Hi!
I’m deep in the DW lab, hard at work.
I’ve been taking more time to write these longer pieces because I’ve found that they’ve a wider readership.
Even if folks like the short hits.
I’ll try to mix it up a little bit more.
Today, I’m going to talk about a number I call “The Real Attendance” and why it matters.
Let’s dig in.
Measuring the right things is something I harp on.
You have so many things you can measure.
So much data to look at.
But knowing what is important can be difficult to declare.
A number I use with most of my consulting clients is something I call “The Real Attendance”.
It is a simple number, you get from:
Percentage of tickets sold * percentage of sold tickets scanned.
As an example:
Your sell-through for an event is 75%. 90% of those folks show up.
.75 * .90 = 67.5%
This means your building is about 2/3 full.
I pay attention to this number because I like to break the mindset that once a ticket is sold, the job is done.
Sold tickets are great for your ticketing department, but an empty seat has real costs to your business.
You will have lower brand equity.
Empty seats don’t buy hot dogs, beer, soda, or merch.
The fan experience is degraded.
These are all intangibles.
There are also real economic impacts.
In Australia, your average Australian sports fan is estimated to spend around AU$ 100 per game in the stadium or at the pub.
A 2021 MLB survey pointed out that the average fan of Major League Baseball spent $51 per person at the game.
In the NFL, there is a wide range with the highest being around $75 and the lowest being around $30.
Let’s say that you have a 70,000-seat stadium in Australia that has a “The Real Attendance” number of 67%.
This means that you are going to lose an average of AU$ 2.31M per game.
A 40,000 seat MLB ballpark with “The Real Attendance” number of 30% during an early season midweek game?
That might be $1.5M in opportunity cost per game.
On and on this goes.
No shows are bad…
How bad?
It depends where you are.
30% or more in college sports.
I’ve heard of some venues having more than half of the sold tickets go unused.
How do we tackle this issue?
Dr. Dominick Schreyer has presented some good tactical ideas to improve attendance, such as reducing the number of season tickets to create more single tickets, improving matchday communications, and creating a better gameday experience.
I’ll point to a few strategic ideas to build on the things we’ve covered.
Brand and Demand
I hypothesize that most businesses in entertainment, sports, etc. lack a clear strategy and don’t focus on their brands nearly enough.
I call this “The Lost Art of Strategy.”
Why?
Because we live in an environment where we are overwhelmed with ideas of “everyone does” this and “everyone does” that.
We fall into the trap of tactics.
This leads us to build out more ad campaigns that hit on the latest trend.
I focus on a simple prescription to think about how you are attacking your market…
– What does success look like?
– Who is our fan/buyer?
– Why are they coming to us?
– What do we need to be successful in reaching them?
– What actions will we take?
This isn’t a stagnant framework.
You don’t have to look far to see it in action.
The Savannah Bananas can teach us some lessons.
The team started in 2016 as a summer ball team in Georgia.
Over the years, Jesse Cole kept finding new ways to improve the experience fans had in Savannah.
This included ideas like playing by Banana Ball rules at home, playing exhibitions, and barnstorming.
Since 2022, the team has only been playing Banana Ball.
The choices made:
– Success for the Bananas is built on giving the fans an experience that contradicts their expectations of what baseball is. This happens through the presentation of the game and the locations they’ve played at such as Clemson’s Memorial Stadium.
– The fans aren’t typical baseball fans. Bananas’ fans are looking for fun first.
– They come to Bananas’ games to be surprised, delighted, and entertained. The competition is secondary.
– Reaching these fans takes many forms, but one of the most successful has been through building a huge following on TikTok and partnering with ESPN and Disney+ to broadcast games.
This has led to success.
The Bananas now sell out football stadiums drawing fans from all over the world to see them play.
Fans enter a lottery to buy.
And games sell out instantly.
The Whole Experience
I turn to my hometown of Ft Lauderdale to illustrate this point because the Florida Panthers are in the Stanley Cup Finals for the third straight year.
That’s great.
But what is really great is the way that they’ve taken over the entire experience for their fans.
The Panthers’ focus seems to have begun with the recognition that fans were going to blame them for the experience, no matter what.
So, they may as well control the entire experience.
This matters because you need to give your fans an experience that makes them want more.
Having control of the entire experience starts with understanding the power of touchpoints.
