Olympic Winners and Losers – Empty Seats and Byzantine Ticketing

What a fantastic ad from Channel 4 advertising their showcasing of the Paralympic Games, beginning soon. Meanwhile, what of the Olympics? Though there have been tales of Tube and travel chaos, Zeitgeist has not personally experienced problems with public transport, either for commuting or for travelling to the Games themselves. And while our mayor may have been left dangling like a pinata the other day, he certainly seems not to have left London in the lurch in its preparedness for the Games.

LOCOG, however, have had to face two severe lines of questioning since the Games opened last Friday. The first, which became immediately apparent to anyone watching the first few days of events, was that thousands of seats were unoccupied, including for events LOCOG had deemed sold out. The fault, it seemed, lay mainly with the Olympic Family, who weren’t turning up to events. Seb Coe tried to shrug off the incident, saying it was normal for the few first events of an Olympic Games. It must be particularly galling for him though after the same thing happened in the 2008 Games in Beijing and he pledged to avoid such an occurrence in London. It is unfortunate then for all concerned then that, despite releasing more tickets, the problem is still not resolved as of today.

Moreover, this brings us to the second big problem. The selling of tickets. The whole balloting system originally set up was pretty arcane and inefficient to begin with. But now with tickets being released on a rolling basis throughout the day, the chaos is all the more apparent. Yesterday, eConsultancy published an excellent article with a blow-by-blow account of just why “the Olympic ticketing website is so bad”. Worst, for Zeitgeist, was firstly not having a mobile version / mobile-optimised site. Secondly it was not having anything informing users of when certain tickets became available. Thankfully, as in any well-functioning democratic society, where there is a market failure, substitute products or competitors will come in to correct the situation. Such was the case at the weekend, when the completely unofficial @2012TicketAlert account was launched on Twitter, which used automated tweets to alert followers when any Olympic tickets became available. It was a fantastic idea, and seemed much in keeping with the ‘hack’ trend we see nowadays, when companies like Microsoft and Transport for London open up their APIs for users to develop their own programs. Such examples clearly had not occurred to LOCOG though, and earlier this evening, after amassing over 8,000 followers, LOCOG denied the @2012TicketAlert account further access. As the administrator of the account, Adam, wrote,

“[I]t seems someone at LOCOG has taken exception to our idea (or the publicity it is getting) and instead of reaching out to us or addressing the lack of a notification system, they have simply blocked our access to their server. This means we are unable to check or post any new ticket alerts… we would point out that the alert was not against the Terms of Use of the http://www.london2012.com website, nor have these terms been updated to make it so.”

It seems a poor PR move on LOCOG’s part, and more importantly a poor operational move because it makes it that much harder again to check for newly available tickets. Taking into account the immense budget that must have been allocated to the ticketing website, the result is severely lacking, and many thousands of people have been put off the Olympic experience because of it. Ticketmaster, which has branding on the website, has also come under fire. These acts, as we predicted in an earlier article, may well be the undoing of those involved, for, once lost, a good reputation is hard to recover.

TV Evolves Before Our Eyes

From the October Zeitgeist…

As Octavius once said of the Roman Empire, so now says the TV industry and the advertising that supports it: we expand or we die.

In the US, the once niche and piffling cable networks now command a much larger slice of the advertising pie, and in terms of quality, their output speaks volumes; Mad Men, The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Dexter; these same shows are rewarded at the annual gush‐fest that is the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. In the UK, the BBC is defending attacks on its unique position in the marketplace as a Public Service Broadcaster. It’s licence fee revenues mean it is moving relatively easily through the recession compared to its moribund rivals. ITV is desperately trying to find someone crazy/stupid enough to take control of the network and Channel 4 is angling for a slice of the BBC’s licence fee to help support it’s own PSB commitments. Sky meanwhile, under the stewardship of heir apparent James Murdoch, is resilient. It is having little trouble courting advertisers as the little personal liquidity that exists is sunk into home comforts like HDTV.

The crowded and volatile marketplace in both countries has led to audience fragmentation, but some are convinced there is not yet saturation. Variety wrote recently about the US push to broadcast TV to devices over ad‐supported mobile DTV; creating a “world where travelers waiting in an airport lounge will watch golf live on their laptops, or homemakers who have to dash out… won’t miss the last 10 minutes of Oprah because they can catch the end… on their cell phones”. 70 TV stations will soon be making their broadcasts available to the country’s 270m mobiles, providing another way for advertisers to create more impressions and reach more eyeballs.

Last month, Culture secretary Ben Bradshaw announced the end to the ban of product placement on commercial TV. The ban was somewhat arbitrary since imported US and Euro shows flagrantly display their wares already. The FT believes benefits to broadcasters are “hazy…a lot of the [money] would simply be transfers from traditional spot advertising”; they also might be tightly regulated, discouraging use. Advertisers though are really more fearful of no one watching their product. DVR penetration continues: most people tend to fast‐forward the ads. US networks are now trying to blur the lines even more between entertainment and advert; American Idol now inserts auditions in the middle of ad breaks.

All this risks putting off the consumer, but Brand Republic notes that viewers think product placement will “add a sense of realism” to fictional fare. If done sensibly, that is.

Regulating Media Consumption

From the July Zeitgeist…

As Brian Lowry wrote recently in Variety, both TV and newspapers are struggling to respond to the changing ways people are consuming their media. “Both are communications media, and each faces a conundrum regarding what to do about the free online consumption of their product that’s rocking their respective worlds”.

Both industries have become subject to massive arbitrage; absent of a consistent way of protecting themselves, these two media are trying all sorts of varying methods to make money: FT.com allows you to view a select amount of articles a month before asking the user to register to their details; most general news on WSJ.com is free, but the more niche articles on the markets are charged at a weekly subscription rate.

On television, there is a similar discrepancy. In the US, Disney, Fox and NBC have all aggregated their content on a free-to-air, ad-supported platform called Hulu. The site is tremendously popular, although debate rages – recently between The New York Times and eConsultancy ‐ as to its efficacy. Other networks like CBS offer free, ad‐supported
content too, but only through their website. UK networks operate under this latter mantra; you can watch our shows but only on our own proprietary website. And a long‐gestating proposition to aggregate all TV content across the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 under Project Kangaroo (exactly like Hulu) has recently been blocked by the Competition Commission. Regardless, Hulu is carrying on with plans to launch it’s services in the UK in the coming months*. If all this sounds confusing, that’s because it is.

Both media recognise that the way users consume their respective content has changed dramatically in just a couple of years. However, their collective response has been mostly in fits and starts; uncoordinated and uncertain. Consumers will not rush to embrace any model (profitable or otherwise) until there is uniformity and simplicity across a medium, and for this to happen companies must work together.

*For more news on the increasing amount of video users are consuming online, click here.