Super Bowl Week Zero
Three Things I Learned In SaaS, Sports, Tech, & Live Events
Three things I learned in SAAS sports tech and Live! Events
The Super Bowl then and now
Sunday, we’re gonna have two championship games in the NFL featuring four teams who have enormous fan bases that travel very well.
Two of those teams will face off in New Orleans, which is hosting the Super Bowl for the 11th time.
The Super Bowl is a great case study of what has been happening in live events since I started in 2002.
Here are three things we’ll see this year that are reflective of what to expect in the future of live events
Live events have finally caught up to technology when it comes to selling to and understanding the fan base.
It isn't close to perfect, but a long way from where we were.
When we started our business in 2007, we had an investor who had been capitalizing on the inefficiencies of the Super Bowl market for nearly twenty years.
The game was in high demand, but it was inefficient in how it was sold to the public and how tickets were distributed. It had to be, as technology wasn’t there to handle a huge event where the contestants aren't decided until two weeks prior.
John, our investor, would take advantage of the inefficiency by trading his services as a bus company for Super Bowl tickets, which he would then turn around, barter, and sell at huge markups. (This wasn’t an aspect of business that we wanted to be in, so he kept it separate from us.)
Wherever there’s an opportunity for arbitrage, smart money will step in. It has been the case in live events for the past two decades, with the Super Bowl as a case study on how to do things.
The NFL started its On-Location program in the mid-2000s, where it started to control the market instead of pushing tickets out to each team. It centralized the inventory and started working through different channels.
Their approach to the market has been copied in just about every live event now, and we’ve seen it mature to a point where the teams are fully embedded with the “brokers,"
We could spend days talking about consolidation and how resellers did deals with teams, but really all that happened was live events got more efficient. It just took a while.
So what’s next? Better pricing. A better understanding, using historical data points and economic kpi, with an assist from AI, as to what events could possibly explode and get more expensive versus those that have risk in the moment to be a dud.
And though that may sound complicated, it is already being done in most industries. It is what hedge funds do every day
Sometimes, an event outgrows its footprint, no matter how much we love the footprint.
We've stated here in the past that marquee events are proving to be much more valuable and able to accommodate larger hospitality pricing than anyone dreamed of.
The Olympics, the U.S. Open of Tennis, the Kentucky Derby, and the Masters all add more hospitality every year at a higher price, and there is no slowdown in their growth.
That brings us to an unfortunate issue. Some events are outgrowing their iconic hosts.
New Orleans is a fantastic city accustomed to hosting major events and conventions. There’s ample lodging in the downtown area for those events, but the Super Bowl has gotten too big, and now people have to stay well outside of town to enjoy the festivities. We know of major sponsors who have hotel blocks twenty minutes outside of town for their largest customers
The city center of New Orleans is not that much different from other cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Francisco. The problem with New Orleans is that there isn't as much infrastructure in the suburbs just outside of the city once the city center hotels are maxed out, which they will be.
These dynamics lead to a difficult fan experience and a tough conversation. Miami has the same problem: everybody tries to stay on South Beach, leading to gridlock and making the event difficult for fans.
I hope I'm wrong.
The Olympics and US Open of Golf have outgrown several host cities, and I believe the Super Bowl is on the doorstep of outgrowing a few.
Sky is the limit.
It's total speculation, but in talking to sponsors going into the college football playoff championship game, it became very clear how tight that ticket was, and that led to a very expensive game.
This Super Bowl feels even tighter. Teams don’t have an inventory like usual, and sponsors are looking for more when they usually have too much. Hold me to it because I could be wrong, but I think this Super Bowl is going to be very expensive.