![\"Jim-McCarthy-2008.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/Jim-McCarthy-2008.jpg\")
<\/span>Jim McCarthy is the CEO and co-founder of Goldstar<\/a> and the Editor of Live 2.0<\/a>. He’s a decade-long veteran of the Internet and e-commerce business, starting with GeoCities way back when “myspace” was something you told somebody you needed when you wanted to break up with them. This winter and spring, Jim will be speaking on the subject of Live 2.0 and the future of the live entertainment business at the TED conference and at SXSW. He lives in Pasadena, California and can be easily enticed to happy hour.<\/i><\/p>\nWhy the broad focus? Sports, comedy, classical, dance, museums… Do
\nyou find that if someone is always looking for, say, comedy shows on
\nthe weekends, he\/she might see a classical listing on your site and be
\nintrigued, or do people mostly stay within their, let’s say
\n“pre-determined” genres of interest?<\/b>
I think it’s easy
\nwhen you’re on the inside of creating the shows to think in genres, but
\nconsumers don’t think that way to nearly the degree some people
\nimagine. Consumers don’t typically ask “What comedy show should I go
\nsee?” Instead, they ask “What should I do on Saturday night?” Also,
\npeople switch back and forth among category types all the time. Just
\nbecause someone is a fan of, say, ballet, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t
\nwant to see the Yankees. The probably do have an interest in that. Because
\nwe came to this business as consumers rather than as producers of
\nshows, that’s just the way we did it. It only seemed natural to us to
\ngive people the broadest selection we could.<\/p>\n
Do you work exclusively with venues\/promoters, or can individual performers create accounts?<\/b>
In
\nsome cases, performers work with us directly, but of course, they have
\nto have the ability to authorize the sale of tickets on behalf of the
\nshow. Sometimes, the performer and “the show” are one and the same, so
\nthat makes it easy!<\/p>\n
The copy on the site seems to be in a consistent voice. Does Goldstar edit listings?
<\/b>
Yes,
\nwe do, and thank you for noticing the consistency in the voice! We
\nhave an editorial staff who writes the copy with input from our
\nvenue\/producer partners, and its goal is to communicate to Goldstar
\nmembers in a way that works for them, and I think they’re pretty good
\nat it.<\/p>\n
Generally speaking, we’re trying to talk to our members
\nas we would if we were a friend of theirs who was telling them about a
\nshow. Sometimes, again, when you’re on the inside of developing a
\nshow, you tend to forget what’s really going to ring a ticket buyer’s
\nbell. They may not care, for example, that it’s the West Coast
\npremiere of your play, which is something that actually gets suggested
\nsometimes as a selling point. In fact, I can tell you with certainty
\nthat consumers care very little about that kind of thing. You, as the
\nproducer, might care, but for the most part, it’s irrelevant to the
\nticket buyer. On the other hand, if the show has a cast member
\nwith a familiar face from “Frasier” or “Crash”, telling people that is
\nvery helpful. Or if the title doesn’t reveal much about the content,
\nit helps to explain that it’s the story of when Einstein met Picasso in
\na bar. It gives the customer something to begin to form an idea
\naround. Movies do that with trailers; live shows need as much help as
\npossible in this area.<\/p>\n
Fairly recently, I noted on this
\nblog that Joe’s Pub in NYC had added comment fields to their event
\nlistings. Have the Goldstar comments sections gotten good responses?
\nHelped sales? Are you ultimately hoping to replace or at least
\nseriously compete with sites like Yelp or CitySearch, or is that apples
\nand oranges?
<\/b>
We were the first company in the world to have
\nonline reviews for live entertainment, and we have far more than anyone
\nelse. We have hundreds of thousands of reviews and ratings, just for
\nshows on our site and just by people who actually went. As a
\ncomparison, search for reviews of “Fuerzabruta” on Yelp and then search
\non Goldstar. There are 49 reviews on Yelp and and 541 on ours. Not
\nonly that, but we have reviews on hundreds of shows that don’t hit
\ntheir radar screen.<\/p>\n
So Goldstar is the worldwide leader in
\nreal-time, unedited user reviews and ratings for live entertainment,
\nand it’s one of the things our members like most about the site. Having
\nsaid that, we’re not trying to do what Yelp or Citysearch are doing.
\nWe’re about helping our members get out to live entertainment more;
\nthey are media companies with an advertising-based business model. It
\nis true, though, that a lot of people use Goldstar as a guide in a
\nsimliar way, but I’m not going to compete with Yelp and Citysearch for
\nthe restaurant biz or in the business of selling banners to advertisers
\nat $1 CPM. They can have that to themselves! <\/p>\n
Obviously, every venue is different, but in your opinion, at what point should a presenter discount their tickets?
