Hi!
I’m back! Which means Penny is back as well.
I’ve been considering changing the nature of the newsletter to go a bit deeper into some of these stories, but not 5 at a time.
Meaning: I’m going to start sending out multiple each week with just one story, maybe two at a time.
I’ve talked to a few folks that have better success with engagement by sending out shorter, more frequent newsletters…so I’m considering testing this the rest of the summer with a Friday roundup post…or something.
What’s your take? Let me know by hitting reply.
To the Tickets!
I. Matt from True Tickets replies to Gary Adler’s post on ticket market reforms:
Ticketing Australia is going to have a big focus on distribution this year. So, get to Parramatta.
I think that the idea of someone making conscious distribution/pricing decisions is at the heart of being a good marketer.
The Ticket Buyer’s Bill of Rights has been something that the NATB has supported for a while now and focuses on accessibility, transparency, and ownership.
Live Nation supports something they call the FAIR Ticketing Act.
The commonality of all of these positions and arguments is that everyone is advocating for what is best for their constituents.
It is entirely understandable.
Power is at the core of any good strategy:
- Power over the customer
- Power over the supplier
- Power over the competition
Where my thinking on this falls down begins with the customer.
Why?
As Peter Drucker pointed out at the dawn of management thinking the job of a business is to create a customer and your attention should be inordinately focused on the customer because that is where the value lies.
No customer. No business.
As I pointed out to a few folks, I managed to do almost nothing for the time I was away in South Florida. (I needed a full-stop break, so I took it.)
But as I sat down with this week’s newsletter ideas, I wanted to create a few bullets of observations and thoughts that Matt’s LinkedIn post combined with the ideas of FAIR and The Ticket Buyers Bill of Rights inspired:
- In any situation, look at who wins by the idea being pushed. The Cure showed that a huge artist can arrest a great deal of control over the pricing/fees/ability to transfer tickets. They also showed the difficulty of doing it.
- Look at the messenger to understand the angle of the message. In this instance, Matt and True Tickets have an angle, the NATB, and Protect Ticket Rights have another, and Live Nation has a third. This isn’t good or bad…it is the reality. For venues and content creators, you have to step back and look at what is best for your venue, really look.
- The ticket market right now is “meh” at best right now. There is more inventory sitting around than at any point since COVID restrictions stopped. We will continue to hear super sales numbers from folks because that’s in their best interest, but the Messi impact seems to be “meh” right now, Beyonce seems to be struggling in some markets, NFL teams are offering discounts already, and I’ve seen festivals canceled or not sell well all over the place. (Great seats are still available from the BO for every Inter Miami game I looked at after their on-sale Thursday.)
- Tony Knopp talked about a corporate ticket ‘blood bath’ and I can’t say I disagree. I spend a lot of time in the market talking to customers because my business takes me into all kinds of areas of the market and the world. What a lot of corporate buyers tell me is that the teams don’t treat them with respect. They are frustrated by having to “train” a new set of reps to service them each season or more than once a season. They want more partnership from their team partners and less transactional.
- The secondary market has still been propping up the primary market in a lot of places, but you are seeing that go away now. Look at the ticket market in Tampa for the Bucs as one broker pointed out to me. Again, look at the Messi effect, or lack after yesterday’s Inter Miami on-sale. Talk to the box offices on Broadway and they’ll tell you that the lack of old-school brokers has impacted the business of Broadway.
- This one I want to come back to, but I’ll save it for later. I will just say that the way that sports, sports brands, and tickets are sold is largely busted because most of the marketing is focused on tactics and there is little to no strategy involved in most cases. (Again, I’ll have more because there are a ton of ideas that I can put together for y’all out of this one.)
I could go on, but I won’t…
As I mentioned in the intro, I’m going to share these ideas a bit differently for the rest of the summer because I have so much to get through and the dense weekly posts are a lot for folks to get through.
See, market research works and I apply it.
Don’t forget to join the FREE pricing session on August 15.
What are you seeing in the market?
II. Diamondbacks expect their streaming service to be a hit:
Frankly, I don’t buy it.
$19.99 a month for Diamondback’s baseball isn’t likely to be a hot item.
Just look at item four.
As I’ve looked at the situation around the Suns and other clubs, the key is “total addressable” vs. “potential”.
Think top of the funnel and feeding them into your sales ecosystem.
You need to think about how are you going to convert “potential” customers into subscribers. A mix of free and fee works for me, but just imagining that folks are going to scramble to sign up for another subscription is iffy at best.
III. Reports say that Apple TV+’s MLS subscription hits 1M subscribers:
At the start of this, I wrote that one of the big issues was that these MLS teams would be stealing significant top-of-funnel awareness by entering this deal.
Let’s call this: I told you so.
Is Messi driving subscriptions?
Yes.
Is he driving enough to make the deal pay off for Apple?
Not yet.
Will Messi’s early performances change the perception of MLS for viewers internationally?
No. They are likely to enhance them.
The consensus of Messi as a driver of ticket sales seems to be “meh”…at least from the folks I’ve surveyed.
What’s your take?
The failure of the Ivy Park partnership is interesting because in a partnership, you bring what you are best at and I bring what I am best at together.
As we’ve seen in the US, Beyonce’s ticket sales haven’t been as strong as folks might have imagined. And, with the collapse of the partnership between Adidas and Kanye West, we see that the Adidas brand isn’t very strong right now either.
V. It is never too early to offer a discount, am I right?
Discounts don’t stimulate demand. At best, discounts pull the demand forward.
What’s interesting about this offer is the language around being delivered the day of the game like you won’t even know what ticket you are getting. This signals to me that sales are weaker than this discount suggests…if that is possible.
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