Paisley puts WME, IMG in harmony on campuses

Brad Paisley salutes fans during a show at Auburn University. Photo by: BEN ENOS / BRAD PAISLEY TOUR

In the 17 months since William Morris Endeavor closed its acquisition of IMG, its executives touted the prospect of bringing together WME’s entertainment and IMG’s sports into a single powerful platform, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious how that would happen.

But Brad Paisley’s just-concluded concert tour of nine IMG College campuses provides something of a road map for how WME will attempt to showcase its Hollywood and Nashville talent at college venues around the country.

While staging a series of free concerts on college campuses during football season might represent the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to integrating WME and IMG assets, Paisley’s September-October tour is just the start, according to the agency. Paisley is a WME client.

“The idea was to start with bite-size opportunities, so we said let’s do something in music first,” said Jason Lublin, who carries the dual titles of WME’s global chief operating officer and IMG College president. “We’ll take the learnings from working with each school — each campus and each athletic department are different — and use that going forward.”

Integrating WME and IMG is “extremely high on our priority list,” said Lublin, who was hand-picked by WME co-CEOs Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell to succeed Ben Sutton as IMG College’s top executive earlier this year.

Even though the Paisley tour just finished last week, Lublin is eager to find out what other WME

assets can be cross-pollinated with IMG College clients in the future. Already, he’s talked to WME agents who represent comedy acts about a tour on IMG College campuses. Food events with celebrity chefs, movie premieres and fashion shows also are on the table.

These types of events, like the Paisley tour, will be exclusive to IMG College clients.

More ideas are in discussion. It’s already been suggested that WME client Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — a former football player at the University of Miami, an IMG College client — could tour IMG campuses to talk about his HBO show, “Ballers.”

“Once we get the train rolling, there’s no shortage of ideas we can generate,” Lublin said. “We just have to listen to the schools, see what they’re telling us and make it come to life.”

This new intersection of sports and entertainment also represents a transformational period for IMG College, which has multimedia rights agreements with 85 schools. Under the WME umbrella, IMG College is attempting to move away from its identity as a sponsorship sales organization. Instead, the company wants to be known as a solutions provider on campus.

Events like the Paisley tour are “changing the value proposition” for IMG College, said Tim Pernetti, president of IMG College’s multimedia division. “Sponsorship and marketing and media, that’s been the bread and butter, but there’s a shift taking place. We’re showing the college world we’re not just a sales company.”

Paisley’s college tour was intended to give the country music A-lister major exposure, especially with the college-aged crowd, just as his ode to college football, “Country Nation,” broke on Labor Day weekend. In exchange, nine universities were able to offer their fans and students a free concert on home football weekends.

The tour, shown playing (top to bottom) in Austin, Texas; Blacksburg, Va.; and Little Rock, Ark., gave out-of-area fans an additional reason to drive in and see the game, college officials said. Photos by: BEN ENOS / BRAD PAISLEY TOUR

The tour started Sept. 6 at Virginia Tech and wrapped up Oct. 16 at South Carolina. The nine-school tour put Paisley in front of crowds in outdoor venues that ranged in size from 7,000 at Wake Forest to 30,000 at Virginia Tech.

The student-focused promotion meant that Paisley was almost assured of playing before crowds that were predominantly in the highly sought after 18 to 22 demo.

“The audience every single artist is targeting is the kids from 18 to 22,” said Rob Beckham, WME’s co-head of the Nashville office who oversaw the tour. “That audience is the most crazed there is. Everyone wants that demo, and the fact that so many of them are female means a lot. We had probably 60/40 females, and obviously the guys are following along.”

The start of the tour coincided with three other promotional aspects for Paisley around his new song.

His “Country Nation” video, featuring college mascots, debuted on Sept. 3, three days before the start of the tour, and he performed the song on the Sept. 5 edition of ESPN’s “College GameDay.”

