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davewakeman · 5 years

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Talking Tickets: 21 February 2020--MLB! NBA! NHL! And More!

Hey everybody!

How’s your week? Let me know!

If you haven’t had a chance to fill out my short survey yet, I’d appreciate it if you’d take 3-4 minutes to share your thoughts and ideas so that I can make sure this newsletter and the podcast continue to deliver value to y’all.

Anytime you want to say hello or share something with me, you can always reply to this email…you definitely will get a response from a live human.

To the tickets!

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1. MLB continues to struggle to put the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal in the rearview mirror:

My frustration with baseball is that they just are always on the back foot to use a soccer term.

This week really highlighted the challenge that is going to have for the game to ever right its ship.

I know they report that they are making more money than ever, but from an attendance standpoint, reporting tickets distributed while Twitter is showing you stadiums sitting there with 3,000-5,000 fans a lot of nights isn’t a great look.

Compare MLB’s reaction to the Astros scandal with the way that Man City’sbreach of Financial Fair Play in Europe is being handled and you see a leadership gap, which hasn’t been helped by the Rob Manfred trying to throw the blame everywhere but his office.

From a marketing standpoint, a tough situation, selling baseball in a crowded market, has gotten more difficult.

I’ll type up some more thoughts about this on my blog, but here are a few actionable things:

1. Stop digging. Rob Manfred’s PR team shouldn’t keep running him out there if he is just saying the same things. If you find yourself in a PR crisis, please don’t just start saying crazy things.

2. Step back and focus on how you are going to move forward. Just speaking about the scandal in the past tense isn’t very effective. You have to have a clear plan for moving forward.

In any organization, change begins by sharing a compelling vision for the future. This is obviously a challenge for MLB and all the teams, not just the ones directly implicated in the scandal. The teams need some leadership and a vision for how this ends and how the game gets back on the front foot, their partners and sponsors need this, and their fans and customers deserve it.

3. I’ve worked with teams that have won the World Series and one of the coolest things from my teenage years was making friends with a member of the World Series winning Big Red Machine teams and going over to my friend’s house to see his replica trophies.

Don’t slag on your trophies, ever. Those trophies represent much of the power and emotional connection your fans have to your sport and if you are crapping on that, why are people supposed to even care?

2. The NBA is seeing some financial challenges from their dust-up with China:

I’ve had the flu this week and I haven’t had the voice to record the intro to a new, updated episode with Greg Turner about doing business in China, but if you can make out anything from the first episode, it would be how this was to be expected. (Technical difficulties due to the firewall in China’s internets caused the first episode to be a big disjointed.)

It seems like the NBA is reporting taking about a 4% hit on revenue this year due to standing up for their beliefs in dealing with China.

In a world where brands are all shouting about how “cause marketing” is so important, real cause marketing means you put your bottom line on the line. The NBA did that, on purpose or not.

To me, the more problematic situation that the NBA is facing right now is a ratings slump at the local level with the Warriors falling 66% and the average team down 13%. Which mirror a slump in the NBA’s ratings this year despite a jump in viewership for this year’s All-Star Game.

Right now, we see the NFL rushing to finish up a new labor deal so that they can negotiate their next round of TV deals while extreme premiums are still likely to be had.

My concern is that losing ratings for a season isn’t going to harm the NBA too much, but if the trend of NBA viewing continues to lag, the issues in China become a multi-year challenge, and maybe you have some more injuries, retirements, or other on-court issues…the revenue becomes challenged. And, that trickles down to raising ticket prices, concessions, and merchandise to levels that to higher levels than they are now.

I mean, you’re already seeing in New Orleans with Zion.

As we’ve seen since the online shopping has become so prominent, we have trained consumers to wait and shop for deals. We’ve also seen an entire generation of marketers and business folks that have become almost blindly committed to managing by spreadsheet while consumer spending on experiences has increased dramatically.

TV viewership is a fickle beast. Live by the sword, die by the sword…I guess.

The real focus here has to be on creating communities of fans around teams, communities, stories, and experiences. These can absolutely happen online and offline.

P.S. The NHL is having hiccups as well. This can be even more problematic because the NHL probably would benefit from more television exposure.

3. Rage Against The Machine is raising money for charity and taking on the secondary market:

I’m going to guess that the Rage Against The Machine tour is going to be interesting. It is their first tour in a decade. It is an election year. It seems like a perfect storm for them, yeah?

This idea that Rage is going to thwart the secondary market would seem consistent with their ethos. Raising money for charities also seems on brand.

