing up in rural Georgia, the only way out was through selling.
As we think through the challenge of bringing folks back, driving revenue, and growing our customer base, here are 3 ideas for you to think about and put to work:
- How are you engaging your audience now? What is working and what isn’t?
- Do you have a customer path for your customers, even now?
- What does your revenue strategy look like to bridge your organization from now to the point when we can welcome folks back?
I know we hear a lot about social distancing, creative seat mapping, and streaming, but we have to continue to think and go even further.
As was pointed out in a few places this week, the numbers on some of this stuff are really tough.
I’m studying this a lot the last week or two and I’ll likely reach out to a lot of folks to better understand what you are dealing with around audience management/development and monetization. If you want to or are willing to chat about this, let me know by replying to this message.
3. Football in the fall is looking more and more problematic:
Thus far in the return of sports during the pandemic, we’ve seen that the bubble works.
I don’t know what the practicality of football bubbles is: for the NFL okay they are professional athletes and grown men, but college football…c’ mon.
We’ve had UConn cancel football this fall and Penn State says that they are going forward with no fans.
As I was completing this, the Big Sky Conference just decided to cancel their season.
The NFL’s player opt-out window closed at 4 PM on Thursday and there are exceptions that allow players to declare themselves out going forward. And, the NFL seems to keep inching closer and closer to saying there won’t be fans in the stands this fall, costing teams millions and maybe billions of dollars in lost revenue from tickets, sponsorship dollars, and other game-day revenue streams. (Though, be careful with these articles because a lot of the missed revenue refers to secondary market data and not primary market data.)
What should we take from this?
In the ‘Talking Tickets’ survey, one respondent said, “Wear a mask! Be considerate of the world around you! So we can get back to normal.”
Making sure that folks are listening to the advice of medical professionals to wash your hands, wear a mask, practice social distancing, and stay home when your sick would be a good place to start to help ensure sports with events can down.
The second thing is to keep an eye on how folks act towards their fans as they make these decisions.
I think I wrote this last week or I mentioned it to someone after another colleague mentioned it to me, but you are going to see schools try and strong-arm their buyers and donors like they have some sort of leverage in the relationship, as we saw with Penn State’s announcement.
They don’t.
The customer and the person with the money holds all the power and before the pandemic, people were already voting with their wallets by going to Buffalo Wild Wings, tailgating before the games before leaving, or just staying home and watching their packages.
As INTIX CEO, Maureen Andersen said on the NATB’s virtual conference, “People are going to remember how you acted during the pandemic.” And, I know from my conversations with customers and teams, that is true and the impact of that is already being felt.
So step wisely when you are dealing with your customers.
4. Dany Garcia, The Rock, and RedBird Capital buy the XFL’s assets:
Friends of the podcast and newsletter, John Wall Street and his colleagues at Sportico have provided some really good coverage on this.
I poked around to figure out whether or not this was much of a story or just a fairly low-risk bet on some assets.
In thinking this through, the bet seems to be on a couple of things that have been hypothesized, but never really proven true or not:
First, the idea of spring football.
In most cases, the we need more football crowd thinks that all football matters and people will turn into more football no matter what.
During their shortened first season, the XFL saw attendance, ratings, and positive news coverage go down each week after the first.
This doesn’t mean spring football won’t work, but from my experience going to a game in DC, the value proposition didn’t seem to really work for a sustainable product that doesn’t have a big-bucks TV deal.
The gameplay wasn’t great. The lines for things were entirely too long for a stadium that had approximately 7,500 fans in attendance, the price of tickets was high for the quality.
Second, the value in having technology and assets in each market.
I’m not sure how much value is really there.
Maybe there is some valuable data that can be turned around for gambling and casino operations, gaming, or some other product.
Locations and assets for facilities don’t strike me as nearly as important as I’ve seen some analysis point to.
To me, it is a low-risk opportunity that provides a good story for Dany Garcia and The Rock. If their angle is like The Big 3, that’s a good theory, but the player costs, the insurance costs, and the other operating costs are very high for something that may not have a super high ceiling.
But if I had access to an extra $15 million, I’d likely take a shot too.
5. Here are a few stories that don’t fit a full theme for the week, but I wanted to share:
MLS will have fans where possible: This will be interesting to watch since there were two teams that had coronavirus outbreaks heading into the bubble and now you move the league from the bubble to their home markets…this is going to be tough without adding fans, but who knows?!
MiLB is getting creative now: Shout out to all my friends around MiLB, they do some of the best work in sports business. Every team I’ve talked with has been incredibly creative in their approach to handling this pandemic and they have been very successful in a lot of cases of getting their partners and ticket buyers to roll over their money to next season. These examples of creativity like the Durham Bulls t-shirt, the Indianapolis Indians events, and other events in minor league parks around the country should be places we all look to see what is possible with some brainpower put to creating value.
Maintaining diversity in the arts is a concern in the UK’s arts rescue plan: We need the arts more than ever and we need diverse voices. You’ll notice over the next couple of weeks on the podcast that I have made bringing to light the need for diversity of thought, background, and perspective a renewed focus. But it isn’t easy and it takes attention and effort.
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What am I up to this week?
A couple of things:
Lots of new podcast episodes going live. I’m really glad I had a chance to sit down with Amira Rose Davis this week to talk about the coronavirus, Black Lives Matters in the context of sports, and a whole lot more.
She was great: thoughtful, engaging, and extremely generous.
You will want to keep an eye on my website because I’m starting to put stuff out from the information I’ve been gaining from the survey that I’m doing. We’ve also been discussing it in the Slack Channel and folks have been sending me messages about how they aren’t used to seeing people take real action from their survey feedback.
I want to try something new and I can with your help. I want to see about trying out a virtual mastermind group with 5-6 folks, executives, entrepreneurs, leaders, etc. from the world of tickets. I was involved in one a few years back that was DC-based and I learned a lot and everyone learned a lot. If you think something like this might be up your alley, send me a note.
I’m in DC! Where else might I be going?! If you want to chat, let me know. I’m here.