Outside of places like amusement parks, there are only a handful of categories of large mass populace events in which a corporation can enrapture the attention of thousands of consumers at once for extended periods of time. Again: this is important because in person, live experiences relating to a company's intellectual property / content make the emotional connect with that intellectual property / content so much more real and validated, deepening and solidifying the consumer's attachment to your company with amazing brand loyalty. Think of all the Disneykids out there.
So what's there left on the plate? Ticketmaster breaks their live experiences down into Concerts, Theater, and Sports.
When it comes to concerts and music, Disney knows all too well how to leverage its Disney Music Group brand-committed stars and integrating them across live events, telecasts, and films. In fact, the "Big Three" music labels that own almost all content are film studio related: Sony Music Entertainment (still owned and operated by Sony), Universal Music Group (once of Universal Pictures, still uses their name and logo, but retained in ownership by French conglomerate Vivendi), and Warner Music Group (once of Warner Bros, still uses their name and logo, but sold to American conglomerate Access Industries).
Branding is a two way street. Smaller music labels like Disney Music use their parent company's name to extend that brand's goodwill onto their lesser known performers, who in turn attract more consumers to the Disney brand. Larger labels like Warner and Universal kept their former studio names in a prudent move to legitimize their storied history and market power in order to attract performers who in turn attract consumers. When it comes to music labels, Sony has its cake and eats it too: its parent company retained control of their Major Label music division while being able to attract A level star power, who in turn can promote Sony Pictures and Sony Electronics.
Meanwhile, the Theater industry is a bit out of the regular-consumption price range of the average American consumer, and thus remains fragmented, with little national or multinational consolidation. Honestly, this is a market that is ripe for an unprecedented scale of corporate investment unforeseen in modern theatrical history. But that's a speculative post for another day.
So that brings us to Sports: the final of mass-consumption, large live events. First off, is there money to be made? Let's ask howmuch for 2015's annual numbers:
While ticket sales and merchandise sales play a part in revenue, the most sizeable chunk by far usually comes from selling the television rights. For example ESPN alone pays $2 billion annually for Monday Night Football. Logically, it only goes to assume that when a media company owns a team (or a league... more on that in a bit!) they can rake in the benefit of:
- Recuperating some of the licensing fee
- Being able to use your team to leverage your larger brand
Neither of these benefits were lost on media conglomerates. Turner owned the Atlanta Braves, Hawks, and Thrashers. Comcast purchased Philadelphia's Flyers and 76ers. FOX bought the Los Angeles Dodgers. Rogers Communications in Canada acquired the Toronto Blue Jays. Disney bought the Angels of the MLB and most famously Anaheim Ducks of the NHL.
In 1992
Disney paid $25 million to the NHL for the rights to an expansion team, the
same year they released their hockey-themed film The Mighty Ducks. They kept
the franchise going with additional sequels, notably rebranding the fictitious
team with the real team's logos and uniforms in the sequel, blurring the line
between the fandoms. The arena itself leveraged Disney-branded merchandise and
it was a cross-promotional Elysium.
Two years
later Disney released Angels in the Outfield, about the local-to-Disneyland
California Angels. Their purchase of the team hit some hiccups and ownership of
the real life team, much like the Ducks before them, also occurred after the
film's release (in 1997). But they also kept this franchise going with two more
sequels as well.
Turner also
hit heavy and hard with the cross-promotional initiatives with their owned
teams. Occasionally going far enough to which the President of the League had
to intervene. In 1976, the struggling Braves were purchased by Turner. They
signed four big players over from the dominant Los Angeles Dodgers in an
attempt to not only pursue a title but to sign big names for big television
ratings. One of these acquisitions, #47 Pitcher Andy Messersmith, had his
number changed by management to #17 and given the odd, never-before-used
nickname "Channel", thus his jersey read, you guessed it,
"Channel 17". Channel 17 in Atlanta, as it so happened, was the
Turner-owned WTCG which Turner was actively trying to rebroadcast nationally as
TBS. Braves PR director Bob Hope (not that one) was quoted as saying "For
'Channel 17,' we knew baseball would step in and stop it. But we would get lots
of publicity." And the fact that you're reading this online now 44 years
later, mission accomplished.
So why didn't corporate mass media scoop into more sports ownership? Despite their ban of incorporated ownership (save for the grandfathered-in Green Bay Packers) I'll use easily-available NFL revenues as an example. Let's say DisneyESPN spends 2 billion per year on their broadcast rights. The NFL in turn makes 13 billion in total that year. Divide that by the number of teams (32) and then divide that by half (half for the team ownership, half to the players). That leaves you with 203 million. That's a 10% "discount" for the trouble of running a team. And what a trouble that can be if those media owned teams have terrible seasons? Fans would rip into them for lack of direct leadership, doubting every general management decision as "rule by committee", and questioning the motives behind every back office decision... thus losing the very consumers these corporations hoped to sway. Just after The Great Recession, with the exception of Rogers' Blue Jays and Comcast's Flyers, most major media companies had fled team ownership, now instead focusing on purchasing the local networks owned by major league teams.
A quirky workaround to this revenue issue would be if a media company could own, I dunno, an entire league. That way, any sold television rights go directly to your company, provided you don't sell to yourself. And that's certainly what current Atlanta Braves owners Liberty Media thought to themselves when they bought the entire Formula 1 racing league in 2017 for $4.6 billion, selling the broadcast rights to every media market worldwide, giving it away for free in countries that don't generally watch Formula 1 (such as the United States) but retaining all the commercial advertising income in those territories. Brilliant.
Don't run awaaaaaaay quite yet, we still have:
- OK time to get to the missssssssstakes aka "I come to bury go90 not to slander him"
- OK so let's say you HAVE all this Intellectual Property across film, television, streaming, music, and live entertainment... NOW WHAT
- Programming, Scheduling and Trafficking (not that kind of Trafficking)
- I mentioned sports... that means I get to talk about eSports aka the FUCHA(???)
- And MOAR
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