Where the big challenge comes in, is whether or not the charity pricing aspect was explained clearly at the start.

Pearl Jam does a similar thing with their charity tickets that support their Vitalogy Foundation. They handle it slightly differently, which I think helps with the messaging and the fan blowback.

To me, this is just a situation where if you have a fan base and you can sell the tickets directly with no issues at all, sell. But today’s consumer also has a higher expectation of transparency…so that if you are going to institute a charity program like Rage to fight the secondary market, just share that at the start.

BTW, where did Tom Morello get his “85% of the secondary market” comment anyway?

And, Don Vaccaro and TicketNetwork have committed to donating all their service fees from the first 3 shows in March to National Action Network, the civil-rights organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton.

4. Congress is going to continue to investigate the world of tickets:

Just as I trying to close out this week’s newsletter, this news came down the pipe. So, on February 26th, 2020, Congress is going to hold a hearing on tickets.

This comes on the heels of a letter being released that Pearl Jam sent to Representative Frank Pallone Jr on Wednesday saying that the BOSS act will hurt consumers and pointing to transferability and transparency of the number of tickets being on sale would be bad for consumers.

After the release of Pearl Jam’s letter, Bill Pascrell sent out a release of his own rejecting Pearl Jam’s feedback on the BOSS act.

This continued investigation of the ticket business is a global trend. Last week, I talked about the CMA in the UK halting the Viagogo & StubHub merger due to their concerns, even as the US government approved the deal despite these objections.

And, this week, news out of Australia shows that people are rallying around an Information Standard in regards to the secondary market.

Along with the UK government stating they will investigate the illegal resale of football tickets in the UK after a report in the Guardian uncovered the ins and outs of massive football ticket resale.

As for how do you approach this story:

* Pay attention to what comes out of next week’s hearing. I stated at the time of the workshop in June of 2019 that I felt like this would be an issue that would hang over the industry through the election because it is easy for both sides to beat down on ticket sellers, technology companies, resellers, and everyone involved in the industry directly or indirectly. Fun for the whole family.

* I’d also pay attention to what gets defined as “consumer” friendly. I’m on the side of giving Pearl Jam the benefit of the doubt. They’ve worked pretty hard and taken steps that definitely haven’t been in their own best interests to do what was right for their fans, but I’m also conscious of unintended consequences.

5. Red Bull shows how to grow a team from the ground up:

RB Leipzig beat Spurs 1-0 on Wednesday! (Just adding to the suffering of having the flu. You think Dele was mad…try watching a poor showing while barely keeping your eyes open and feeling like reheated death!)

But this story is really great in the context of the continuing story of the Astros scandal in the States, Man City in Europe, and Thursday’s news of the arrest of PSG’s president for bribery.

Closer to home for me, it highlights what is possible with vision as the Mets are for sale and the sale has started to have its own amount of drama…and, as the Knicks continue to struggle at MSG.

3 things here:

1. Vision is so important. Melbourne FC just released a plan this week for their fans. It was called out on Australian radio, but without a plan and a vision…you don’t ever reach your potential.

2. Winning matters, but community is powerful. I’ve given this speech on 3 continents now…but you can’t just sell winning, you need to build a community. Leipzig is showing that now and we can see in a lot of places that there is a thing like winning fatigue. Or, in the case of the Warriors, a new arena and a lot of winning aren’t going to fix a bad season in every case.

3. Marketing matters: Red Bull’s involvement in sports and the way they have managed their teams shows that they understand the value of marketing and they understand that great brands, teams, and organizations aren’t built in a day.

While their teams haven’t been successful 100% of the time, they have been consistent and have continued to focus on their vision, their values, and their message over and over. That’s something we can all learn from. —————————————————————————————————————-

What am I up to this week?

I’ve got a couple of webinars coming up this week starting with Wednesday’s visit of my ebook created in partnership with Booking Protect: What Matters In Ticketing Now. Sign up for the webinar and learn ideas, trends, and actions that you can take to put these insights to work for your business.

On Thursday, I’m turning my eye to sales by putting together: The Language of the Sale–10 Ways To Use Language More Effectively In Your Sales Process. This is built on the last 6-9 months of sales training I’ve done with teams around the world and this one will be fast and actionable for your team as soon as you get through with the webinar.

Check out the podcast archives: new episodes coming this week now that my voice is coming back. If you have suggestions for guests and the podcast, fill out the survey at the top of the page.

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Talking Tickets: 21 February 2020–MLB! NBA! NHL! And More! was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

#marketing #sports business #tickets

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