Play Like a (Detroit) Tiger

I know I’ve been talking about sports a lot lately, but rest assured it’s because I think these issues cut across all genres of live entertainment.  If you’re a theatre, performing arts or classical music person, it would be a big, big mistake to ignore what happens in sports marketing because everything you do, they do (well, except the performances themselves obviously) and often on a much larger scale.  After all, my good friend Russ Stanley at the San Francisco Giants has to sell 45,000 tickets 82 times a year.

Anyway, I read an article yesterday by Lee Jenkins in Sports Illustrated about the Detroit TIgers baseball team.  Although I feel strongly about everything we discuss in Live 2.0, it’s rare that something moves me the way this piece did.  It says so much about the importance of live entertainment and about being fan-centered and at the same time has so much relevance to the dramatic times we’re going through that I just felt compelled to share it.  I wish you’d read the whole thing, but I’m going to excerpt and comment a bit.

First, a little backdrop.  The Tigers are traditionally a mediocre to poor team. They last won a World Series in 1984, and in the intervening years, they’ve done a lot of losing.  Unlike some teams that compete well but can’t quite get over the hump and win a championship, the Tigers have been in a generation-long rut.

And then of course, there’s Detroit.  If the Global Financial Crisis were a world war, Detroit would be the town that happened to be where the armies met for battle.  Although it’s been a long time since Detroit was riding high, it hasn’t been this low in a long time.  Unemployment is 23% and I read recently that the average price for a home sold in Detroit is $7,000.

Not 70.  Seven.

The Tigers are owned by a man named Mike Ilich.  He’s 80 and made a lot of money from his business, Little Caesar’s Pizza.  He also owns the Detroit hockey franchise, the Red Wings.  He’s a Detroit boy, and he’s got a heart for his city that seems to be fundamentally built into the mission of his baseball team.  I believe he has hit on something truly profound in his approach, and it is perhaps the best example of a comprehensive Live 2.0 approach that I have seen recently.

Here are some excerpts that show you what I mean:

“At the end of spring training, the unemployment rate in metro Detroit had climbed to 23%, the average home price fell below $12,000, and the Tigers calculated that season-ticket sales were down 13,000. Corporate sponsorships and luxury-suite sales were also taking a hit. “I was here in 2003, when we lost 119 games, and a lot of nights this stadium felt like an empty cathedral,” says third baseman Brandon Inge. “I expected it to be like that again.” Anybody familiar with the economics of baseball could envision how the summer would play out: Paltry attendance would lead to slashed payroll and a second straight last-place finish. “My only hope,” says centerfielder Curtis Granderson, “was that people wouldn’t go on vacation to Orlando or California and would come to our games instead.”

My comment: Ah, Staycation.  The last hope of the desperate.  But wait!  It didn’t play out this way!

“The financial forecast in Detroit has not necessarily brightened, but in a development as unexpected as Chevy’s unveiling of the Volt, the Tigers have provided a jolt—electrifying for much of the summer, slightly terrifying recently—for the city. They rank fourth in the American League in attendance, at 31,360 per game; are fifth in the majors in payroll, at more than $115 million; and, through Sunday, were still in first [place in the standings].”

My comment: sure, winning helps.  But why are the Tigers winning?  The following is one of the best things I have read about being fan-centered in a long time:

“They [the Tigers] were also 48–26 at Comerica Park [their home stadium], a record they attribute to the overwhelming responsibility they feel playing in front of their home fans, many of whom are presumably using what little discretionary income they have to watch the team play. In his first spring training meeting manager Jim Leyland told his players, “People are going to be spending some of their last dollars to come to these games, and we need to give them our best effort. This is not the year not to run out a ground ball.”

My comment: I just want to repeat what Jim Leyland said: “People are going to be spending some of their last dollars to come to these games, and we need to give them our best effort.”  Just let that stay with you for a few seconds.  I read that and it makes me want to be better at what I do to give Goldstar members a great experience.  Does it have that effect on you?  Here’s another one:

“”We know there are families in the stands who are fighting to keep their houses and feed their kids,”  [Tiger's player Brandon] Inge says. “We take that seriously. We can’t lollygag our way through a game. We have to give them a show. I really believe they are the reason that we are where we are.”

