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Sports Business & Sports Ticket Management Links: Week Ending 3/28/10

Posted on March 29, 2010 by SpotlightTMS  •  Leave Reply

Spotlight’s weekly collection of relevant press, tweets, and blogs shaping the world of corporate ticketing. The evolution of Corporate America’s involvement in sports is leading towards more responsibility and better analytics. Please read on for more on: sports sponsorship, sports business, ticket management, corporate accountability, and The Spotlight Ticket Management Solution.

Comcast-Spectacor completed their purchase of Paciolan from Ticketmaster, allowing Comcast-Spectacor to begin to compete with the behemoth that was once Ticketmaster and is now known as Live Nation. More competition in the ticket market brings more transparency, more transparency brings more options, and more options brings more optimally priced tickets. Everybody wins….well, everybody but Live Nation.

Funny how responsibility rears it’s head in the most unlikely of places during economic downturns and desperate times. The Wall St. Journal put together a piece discussing this year’s NFL free agent crop, which was supposed to be the richest of them all with no salary cap, and how the downturn has caused even free spending owners to reign in their outlays for players.

The downturn has effected nearly everyone and this same caution has been rampant in the sports sponsorship market since the meltdown of Lehman Brothers two years ago. Even the firms that want to spend money are afraid to do so believing that there isn’t enough justification to get involved in sports. Responsibility leads to transparency and good business decisions. Implementing Spotlight allows a true return on investment of over 12 times the cost and allows Corporate America off the sidelines and back into the sports game.

NFL teams rely on Corporate America to buy sponsorships and the most expensive tickets. When Corporate America pulls back, the teams are hit where it hurts the most: their bottom line. With proper tracking and use these firms will see the value in responsibly engaging in sports and entertainment and will come back. Maybe then the owners will have the money to lure free agents.

ESPN recently announced the launch of the XP program aimed at using analytics to drive business decisions for their customers across multiple platforms. ESPN hits it on the head bringing proven business techniques to the sports business to drive deeper partnerships and create more opportunity. “Our hope is that insights derived from measuring major media events, particularly in live sports and across all media, will help advertisers and programmers make smarter decisions to grow their businesses in the years ahead,” said Howard Shimmel, Nielsen Senior VP, Client Insights. Spotlight Ticket Management uses the same value-added approach for teams and customers allowing them to truly unlock the potential in sports and entertainment tickets, suites, and hospitality assets. Once firms begin to study the effectiveness of sports and entertainment in influencing revenue they begin to make more intelligent decisions to drive more business. Simply put: look at the numbers. They don’t lie. Numbers like: 43% of all corporate tickets go to waste, More than 50% of corporate luxury inventory sells for 50% of face value on the open market, or the NFL boasts a regular season utilization rate untouched by any other league.

Dynamic ticket pricing continues to be a hot discussion amongst teams and will be tested very soon in the Chicago market using Qcue, the service currently used by the San Francisco Giants. Dynamic pricing allows teams to price each game according to demand, eliminating the static face values we’ve seen for so long. StubHub will argue that they’ve been dynamically pricing tickets since inception and doing so without any price floors- however that’s easy to do when you have no skin in the game and dont need to sell tickets to less sought after games to cover overhead expenses. Teams will argue that they dont want to identify “soft” or “distressed” inventory and dynamic pricing will water down season ticket holders. (All arguments that dynamic pricing providers have rebuttals for…whether they are effective or not). Dynamic pricing is another tool in creating transparency and efficiently pricing tickets. The Priceline.com model is on the way with ScoreBIG and the Kayak model is being built and led by FanSnap.com. Transparency and efficient pricing, the mantra of Spotlight Ticket Management, are quickly coming to the market and the fan stands to benefit the most. The ticket and event market is heading towards efficiency, it’s just a matter of who gets there first

The Wall St. Journal begins the discussion about London Summer Olympic 2012 tickets and the like clockwork controversy about tickets going out the back door. As we’ve written here before: anyone hoping the Olympic Games will be a pioneer in transparency and availablity is prime to buy some beachfront property in Kansas. It’s simply not happening. Too many people are making too much money out the back door, including the official providers who have already been indicted as fraudulent. Until transparency is mandatory we will all have to live with shady brokers. Spotlight Ticket Management is the first and easiest step and can be used by both the event provider and the buyers to assure true transparency.

Red Bull will finally unveil the new Red Bull Stadium in New York to host the Red Bull soccer franchise. The energy drink maker purchased the team from MLS leader AEG and has sunk over $100 million into the team. The stadium will feature stored value cards as an option instead of tickets. The real question: With the United States event attendee adopt the idea of cards instead of tickets?

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