Hi!
Just a head’s up, The Coalition for Ticket Fairness is hosting a dinner in London on 9 November at Steak and Company.
My latest free webinar is on one of the most common ticket questions I receive, “How can I make the secondary market work for me now?”
A few links and a few thoughts on stuff I’ve been reading today.
To the Tickets!
Matthew Stoller writes about “price fixing” and mentions tickets and junk fees:
I’ve been sharing a lot of Matt’s stuff over the last 2 or 3 years because I think that antitrust cases like the ones going on against Amazon are the way we are going to see change come to the ticket industry.
I don’t hold my breath when it comes to whether or not legislators will get their acts together.
You should spend a few minutes with this article because it talks about a few things that are important to people that are selling tickets:
- Price fixing isn’t always about driving prices up, but also about driving wages down. How many people do you know in the world of tickets that have to have “side hustles” or “gigs” besides their 40+ hour a week job in the arts/sports/entertainment?
- The push for “all-in” pricing is good. But you also need to consider what the fees are about, adding costs to the price while emotionally manipulating customers. You and your venue/team probably are dealing with the fall out.
- All of these things that Matt talks about don’t just apply to the primary market, they apply to the secondary market as well. Because the same forms of squeeze can be put on a reseller even if there is currently more “competition” in the secondary market for your listings.
Anyway, I’m curious what you think about all of these antitrust cases, price fixing, and whether or not you think some of this will leak over into the world of tickets.
Let me know! I accept emails, texts, Slack messages, and smoke signals.
F1 considers adding a team and cutting races:
We’ve lived in an environment where the answer to everything has been MORE for so long that the idea of cutting back seems crazy.
Broadway must do 8 shows a week.
Basketball must have 82 games.
Baseball needs 162 games to decide things.
Liverpool played over 60 matches one season.
F1 is currently racing 24 times a year. That’s about every other week.
But the sport has begun to think about cutting back on the number of races as a way to help with driver safety.
My question is how does that drive demand or help with brand perception.
Let me offer up a few questions to consider:
- Making F1 races more exclusive by having fewer, could that positively impact the perception of the races as premium events?
- Keeping the number of teams below 12, does that signal performance and exclusivity?
- By having a cap on the number of races, does that make it more likely that fans will make F1 races destination events?
What do you think?
More importantly, can you apply some of these questions to your own venue/event/team?
AI helps Predators have 400 meetings to make $500,000 in new sales:
I’ll have to see the technology to tell you exactly whether or not it really adds a lot of value.
Last week, I had an article published in the PMI member magazine on AI. So I’ve actually been playing with it the last few months off and on.
As I read this piece, a few ideas came to mind:
- If your sales team has to create “top of mind” awareness about your sponsorships, premium products, tickets, etc., that’s a failure of marketing and your sales team is already at a disadvantage.
- 400 new sales meetings to generate $500,000 in new sales seems like the qualification process of the AI or the sales team is off a little bit.
- In my experience, teams/venues/organizations would be better off starting with some solid market research before they began jumping into tools like AI because in many places “data” has replaced research. And, the bias is “data” is that the past will look exactly like the future. Which I’m not betting on…
To recap:
- Top of mind awareness is the job of your marketing and branding efforts. If your sales team is doing that job, they are at a disadvantage.
- Do your market research. You can start with secondary data.
- Data has a bias. It is that the future will look exactly like the past.
Maybe I’m wrong. You tell me.
Also, I drew a picture of a rudimentary marketing funnel:
The Wall Street Journal looks at the issues of profitability in AI tools as well.
Which raises the question:
- Can an AI tool make enough money to make the offering profitable?
- Is the ROI of the AI tool really enough to make the investment from the team/organization side justifiable?
- Is AI the new DATA?!?
You have made it this far, share this post with a colleague that’s worried about their ticket sales efforts, might not know the power of marketing, or thinks they are trying to sell too many things at once.
A few fun things going on with me in London and online.
BTW, send me any interesting stories you’ve come across.
Do you have a question about your brand? Let me know. I’ll try and work some of the best into a future issue of the newsletter or the podcast.