I’ve dealt with this often.
When you are considering sales, I’ve consistently seen sales teams need 11-13 touches to make a sale.
This doesn’t include all the touches that come from advertising messages and branding efforts that might have happened over years.
The key to remember is that a rule of thumb is that your touchpoints start earlier than you might recognize and they go on longer than you might imagine.
This makes considering the entire experience a key part of driving people to attend games.
It begins by developing a sense of excitement for your games and events.
It continues with the ingress to the building, the greeting upon arrival, the merch, the food and beverage options, and on it goes.
This counts on the way out as well.
What does egress look like?
How do you follow up?
What do you do to invite people back?
Think about all this stuff.
It isn’t free.
For the Panthers, they had to hire around 1,000 new event staff and spend seven figures on new infrastructure and capabilities.
The flipside is that they have made eight figures in new revenues and $15M in new profits.
Risk but reward.
The key is driving people to the arena.
Lifetime Customer Value
I have been talking about this for years.
Gary V caught up with me at some point.
Thanks for joining.
Thinking in terms of LCV is a mindset shift because you need a minimum of three new approaches to your thinking.
First, you need to recognize that customer lifecycles aren’t straight lines.
Soccernomics did a great job of breaking down how fandom ebbs and flows over the course of a fan’s life.
This didn’t highlight the need to squeeze people. Instead, it highlights how important it is to be a constant companion.
Fans have ebbs and flows in their love of a team, an art form, or a passion.
That’s totally fine.
Part of having a good strategy and being a good marketer is managing those ups and downs.
How do you build this LCV into your plan?
There are likely limitless ways of building a plan for increasing a fan’s LCV, but one that is easy to administer is a membership.
Memberships are huge in the United Kingdom and Australia.
Check out my NRL team, the Parramatta Eels.
My football club, Tottenham Hotspur.
Or, my Australian Football Club, the Melbourne Demons.
Each of these clubs have plans that fit almost every stage of a fan’s journey.
My son has had a One Hotspur Membership since he was 8 and he went to his first Spurs match.
With the Demons, I’ve had the international membership because I don’t get to Melbourne often enough to need tickets.
And I’m totally waiting for my Eels membership to include matches.
Even if I watch one match a year, it is a cool thing to have.
What do these memberships do?
They build connections.
They aren’t all or nothing affairs.
That’s the beautiful thing about these memberships; they can be upsized or downsized depending on your phase of life.
Plus, they solidify loose ties.
They are also valuable tools in helping you tell a story of connection, community, and belonging.
That’s important because that’s one of the beautiful things about entertainment and sports.
The connection to something larger than you.
These are irrational things.
But they mean the world.
Think about Swifties and their friendship bracelets.
More than accessories, these bracelets symbolized community, sparked conversations, and brought fans closer to their favorite artist.
I took Cormac to see the Spurs Europa League final match with MoCo Spurs.
It was great.
But an even more beautiful scene was the collection of supporters celebrating at the end of the Europa League final.
Strangers are friends.
Friends are family.
Watch the video, you’ll see me and the boy at around 1:20.
What these types of connections do is open the door to storytelling.
Storytelling matters because it helps maintain the connections that fans have with their favorite artists, teams, and events.
Examples?
Have you ever seen the pre-game video before an Alabama football game?
That’s history.
That’s story.
That’s connection.
Another example?
Look at “The Linguification Library” on Wicked’s website.
What is it?
A place to connect, to reflect, and build communities.
Does this help drive people to see Wicked again?
There’s someone in this chat who says she’s seen the show 13x on Broadway and 3 times in the theatre.
Strangely, I’ve seen it four times.
Does this add up to LCV?
You bet it does.
Think about your habits.
How many times have you seen your favorite show?
Do you travel to see your favorite artists?
Does your wife have the full collection of Ryan Adams’ paperbacks?
Do you still listen to the cast recording of Avenue Q? (Oh, that’s just me.)
These strands of connection.
Build them.
Keep adding layers.
Connections over time are real.
They are healthy for your brand, your fans, and your bottom line.
Pulling it together
Filling your seats begins with knowing your numbers.
Going on from there, you need to have a strategy.
For me, I build demand first.
I control everything I can.
Then, I focus on driving revenue.
What do you think?
How do you handle this?
Hit reply and let me know.
DW
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