One of the most important lessons of crisis communications is that most crises are not communications problems, they're operational problems. Communications can help in many ways to diffuse a crisis and calm people down, but if the operational issue at the heart of the problem isn't addressed, no amount of PR spin is going to distract interested parties from that fact.
This, is a nutshell, is my fan-level reaction to Ticketmaster's new PR ploy involving its captive reseller program, TicketsNow. Ticketmaster had a big problem earlier this year when it was caught transferring ticket seekers from the original ticket onsale screen to the TicketsNow resale screen, where the same tickets that had just gone on sale were now supposedly only available for huge markups on TicketsNow.
Last week, Ticketmaster announced a so-called "Fans Up Front" program that claims to address the concerns of ticket buyers who believe that Ticketmaster holds back tickets from the original ticket distribution and then makes them available via TicketsNow at a markup. The program includes a side-by-side comparison of the original price and the scalper/TicketsNow price, and will tell prospective TicketsNow buyers whether there are still original price tickets available via Ticketmaster.
Here's why it's an attempt to use PR to solve an operational problem: both of these initiatives are lame-ass smokescreens. Two of the easiest pieces of information for a concertgoer to figure out are a) the list price of the ticket and b) whether Ticketmaster has any more original tickets for sale when you go online to get them.
What none of us understand is the answer to the question that Ticketmaster continues to evade: how is it that tickets are "sold out" minutes after they go on sale, only to be available for huge markups on the TicketsNow site and elsewhere, such as eBay? The answer, I and many others suspect, is that in the byzantine world of ticket sales, lots and lots of people have their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, skimming off the best tickets for themselves, for friends, for ticket brokers and for scalpers. What's left for the average fan is the crumbs.
Until Ticketmaster addresses its operational problem -- that far fewer than 100% of the available tickets are made available to the general public -- then lame PR programs like "Fans Up Front" will continue to be seen for what they are: ineffective spin.
No comments:
Post a Comment