Emerging Trends in Sports Marketing

In this week's SportsBusiness Journal:

"During a talk on emerging trends in sports marketing, AEG president Shawn Hunter identified areas to watch including wireless commerce, broadband channels, secondary ticketing in sports and VIP ‘experiences.’"

There has been a lot of talk recently about how to handle scalping and secondary tickets. Personally, I don’t think anyone will ever be able to create a fair program. A lot of teams are trying to take secondary ticketing in-house, which I think is a good idea. I don’t agree with the idea Ticketmaster is pitching in that whatever organizations sells the tickets originally, should have the opportunity to sell the secondary tickets. Well, Ticketmaster sells a freakin plethora of sports tickets. They would definitely come close to having a monopoly.

In the future, watch the evolution of VIP experiences. This type of service is going to explode in 2007 – I guarantee it. The baby boomers want to attend sporting events, but they also want to meet athletes or play on the athletic field or attend a major league sports camp. They want to feel like VIPs. There is tons of money to make in this industry sector and a lot of companies are developing experiences as we speak.