Paisley also appears in an ongoing commercial for Zaxby’s, the quick-serve chicken restaurant that sponsored the tour and covered the costs of the free concerts. Paisley’s appearance in the Zaxby’s spot was part of the sponsorship agreement.

Additionally, he records a customized version of “Country Nation” each week for the SEC game on CBS throughout the season.

“It’s the most systematic launch of a single I’ve ever seen,” Beckham said of the song, which last week was No. 32 on Billboard’s U.S. Hot Country Songs.

Meanwhile, the nine colleges benefited from staging free concerts.

Arkansas saw a direct uptick in ticket sales for its Sept. 12 game against Toledo in Little Rock, where Paisley played a postgame concert. From the time the Razorbacks announced Paisley would play just outside War Memorial Stadium, they sold 16,000 game tickets in the following 24 days, the school said.

“It’s by far the best single-game ticket sales we’ve had this season and, no disrespect to Toledo, but games like that can be a tough sell,” said Chris Fleet, Arkansas’ senior associate athletic director for external operations.

Arkansas was so pleased that it has worked with WME to bring another country singer, Justin Moore, to its Fayetteville campus to perform prior to the Auburn game this week.

“Every AD in the country is talking about ways to improve the fan experience and this is one way to do it,” said Pernetti, a former AD at Rutgers.

Administrators at Arkansas and Florida State, where many ticket buyers drive two to four hours to see their team play, say the free concerts give their fans an additional reason to make the trip and stay for the weekend. In fact, the Seminoles have been staging Friday night concerts on home game weekends for five years, although those up-and-coming acts don’t compare to having Paisley perform.

“Every game we play this year will be available on TV,” said FSU’s Jason Dennard, assistant AD for marketing. “And we felt we needed to give people reasons to come to Tallahassee, outside of the football game.”

While the appeal of a free concert was enticing to many universities, it wasn’t a slam dunk. WME executives thought the tour might have grown beyond nine schools, but some university officials were worried about having the right space to accommodate such large crowds. The opening show at Virginia Tech, which drew 30,000 on Labor Day weekend, scared off some schools that were considering an October date but were worried about crowd control.

“Some schools passed,” Lublin said, “because they thought it’d be too difficult, too big. Some are probably regretting that decision now. But some were willing to take a chance with us. They didn’t know how it would turn out.”

What WME and the nine schools realized along the way is that the concerts are customizable to fit most any space. Wake Forest and Baylor used smaller footprints on campus to create more intimate settings. Each of those shows drew 7,000 to 8,000.

Bigger spaces at Florida State and Auburn, just outside the football stadiums, drew 18,000 to 20,000 each.

Paisley and friends at the Little Rock, Ark., show. Photo by: BEN ENOS / BRAD PAISLEY TOUR

Officials at Arkansas, FSU and Baylor said the concert logistics were efficient. WME-IMG brought in all of the staging equipment, tore it down and cleaned up the space. The schools, whose expenses were limited to a few thousand dollars each, added security where needed and brought in their concessionaires to sell basic food and beverage items. Alcohol was sold at three of the nine shows — Texas, Arkansas and South Carolina, IMG said.

“We do shows all the time in stadiums, in amphitheaters, in arenas, but nothing like this where you set up in a completely open space,” WME’s Beckham said. “We brought the stage, the power, the sound, the lights, the video, the crew, everything for a show in one day. It was a unique challenge.”

The only thing missing from the Paisley tour was a significant revenue component for the schools. Zaxby’s covered most of the concert costs, and some schools did realize some revenue from concession sales, which was enough to offset security costs in most cases.

It remains to be seen whether WME-IMG will continue to offer the concerts for free in the future, or charge admission.

The bigger picture, however, is that “now we have tangible, hard evidence that the companies coming together has made a difference,” Beckham said. “It was the branding side with Zaxby’s, it was the TV side with CBS, it was the live music side with WME and it was the college side with IMG. Literally every aspect had to be tied together. We made something happen out of nothing, and that’s really cool.”