Event Planning Status Quo: Professionals vs. Fans
Professional entertainment event planning — those who work in booking and promotion of the world’s entertainment acts — should see themselves at a crossroads: what matters more, their expertise or what the fans want?
Right now, there are professionals developing travel itineraries for globally recognized musical acts like BTS and cherished sporting leagues beloved the world over like the NBA. These are promoters, researchers, marketers — a gaggle of parties whose sole job is to make the best determination of where the fans would like to see these acts appear.
It’s an unpleasant irony that few of these parties will ever ask fans directly who they’d like to see and where.
If you’re a BTS fan in Calgary, an NBA fan in Vietnam, good luck bringing either of these acts home to a venue near you. You’re a fan but there’s no way for the entertainment industry to hear you directly. It’s the professionals versus the fans.
There has to be a better way to do this, right?
Case Study: Brazil Global Tour 2019
At the close of 2019, Brazil held matches around the world.
At the Singapore National Stadium, Brazil played a match against Senegal on October 10th. Afterward, Brazil also played against Nigeria’s national football team on October 13th, also in Singapore.
On November 15th, Brazil continued their world tour with the revered annual match against Argentina known as the Superclásico de las Américas — Copa Doctor Nicolás Leoz, or simply the Superclasico. In the sixth edition of the annual match, Brazil succumbed to their longstanding rivals at the King Saud University Stadium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in a 1–0 game.
During their world tour, Brazil also played the Korea Republic national football team, 2002 FIFA World Cup semi-finalists and the 2019 AFC Asian Cup quarter-finalists. Brazil, a five-time FIFA World Cup winning team, were formidable foes at the match, which was held at Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
The Brazil Global Tour 2019 centered on Singapore and Saudi Arabia.
Coincidentally, these were the same host cities selected by Brazil football enthusiasts in Fandom.Live’s crowd voting held ahead of the games. Singapore was selected as the preferred venue to see Brazil play. Fandom.Live’s audience cast their votes, selected the two cities. Lo and behold, the professionals came to the same conclusions and selected the same cities the fans did.
It’s not a coincidence, it’s just data. Fandom.Live’s relatively straightforward fan voting platform is an easy, fast way to get an answer on levels of fan enthusiasm. It’s simple: we asked fans what cities ought to host the Brazil Global Tour 2019 play, and they too answered Singapore and Saudi Arabia.
Compare that with what the professionals are doing: intensive market research, limited consumer testing, assessing relative financial risk of hosting matches in various places … i.e. doing almost everything outside of just asking the fans directly. These are two processes that, while highly similar in outcome, are also highly different in terms of their methods and, more importantly, their resource needs.
Singapore. Saudi Arabia. Fandom.Live was able to determine that these were the best cities to hold Brazil’s matches just as the professionals did. We did it quicker and we did it cheaper. And we did it by answering a different question. Instead of asking, “Where is the best place for Brazil to play its matches abroad,” Fandom.Live’s innovative crowd voting platform allows for a more intuitive and straightforward question to be asked and answered: “What do the fans want?”
What Do the Fans Want? Just Ask
The clearest way to explain how our fan crowd voting system works is to use our voting events for the Brazil games as an example.
What Three Questions We Asked
In October 2019, we asked fans three questions to see how they’d like to see Brazil’s world tour play out, specifically with regards to the match lineup and location.
Question 1: Where in SEA do you want to see the Brazil vs. Chile match?
Question 2: Which local national team do you want to see Brazil play against in Singapore?”
Question 3: Where should the Superclasico match against Argentina be held?
What the Fans Told Us
The three questions we asked above produced the following results.
Response to question 1: Singapore was the preferred location for the Brazil vs. Chile match.
Response to question 2: Over all other local national teams, Singapore was the preferred team to take on Brazil.
Response to question 3: A majority of fans, 25.45%, preferred Saudi Arabia over other venues around the Middle East to host the Superclasico.
How Our Way Stacks Up to the Pros
There isn’t an exact alignment between what the majority of fans selected and what actually took place. For example, Brazil did not play Chile however they did end up playing in Singapore, a place that Fandom.Live’s voting suggested would have a great reception. But in places where the fans got their way, attendance was far better proportionally as in the case with the Superclasico’s appearance in Riyadh to a nearly sold-out arena.
Here’s the breakdown by question:
Question 1: As we said above, Singapore was the preferred host city for the Brazil vs. Chile match, although the team they ended up playing was Senegal. On this question, the professionals were partly correct in getting the fans preferences right.
Question 2: Fans selected Singapore as the preferred Asian team to take on Brazil. The real match itself put Brazil against South Korea in November 2019. On this question, the pros missed a chance to meet strong fan demand.
Question 3: This was a perfect match. The fans wanted the Superclasico in Saudi Arabia and got it in Saudi Arabia that November. The pros matched with the stadium being fully packed out. SOLD OUT
Asking a Better Question
As we said at the beginning, there’s incongruence because the professionals working in event management and booking are asking a different question compared to the fans. They want to know where the best place is to have the event.
It’s an open-ended question that can take a lot of different inputs: does the best place have the highest concentration of Facebook likes? Is it a place that’s been booked before with known people who are easy to work with? Is the best place just the place that has the largest parking lot and the biggest number of seats? Further pricing analysis is required to know whether those seats are fillable and what the best ticket fee is, and that requires another set of experts, more parties, more resources. Complexities beget complexities, and so on.
A sophisticated and variate booking and promoting scheme eats at the potential earnings of the artist, entertainer or show itself. According to an analysis in The Guardian calling the modern era “live music’s golden age,” music concert revenues have skyrocketed in the last two decades. In 2001, Billboard reported that the top 100 music concerts collectively generated $350 million. In 2015, this amount was surpassed just by the top 25 touring acts that year.
Nevertheless, artists (who often pay for their own tour infrastructure, stage design and production staff salaries) have not been able to change their share of concert revenues meaningfully. The Guardian’s figures show that top acts still capture between just 70 to 50 percent of their concert revenues.
The rest? It goes to the venue, the promoter, et al. as well as those tasked with answering the question “Where is the best place to have this event?”
Our position is that, while some of these costs are necessary, perhaps not all of them are. We can offer a simple way to fill this need for audience insight by asking a better question: What do the fans want?
Well, What Do The Fans Want?
The professionals have ways of estimating and making very solid determinations on where the fans are. These are, after all, the people that the events are for. The point of putting so much thought and research into the planning stage of the event is to make a best approximation to what people want to see with what’s offered.
But it is, even in its best form, an approximation, a guess.
Fandom.Live offers a clear, direct way to know where the fans are. Traditional research offers its best guess at where the event will make the biggest splash, but at its heart, it’s just that: a guess. Fandom.Live’s user voting platform offers a better way to know with certainty whether an event will get the reception, payoff, and attendance it deserves.
What’s more, Fandom.Live’s data-centered approach yields other benefits over conventional event planning, like our ability to easily and accurately deliver comparative research of multiple different events. For example in the first question we asked, fans expressed the greatest in seeing Brazil play Chile. The Brazilian national team would be remiss to not consider playing this very match in Singapore in the future due to the enormous response it had in Fandom.Live’s voting. These aren’t possibilities that are as easily or clearly explored in traditional event planning largely because there’s never been a way to just ask the fans.
Well, what do the fans want? There are a lot of people in marketing and promotion purporting to know just that. But in reality, the current state consumer intelligence has circled around an important question without answering it directly: what do the people, the fans really want? For the first time, we’re able to answer that question with accuracy for the world’s entertainers. “If you build it, they will come,” they say. Will they? Let’s ask the fans themselves.
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