<\/b>
Here’s what I suggest to every venue partner who will put up with listening to me on this topic: From
\na sales point of view, there’s only one number you should be concerned
\nwith – revenue per seat. That is, take all the money you make from a
\ngiven show and divide it by the number of seats you have available to
\nsell.<\/p>\n
So for example, and to keep the math easy so I don’t mess
\nup, imagine you have 100 seats in your venue. Imagine that you sell 50
\nof them at $20 each. That’s $1000, or $1000 divided by $100 or $10 per
\nseat. Now, if you sold another 50 at $10 per seat, you’d have $1500 in total revenue divided by the same 100 seats or $15 per seat. Some
\npeople go by average ticket sold, so they’d see that as a drop because
\nnow they have all these $10 seats mixed in with the $20, but in
\nreality, what they’ve forgotten to do is add in all the $0 seats for
\nthe ones they didn’t sell. <\/p>\n
So my advice is to evaluate how you’re going to maximize revenue per seat and raise or lower prices accordingly. Having
\nsaid that, if you’re going to discount, you should do it through a
\nchannel, like Goldstar or others because it protects the integrity of
\nyour prices to your core buyers. In Goldstar’s case, not only is it a
\nchannel, but it’s a channel that is overwhelmingly people who are new
\nto what you’re doing. Last year, we learned that 85% of the time,
\nGoldstar members do not have a specific show in mind when they come to
\nthe site, so if you are a venue or producer are on the site, you’re
\ngoing to be reaching a new customer in all likelihood.<\/p>\n
To shift
\nthe subject slightly, sometimes I’m amazed that people who hesitate to
\ndiscount in channels are the very first ones to blast their core buyers
\nwith a discount. If you’re giving your core buyers discounts often
\nenough, that’s not a discount; it’s a reduction in your price.<\/p>\n
Finally,
\nI’d say don’t be shy about having a strategy that includes discounts as
\nearly as possible because the effect of not having people come to your
\nvenue is tremendous. If we were in the business of selling iPods, we
\ncould take whatever we don’t sell today and sell it tomorrow, but our
\ninventory is expiring. You can’t sell Tuesday’s ticket on Wednesday. Not
\nonly that, but the benefits of having somebody there as opposed to not
\nthere are obvious: word of mouth, secondary sources of revenue like
\nfood and beverage or merchandise, not to mention simply the opportunity
\nto reach that person with what you’re doing and draw them into your
\npermanent fan base.<\/p>\n
By the way, I give a 90 minute seminar on
\nthat Revenue Per Seat thing, and if any of our venue partners or
\norganizations they belong to would like to hear it, all I ask in
\nexchange if that you take me to dinner afterwards. \ud83d\ude42 Seriously, they
\nshould contact us about that and we can work out a date because this is
\nvery important for people in the industry to understand.
There’s
\nthis purse store in Tribeca – Cleo & Patek – in which the bags
\nare always 60% off. You walk in and the woman says, “The price on the
\ntag is not the price. Everything is on sale.” I fall for it time and
\ntime again, and I’m starting to suspect that the “real” prices are
\nactually the “sale” prices…or vice versa. Psychologically speaking,
\ndo you think presenters should mark up and then “discount” tickets as
\nsoon as they go on sale?<\/b>
For my taste, that example is a little gimmicky. Actually, it’s a lot gimmicky. Consumers are smarter than ever [Not me! I’ve bought two clutches and a wallet from that store.] <\/b>and so when you tell them what something’s “real” value is, they’re not just going to take it as gospel because you said it.<\/p>\n
I
\ncan’t tell you how much time we spend making sure that the “full” price
\nwe put on our site is the legitimate full price that people are really
\npaying at the venue for a ticket. It’s a bad idea to try those kinds
\nof shenanigans with consumers because it erodes their trust in you very
\nquickly, and I wouldn’t recommend it at all. Going back to
\nwhat I said earlier, venues need to manage their Revenue per Seat, so
\nthey should be looking for the combination of prices that does that. <\/p>\n
I’ll
\ntell you another thing that I’m not a fan of: pretending things are
\nsold out that aren’t sold out. At a conference in NYC last year that I
\nwill not name, one of the keynote speakers was a “marketing expert” on
\nBroadway and touring Broadway shows. The thrust of his whole
\npresentation, believe it or not, was that your goal as a marketer was
\nto create “perceived demand”. In other words, if you make people think
\nsomebody wants your tickets, then those people will want your tickets.<\/p>\n
Well,
\nguess what. That only works if people really do want your tickets!
\nYou might manage to stimulate your already-committed base to action by
\nputting part of the house on sale and then “selling out” and then
\nputting another part on sale, but that’s it. My counterpoint to
\nthis whole way of thinking is that if everyone took the energy they put
\ninto trying to generate this phony-baloney “perceived demand” and tried
\ninstead to generate ACTUAL demand, everyone would be much better off.
