Attendees on the last night of the Event & Arena Marketing Conference at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas.
REPORTING FROM AUSTIN, TEXAS — I think it might be time that the Event & Arena Marketing Conference, or #EAMC2013 as its hashtag reads, considers adding the letter ‘D’ to its name.
What would the new moniker be? The Event and Data Analyst Marketing Conference. After attending this year’s conference, it’s clear that the shift toward ‘Big Data’ and analytics-based decision making has fundamentally changed the way concerts and live entertainment are marketed.
Soon, the ability to communicate will parallel the need to analyze and execute data. Sure, George Strait is going to kill it in any market he plays, but Kate McMahon from promoter TMG-AEG says she spends more time than ever adjusting prices in markets they’ve visited dozens of times. Factor in fan club reports, Twitter feed analysis and sentiment monitoring and suddenly the world or rock and big country has gotten a little, well, geeky.
It’s a big departure from when I first attended EAMC in 2007 in Dallas, when platforms like Facebook and Twitter were relatively new and content was relegated to interns and low level coordinators. Today, Social Media isn't just a powerful communication tool — it's one piece of a larger shift toward a data-centric business model. Marketing a Brad Paisley concert is no longer about getting offers in front of as many people as possible — it’s about identifying engaged fans and deploying them on your behalf, setting the parameters for ad-retargeting to remind (yet not annoy) undecided buyers and, most importantly, analyzing historical and transactional data to find patterns that can eventually improve everything from on-sale times to ticket price.
In short, the shift toward a data-driven economy means marketing is less about speaking to the customer — and instead, trying to learn as much as possible about the consumer.
“If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less,” said Doug Ulman, CEO of the Livestrong Foundation who delivered the opening keynote at this year’s conference. Ulman’s organization faced a massive challenge earlier this year when its founder Lance Armstrong appeared on Oprah and admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs. Suddenly one of the organization's primary vehicles for speaking with the public had tragically fallen from grace.
Ulman’s response? Use Livestrong’s own members to tell the organization’s story. Ulman and his team produced a series of incredibly powerful videos from cancer survivors praising programs that help victims of ovarian cancer have children, or provide ride service to low income individuals suffering from cancer.
It’s an imperfect example, although it does illustrate my larger point that knowing the customer and understanding how they holistically fit within one’s organization is becoming increasingly more important than sending out any one particular message. Knowing everything about your customer — how they respond to email campaigns, how often they buy tickets, how they interact with their online community and what they do when they get to your venue — is a massive undertaking, but it’s a job the marketers attending EAMC seem to be up for. Here are some of the ways marketers are changing the way venues interact with their clients.
Influence Measurement
Cara Vanderhook from Staples Center in L.A. explained that while it’s impossible to engage in a conversation with every single fan, the ability to identify influential followers is being powered by new startups that measure fan reach.
Her favorite — Klout, an app that gives Twitter users a score between 1-100 based on follower count, retweets, likes, engagement and share indicators. A plug in lets Klout sit directly on top of Twitter so accounts with large followings can make quick decisions about who to engage and who to ignore.
The next step — monetization of the consumer, both at the individual and top down level. The team at Wells Fargo Center has set a value on each customer in their email database — not only does it generate a dollar-based ROI of marketing campaigns, but it also helps set year-over-year sales goals.
Ad Retargeting
Ticketmaster, Paciolan and other ticketing companies are doing some very cool things with ad retargeting. What began as an effort to buy ads on online exchanges to reconnect with consumers who visited a site but didn’t finalize a purchase has become a cottage industry of microtargeting and data-mining.
In fact, EAMC had its own success with retargeting, generating $1,223 in registrations through a relatively frugal 33,772 impressions. Keep in mind it’s a niche audience and the click-through rate on those impressions was about one-tenth of one percent, but overall the conference still saw a 7-1 return on investment — not bad for an event with a targeted audience.
Keyword Protection
The gaming of search engines like Google is growing more significant as scalpers and secondary market sites try to raise their ranking results for searches of venues, tickets and artists.
Eyal Mintz from Fan Interactive Marketing recommends bidding on hundreds of search terms for venues, and then constantly testing and retesting which terms prompt consumers to buy. Not only will analyzing and testing lead to a better crafted marketing message, it also helps venues outrank scalper sites on Google and lead consumers direct to your business.
Working with a Changing Media
Changes to the newspaper and print industry have meant a large cutback in newsroom jobs — John Bumgardner with Mint Public Relations estimates that four PR professionals exist for every one media professional. Not only is it more difficult to get a story picked up in the local newspaper but, increasingly, publications are asking PR firms to help write and develop pieces. Writing skills and the ability to analyze information and present it as news will become increasingly important in the coming years.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t congratulate this year’s EAMC Award winners. Cliff Clinger, director of marketing with Boise (Idaho) Centre and known to most of his peers as "Promotions Cliff" because that's the way he has always answered the phone during his 25 years in the business, won the highest honor EAMC gives, the Gigi Award. .JT Tepolt from Ticketmaster was inducted into the EAMC Hall of Fame last year, but was unable to attend and accept his award so he was honored this year. This year’s 2013 inductee into the EAMC Hall of Fame was my dear friend and 2012 Women of Influence Award recipient, Vanessa Kromer with Nederlander Concerts. Also inducted into the Hall of Fame were John Urban with the Sports Museum of America in New York and Christy Ricketts Foree with Contempory Research in Dallas. Both were unable to attend this year's conference but are expected to accept the honors at the 2014 conference in New Orleans.