Ten days ahead of the most anticipated fight since the advent of pay-per-view, the head of Showtime’s sports division scanned a sales report from distributors and saw trends that were even better than he had hoped.
The most lucrative pay-per-view ever, Floyd Mayweather’s defeat of Saúl “Canelo” Alvarez in 2013, brought in about $150 million from 2.2 million buys. Last Wednesday, sales of Mayweather’s upcoming fight against Manny Pacquiao already were even with where the record-setting Mayweather-Alvarez show stood one day before the event.
“Our assumption is that largely we have the awareness, certainly among the boxing fans and almost certainly among sports fans,” said Stephen Espinoza, executive vice president of Showtime Sports. “The second part of the equation is converting that awareness to buys. … We think we’re on our way to doing that.”
Projecting pay-per-view results based on advance sales is tricky business. There’s no way to know whether the early indicators mean more people will buy, or a similar number as bought before simply are buying earlier. But the strategy behind those numbers gives Espinoza and his production partners at rival network HBO, which is working with Showtime on a fight for only the second time ever, reason to be optimistic that the early buys are indicators that they’re on a record pace.
This is unlike the vast majority of pay-per-views — all of them, really, save perhaps Mayweather’s fight against Oscar De La Hoya that did $136 million on 2.4 million buys in 2007 — in that it has the potential to engage consumers beyond the avid fans who typically plunk down upward of $70 for a fight. That, along with a $99.95 price tag that is about $20 more than the previous high, led Showtime and HBO to market the PPV differently than they have previous events.
From the time the fight was announced on Feb. 21, executives at the two networks set advance buys as a priority. It’s something both had encouraged distributors to do in the past, but with mixed success. Dedicating a channel to the fight more than a week before an event means sacrificing a spot on the grid that could be generating revenue. Typically, distributors have viewed early orders mostly as time-shifted orders, having little impact on the final tally. But with high hopes for record sales from Mayweather-Pacquiao, they had little trouble convincing distributors to approach their strategies more aggressively.
“Early ordering in the past has always been held back by this crazy concept of: Pay-per-view is impulse, what does early ordering really mean?” said Tammy Ross, vice president of strategic initiatives and integrations for HBO Sports. “Well, in this case, early ordering could mean the difference between getting the fight and not getting the fight.”
With that in mind, the networks focused on getting distributors to view their role as sellers rather than order-takers, assigning reps to the accounts of likely buyers: Not only purchasers of previous PPVs, but also some subscribers to sports packs. They reviewed customers’ accounts for anything that might be a barrier to purchase, such as a credit limit or unpaid bill, and then called to attempt to clean those up. Then, they offered to take the PPV order for the fight in advance.
“For those operators who engaged in that, we have seen order numbers that have blown us away,” Ross said. “We truly believe that what is going to make the difference between whether this event shatters the record or establishes a new stratosphere is the ability to take that order. So the more we worked with all our operators to get them on board with this early capturing concept, the better off we’re all going to be.
“The last thing we need is for a customer to hit impulse and have to call a [customer service representative] to clean up a credit issue at 8:30 Eastern on May 2.”