\nThis involves getting to know your customers better, innovating to
\nserve their needs and generally quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears,
\nso often, people don’t do it enough.
<\/p>\n
Papering houses: sometimes necessity or avoidable circumstance?<\/b>
I
\nsuppose it’s a necessity at some point if you haven’t prepared from a
\nmarketing point of view or if there’s simply no interest in the
\nmarketplace in what you’re doing.<\/p>\n
We have an interesting
\nstrategy in this area. We have a program called Quick Start, which is
\na way for shows in the first couple weeks of their run to put lots of
\ncomp tickets on our site. Our members love it, and they pay a small
\nfee per ticket for these ‘comps.’ Because they have a small
\ninvestment, about 85% of people who buy comps on our site show up,
\nwhereas the traditional ratio of papering is just the inverse of that:
\nyou give away 10 tickets in Times Square for every one person who walks
\nthrough the door. Not just that, but by packing your preview or
\nfirst couple weeks, you activate word of mouth and end up with lots of
\nreviews and ratings on the Goldstar site. Good reviews tend to help
\nsell the show and raise the profile of the event on our site. Then, hopefully, we’ve helped create a market for the rest of that show’s run and comps aren’t necessary anymore.
When
\nyou go to performances and see half-empty houses, does it just annoy
\nthe heck out of you? Last time you sat in the audience of a half-empty
\nshow, what was the first thing that came to your mind?<\/b><\/p>\n
Yes, it does. How’d you guess? <\/p>\n
The
\nlast time I was in a place like that, the first thing that I thought
\nwas, “they didn’t manage their revenue per seat very well on this one,
\ndid they?” The second thing I thought was “We could probably have sold
\nhalf of that mezzanine for them.”<\/p>\n
The third thing I thought is
\nthat I should probably learn to compartmentalize my work life and my
\npersonal life a little better.
<\/p>\n
In your opinion, what
\nare the three biggest mistakes performing arts organizations make in
\nmarketing (or not marketing) their performances<\/b>?<\/p>\n
1. They
\ndon’t take into account the way marketing has changed. I’ve literally
\nheard people say they were about to send out 5000 post cards for their
\nshow and so they were going to wait to see what happened after those
\nhit before they figured out the rest of their marketing plan. Well,
\nlet’s do the math on that: 5000 post cards get delivered, but maybe
\n20% get read. That’s 1000 post cards. If 10% of the people who read
\nit are interested, that’s 100 post cards, and if 10% of those people
\nactually remember how to buy the tickets and actually go through with a
\npurchase, that’s 10 customers buying a couple tickets each.<\/p>\n
The
\nsimple fact is that most traditional advertising is overwhelmingly
\nineffective now. Even “traditional” web advertising has dropped to
\nlevels of responsiveness (or unresponsiveness) that we would have been
\nstartled by back in ’98 or ’99. If you’re counting on some kind of
\nmedia buy to solve your marketing problems, you’re going to have a hard
\ntime hitting your goals, so you have to do something else.
2.
\nThey separate the art from the marketing. In the past, it might have
\nbeen ok to have the “art” over here and the “marketing” over there, but
\nin a Live 2.0 world, You Are Your Marketing. To say that differently,
\nsince advertising really doesn’t work anymore, the show itself has to
\ncommunicate what makes it special and worth seeing and what was once
\nthe marketing department is now responsible for running the
\nconversation about the show. You can’t do that in silos the way you
\ncould when marketing’s job was to create pretty postcards or print ads
\nor web banners about whatever show the creative people happened to come
\nup with.
3. They worry about the wrong things from a business
\npoint of view. Ultimately, any performing arts organization should care
\nabout two things when it comes to selling tickets: getting as many
\npeople as possible to see the show and getting as much money as
\npossible. All too often, though, they get wrapped up in issues that
\nare secondary or even counter-productive like average ticket price.
\nWell, you don’t put average ticket price in the bank; you put dollars
\nin the bank. Not only that, but when keeping your average ticket price
\nup* also keeps people out of your venue, you have to stop and ask
\nyourself why you’re doing it.<\/p>\n
*BTW, people who manage average ticket price almost never count the zeroes from unsold seats, which makes it inaccurate anyway.
Final question: Can you please put Billy Elliot<\/i> on Broadway up on Goldstar so I can afford to go see it?<\/b> <\/p>\n
It’s already been moved to the top of my priority list!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Each week, I’ll post an interview with someone far more knowledgeable than myself on specific marketing and publicity subjects. This week, Goldstar CEO and co-founder Jim McCarthy on sitting in half-full audiences, going genre-less and why you don’t actually gotta having a gimmick. Jim McCarthy is the CEO and co-founder of Goldstar and the Editor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}