Palace Sports & Entertainment has licensed its targeted discount ticketing service located at mycompanyoffer.com, to the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers for the coming NBA season, with a dozen more teams also looking into the service, according to Dave Auker, senior vice president of PSE.
The patent-pending service makes it possible for employees of team sponsors, suiteholders and season-ticket holders to buy reduced-price tickets on short notice, similar to an airline "e-saver" program. The program was developed by PSE two years ago, during the Internet rush.
The Heat and Cavaliers will pay PSE a variable fee of less than $2 for each ticket sold through the system, Auker said.
The PSE-owned Detroit Pistons sold 17,000 tickets last season using the system, including more than 1,000 seats to each of a few late-season contests, and Auker was sure most of those seats would have gone unsold otherwise.
Seats are made available anywhere from one day to two weeks before an event. The discounts are steep, averaging 50 percent to 60 percent. A few $85 floor seats for WNBA Detroit Shock games went for as low as $20 last season. Auker wouldn't say how much revenue the program generated, but in the past two years, PSE has sold 117,000 tickets through the site for all of its various events.
Companies participating in the program jumped to 500 from 200 last year.
The program is open only to companies that have some relationship with PSE. In addition, a company administrator, not PSE, controls the promotion of the offers so the tickets are positioned as a perk to employees, not a pitch from PSE.
The company administrator logs into the mycompanyoffer.com system and programs it to send offers to certain employees, who log on and purchase tickets on a company-branded home page.
Companies as large as General Motors, Kmart and BlueCross/BlueShield of Michigan are using PSE's program.
Auker tells a story of how the Detroit-area Time Inc. office signed on. Several executives were pondering it at a meeting with PSE but were skeptical, given the number of suite seats the company already had to manage. The program does not sell suite seats.
"[Time Inc.'s] ticket administrator was there taking notes," Auker said, "and she looked up and said, 'Sure, but I know 45 employees who would love to go to a Pistons game and don't need to sit in a suite, either.'" Time Inc. signed on.
PSE developed the program in about 15 months with help from Detroit-area programmers and Web developers. Auker would not state what the start-up costs were, but said they were "not inexpensive." He added that the program has more than offset its costs already.
PSE presented the program at the NBA marketing meetings in March and began pitching it leaguewide after Commissioner David Stern signed off on it, Auker said.
LITTLE SPLASH FOR BONDS BALL: Lelands.com took a bit of a bath on the ESPN-televised auction of Barry Bonds' record 73rd home run ball on June 25. Maybe that's appropriate for a ball that first took a bath in McCovey Cove.
Lelands.com and other memorabilia experts had expected the sphere to sell for around $1 million, but it fetched only $450,000 from comic-book magnate Todd McFarlane.
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| Lelands.com lost money but gained publicity on the Bonds ball sale. |
Still, Lelands.com managing partner Michael Heffner said he was pleased with the results. "We're certain the publicity will offset the losses here," he said.
Lelands.com bought print ads, printed a glossy 20-page catalog, flew the ball's former co-owners around the country and paid for outside PR assistance. It did receive 10 uninterrupted minutes of promotion when the auction was aired live on a 6 p.m. ET edition of ESPN's "SportsCenter," plus ad spots on the network.
Heffner said the company would have broken even with a $1 million sale.
Noah Liberman can be reached at nliberman@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
