Is football a good value for dollar entertainment ???
Michael
One seat for 8 games... Approx $1,250 (mid range not counting PSL)
Add in your parking ticket $200.00. Add in your PSL (pay plan)
$150.00 installment
Say an average of $1,600 per person for his/her seat
Ten games total. (yes... I'm counting preseason games)
Average of three hours per game: 30 hours total entertainment time for
your money.
That costs you $53.33 per hour. It is reasonable considering the
forum and the sport just so long as you do not spend a dime on the
over priced refreshments they sell at the stadium.
OMHO, the could sell tickets for half of what they do now and still
turn a profit
MZ
I wonder if having higher ticket prices increases tv revenue? Which,
as I understand it, may be the more important revenue stream (because
it's almost 100% profit).
Michael
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interesting question... i know a pile of people that work in the
advertising industry. one of them works as a media planner for one of
the major agencies. he probably could not tell us more that we
already know... ad prices for print, broadcast and electronic media
of any kind are related to ratings or coverage. in order to change
the ratings stats of a football game, you would need to have ticket
prices sooo high, the entire stadium decided to stay home. high
ticket prices or low... the stadium is still going to be full with 60m
to 80m people. so... i dont think high ticket prices causes more
people to watch the games. if the stadium is full, 60m people or so
are not watching tv. you also have to consider national buys vs local
buys. if 10m people dont go to the stadium for a monday night game, it
still is not significant to the national ratings. what matters is how
juicy the game is or if favre is gonna pull out his weenie or what
ever. of course, those are unexpected benifits as those spots are sold
long before things shape up to be a contest between titans or twits.
MZ
I wasn't thinking so much about people watching because they're not at
the game. I think that would be a relatively small percentage. I was
thinking more along the lines of something that's inaccessible being
more alluring. Cabbage Patch Kids were popular because nobody could
get them (unless you spent $$$), not because they were wonderfully
engineered toys. So, I wonder if high ticket prices add to the
desirability of the product.
papa.carl44
"MZ" <for...@mdz.no-ip.org> wrote in message
news:10d5e548-57a3-4c7f...@u12g2000vbf.googlegroups.com...
Mark, You just hit on something important. I never thought of it in
relationship to football tickets before. I grew up in a home where my Dad
was a photographer. He made his living working as an industrial
photographer at an explosives company and had his own business also. I can
still remember him explaining to me when I started helping him with some
things that pricing was very important. You had to be competitive he said,
but if you were too reasonable people would not use you because they felt
you must not be that good. Then later in life I got involved in some of my
own photography and in the process met some guys who sold their prints in
galleries etc. They jacked up the price to sell in certain areas...because
those people only bought things that were expensive. One landscape guy
would sell stuff at a summer country fair or some such event for $50 and
sell the same print in a gallery for $300 with ease. You hit on an
interesting idea...do some people pursue things in what Vance Packard called
"conspicuous consumption" and will football become part of that deal....the
prestige of paying for it. They could probably still fill stadiums when
they market to the corporate audience. I think of the hay day of pro
boxing....they charged huge amounts of money to see a fight live, and the
more the price went up the more desirable it became for some to be there.
Interesting.
Michael
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i'd say you might pick up a few viewers that tune in just because they
think it is exclusive, but it wont be too many. hardly any at all.
i've written advertising platforms, so i can tell you a bit about
target markets, media planning and so on. football has little to no
snob appeal. social elites or people who want to cultivate that image
would not choose football. the info that advertising people have on
football fans as a market is probably one of the most well known and
tapped profiles in the history of advertising. same with most major
sports. market factors for both the creatives in advertising and
media planning go outside of the norm for the superbowl because it is
a national event, but never for weekly games with only local
considerations. only fans want to watch games, and people who are not
fans avoid it like the plague. what can really pump up the ratings of
a game is what is going on for that particular match up. the first
vikings packers game with favre as the vikes qb is a good example. so
is the national televised jets pats games with rex and his big mouth
and brady with his "i hate the jets" paving the way to add human
interest past what normal fans are into. even then, those extra
ratings done come because snobs want to watch. those are fans of
other teams and casual fans that tune in to watch two teams they dont
usually care so much about because they wanna see a train wreck, see
favre get his head stoved in or see rex get some egg on his face.
