Concert With A Game

The folks at ANC Sports Enterprises have decided to do what any music/sports lover would do: Combine the two events into one night of fun. With one successful Gavin DeGraw concert that followed a January 14th Boston Celtics game at the city’s FleetCenter, plans to expand the idea to other sport teams are already under way.

“The concept I had was, ‘Let’s find another way to get people to want to come to sporting events – whether it be hockey games or basketball games,'” Mark Lev, ANC Sports executive VP of sales and marketing, told Pollstar. “The premise it’s based on is that teams have a need to sell tickets and they’re looking for innovative ways to do that.”

The “concert with a game” promotion began last year in a partnership between the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins and ANC Sports, which provides venue display systems for sports, entertainment and retail facilities.

With the help of Pretty Polly Productions and Paul Jarosik, who independently handles artist management and relationships, ANC Sports was able to put on two game/concerts at the FleetCenter with Godsmack and Dropkick Murphys.

“Buying a ticket to a sporting event is a value proposition and any time you can add more value, you’re increasing your potential of selling tickets,” Richard Krezwick, FleetCenter president/CEO and Bruins executive VP, told Pollstar. “Adding Dropkick Murphys to a Bruins game increased the value significantly. We sold 5,000 tickets more, in our estimation, by working with ANC and booking Dropkick Murphys.

“In this day and age, with the significant entertainment competition at every level, we need to make sports as fun and entertaining as possible,” he added.

Through the two initial concerts, Lev was able to convince ANC client the Celtics to allow DeGraw to perform after the January game. After the performance was announced, the game sold out all 17,600 tickets.

To entice artists to perform, the company uses a variety of promotional tools through the team – including drop-in ads during TV and radio broadcasts, video board announcements during home games, the team’s Web site, and e-mail blasts to the team’s subscriber database. Generally, these are places where an artist’s name wouldn’t typically show up, Lev said.

“The prospect of having an artist perform at a sporting event in front of a large number of people, and using all of the promotional resources that the team has at its disposal to highlight that can be used as a marketing tool for an emerging act,” Lev explained.

DeGraw’s people were sold. Shortly thereafter, a sponsorship deal with Verizon Wireless was struck.

“It was automatic,” Lev said. “It didn’t really take much of an effort for him to commit to doing it.

“The trick is to demonstrate to the artists, and the artist’s management and the agent, that this is almost like a promotional performance as opposed to a payday. We’re never going to get Aerosmith, for example, to come and do something like this,” he added.

“For artists that have new albums coming out that are looking to make the rounds to get the word out about their album, this is a very effective alternative distribution channel for them.”

Jarosik, who helps with consulting on the music end, added that artists do get paid to perform. And with the payment and promotion combined, he feels it’s a win-win situation for everyone.

“We don’t expect these artists to play for free, obviously,” Jarosik told Pollstar. “We try to negotiate and offset some of their full going performance fee with some of the marketing value we have to offer to them.

“We’re just trying to make everyone in the industry aware of what we’re doing, and I think we can be another viable option for artists and touring agents.”

The next event for ANC is another DeGraw performance, which is scheduled to take place during and after a February 16th New Jersey Nets vs. Sacramento Kings game at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J. And it won’t stop there, Lev said.

“I soon expect to be working with a whole host of others after some meetings next week,” he said, adding that talks with several NBA teams are in the works. “We have high-level relationships with senior marketing executives with virtually every team in hockey and basketball through our existing business.”

The biggest challenge, Lev added, is getting an artist who’s available on a date that works for teams wanting to boost attendance for slow-selling games.

In each of the three events ANC has organized, Lev pointed out that local radio promotion was a big factor in their success.

“The biggest radio stations want to be a part of it in a big way,” he said. “When we’re able to pull the resources of the team and the power of FM radio, it’s a very attractive proposition for the artist.”