Every sports venue in the country — every coliseum, every stadium and every arena — are all engaged in an arms race of sorts. It’s an all-out war for time and money!
It’s a fight for something no fan has enough of… time! Venues need to be exciting, engaging “places to be” on game day or the battle is all but lost. And, if you can’t provide the sponsors with effective activation strategies to “wow” the fans and justify their investment with quantifiable ROI you just might get ambushed and find those dollars being spent with another team that will.
While there’s nothing new about quantifiable ROI, recent technology is helping stadium owners create revenue streams seemingly out of thin air that are driving massive advertising ROI.
New revitalization projects such as the recent TD Garden renovation or Xfinity East Plaza for the Miami HEAT or the new “Bunker Suite” at Gillette Stadium are turning revenue-dormant areas into fan engagement centers that are full of new growth opportunities and, guess what, new revenue streams galore!
No question about it, this is exciting business. But there’s a much more human element in this arms race story. It’s the evolving face of fan engagement.
Today’s mega-stadium has raised the price of the fan experience that we used to know. Teams and venues not only have to create value for that big spend but they also have to compete against a great in-home experience. The “man cave” reference isn’t just a bad joke, the home television combined with the ability to watch so many games and the growing attention to fantasy sports makes for a competitive playground when trying to get fans off their couch.
That’s why sports teams today have to create an OMG experience, one fans will be telling their friends about for weeks to come, creating lifelong memories and lifelong fans. Conventional wisdom says you can’t just manufacture special moments between fans and superstars and your sponsors; but today’s technology is changing that belief as we speak.
Media, in its most creative forms is predictably creating these kinds of special experiences. The best of display media is bringing every fan — ever kid — every VIP — right onto the sidelines to see and hear the game in ways that wasn’t possible yesterday. It’s media where you don’t expect it. They are displays of any size and shape, and curved on a scale so sharp, and so big, that’s it’s hard to imagine anyone ever finding them passé.
This is the human story behind the arms race. It doesn’t start with spreadsheets or ROI. It starts with a very human moment and works backwards — a moment something like this is the one that will keep fans coming back, time and again: Leaving the stadium, holding each of your children’s hands. They look up at you and say, “Daddy that was the most amazing time we’ve ever had.”
If you would like to learn more about stadium dead space, please download our white paper The Death of Stadium Dead Space today.
~Rob Jackson
Vice President of Sports and Arenas