MZ
I wasn't thinking about social elites. I was thinking of Brittney
Spears / American Idol fans who wear Hollister shirts that they bought
second hand and put spinning rims on their cars. I think this is a
big target audience for the NFL, as evidenced by their stupid halftime
shows and Fox's dumb robot guy that jumps all over the scores. Like
papa said, you can make stuff seem better than it is by just upping
the dollar amount. People still buy Sony TVs, don't they?
Michael
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high ticket prices still would not influence tv ratings by means of
attracting a few new odd balls. of course, i cant back that up at the
moment with a professional marketing study, but i think the extra
people (ratings) you would pick up as a direct result of higher ticket
prices catching their fancy would not be statistically significant.
what papa is pointing out would not have the same effect across the
board with all products and services. If you were selling cars, mouse
traps or pushing what was on restaurant menus, papa's point holds
true. if you were selling pro ball tickets, more expensive would not
motivate any positive attitudinal change in a tv audience. high
priced tickets would only be a turn off. imagine one sea food
restaurant sold lobster for 10 bucks... you'd probably think,” we are
goanna get food poison”. the place down the block was 20 bucks.. you
would think “fair deal”... the place across town 50 bucks... you would
think it was a high end gourmet place with top of the line service...
now... imagine the jets sold their seats for 200 each and the pats
sold theirs for 100. the jets are rip off artists, not an excusive
club. same goes for commodity items. for my regular job, I sell
plastics to industry. no one buys bulk metals, papers and plastics
because they feel a higher price means better quality. the suff has
to perform as a minimum, but past that, it is price and lead time.
so, papa’s reasoning only applies in some cases. as for a few
celebrity types... they wanna be seen at the superbowl. they don’t
care to watch football at home and they know there will be no fame
giving cameras on them as they sit on the couch for 90 minutes to
watch sanchez and brady play a sport they cant even figure out.
papa.carl44
I think you are really on to something. They do not seem remotely
interested in the blue collar working class guys who made the game by either
playing it or watching it. It's not a family game anymore either, not a
thing you pass on to your kids. Most guys can't afford to take their kid to
the game anymore. I read a piece today where Bon Jovi blamed Steve Jobs for
killing the music business. All the download stuff has created a very
different market for anything related to music..it's flat out different.
The idea of a concept album is gone. That target audience is the same one
the NFL may be shooting for, and a very much younger audience too. Those
folks won't care what crap they sell them either, or if the game is really
good or a sham of what used to be etc. The contact I have with some of that
group has already shown me they LOVE the T.O. drama crap. Here we go??????
Michael
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wanna know what sells football ??? people who are already fans like
the game for a lot of reasons. the complexity, the physicality, the
brutality etc... advertisers could care less about us because we are
already on the hook. when an agency produces a print or tv/radio spot
for a client, what the creative people look to do is come up with what
advertising people call a "USP". Unique Selling Proposition. That is
something about the product or service that makes it unique in the
market. In the case of football, and advertiser would look to find
what was unique about football as entertainment as opposed to other
forms of entertainment. They would play off that as their USP and
work it into the creatives to construct a message that would motivate
a new viewer. If I had to explain to an ad account executive who know
nothing about football what made my product unique in the market
place... I'd say stuff like... "in your face", "smash mouth", "rowdy",
"beer", "tailgate in the cold", "take your shirt off at the stadium
in the freezing weather". I'd tell him all that crap, but the last
thing I'd tell him is "exclusive high priced up scale". Then the
media planners would find the TV shows that attract the sort of
assholes who the NFL’s UPS would appeal too and run the ads. Of
course, you can see how this USP is reflected in the advertising that
is done for the NFL. Like the TV spots that have people in the
supermarket tackling each other over a cantaloupe "Its football
season". Classic creative expression given to a USP.
Grinch
It's a *great* deal at home on a big screen TV with a Tivo to run all
the replays you want and record the whole thing.
Pretty good in a sports bar too, if it's a good sports bar and you're
with good people.
I saw near every game at Shea and a good number in the Meadowlands in
person. I rarely go now, and when I do it's an "oh, do I really have
to?" thing for one of the kids birthdays or something.
Not because of the cost, it's just not as good an experience. Not even
close. Maybe it's just me, partly because I've already got so many
games in the stands under my expanding belt -- enough!
IMHO YMMV