Naturally, the team has been aggressively doing community outreach of all kinds, giving away tons of tickets to community organizations and “inviting them to use Tigers home games to conduct 50-50 raffles.”  That’s just your normal good citizen kind of stuff, but listen to this:

“The most stunning example of community outreach did not involve a nonprofit organization but a bankrupt one. At the end of last season General Motors decided it could no longer afford to sponsor the fountain over the centerfield fence at Comerica Park, which shoots great plumes into the air whenever a Tiger hits a home run. The fountain is the most valuable piece of advertising space in the stadium, and two corporations quickly expressed interest in taking GM’s place. One offered to pay $1.5 million for three years. Mike Ilitch, the Tigers’ owner, considered the offer seriously. Then he rejected it in favor of a deal that would pay him nothing at all. Ilitch kept the GM name where it was, free of charge, and added the Ford and Chrysler logos on each flank, over the message: THE DETROIT TIGERS SUPPORT OUR AUTOMAKERS. To emphasize the point, the Tigers invited one employee from each of the embattled car giants to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day. Before GM inspector Loretta Abiodun went into her windup, she turned and looked at the fountain. ‘It was breathtaking,”‘she says.”

Whatever you may think of the Detroit automakers, in Detroit, they’re a local story, and you can’t bash GM or Chrysler or Ford without bashing your friends and neighbors, and their parents and grandparents too.  Mike Ilitch gets that and feels the same way.  You better believe that Detroit Tigers fans, and the entire city, know that he’s on their side.

“[Ilitch] is a businessman by trade, but he is consumed with two causes that don’t always lend themselves to profit. “Turning around our city,” he says, “and winning the World Series.” Ilitch, who is 80, wants to see those goals realized in his lifetime, which helps explain how the Tigers have managed to keep payroll high, ticket prices relatively low and the community-relations budget constant in a period of plummeting revenue. As one major league executive puts it, “Their owner doesn’t operate from a profit-and-loss standpoint. He treats the team more like a public trust.”

My comment: But I bet that high attendance and a winning record are making Ilitch’s Tigers one of the best businesses in Detroit these days.  So many people see running things this way as something that makes it harder to make a profit, but I’m here to tell you that today, and in the long run, it’s going to be the key to making a profit.

So what’s Ilitch like?  Here’s what his son says:

“‘I go to owners meetings, and you get the feeling that some could take it or leave it,’ says Ilitch’s son, Chris, the president and CEO of Ilitch Holdings Inc. “It’s a hobby for them. You win some, you lose some. My father just isn’t that way.”

In other words, this is serious for Mike Ilitch.  It’s not just a game or an investment because it’s about people and the life of a city.  Speaking of which:

“Detroit has always had its showbiz side, dating back to the Roaring ’20s, and Ilitch believes that live entertainment is integral to a renaissance. That’s part of the reason he bought the Fox Theatre in 1987, hired welfare moms and recovering drug addicts to help bring it back to life, then built, largely with private funding, Comerica Park across the street and helped persuade Lions vice chairman Bill Ford to put his football stadium next door. In a city famous for blown-out buildings, the Fox has not sustained so much as a broken window since its renovation, a testament to the love the old playhouse engenders. Even the homeless say they discourage panhandling beneath the Fox marquee.”

Why does it not surprise me that Ilitch believes in the importance of Live Entertainment to the cultural life of a city and puts his money and energy where his mouth is.

Like I said, I encourage you to read the whole article, and while my knowledge of Mike Ilitch is pretty much limited to this one piece, I have to say that I strongly admire what he’s doing, not just because he’s being a good corporate citizen, but because he’s doing the things that will make Live Entertainment great.

I was talking just yesterday about leading the culture.  This is exactly what I’m talking about.  The Tigers are absolutely leading the culture in Detroit, and it starts at the ballpark.  Not on TV or the Internet.

And looked at from a more selfish point of view, I ask you this: how do you think the people of Detroit feel about the Tigers?  Sure, they root for the team, the baseball fans.  But how do you think they really feel about the Tigers?  At a time when fans are feeling exploited by clubs they’ve loved for a long time, perhaps BECAUSE they love them so much, I’m sure that’s not happening in Detroit.  I’m sure it’s quite the opposite.  The Tigers are building a support and loyalty base that could last for generations that only partly has to do with winning or losing.

Just like Jim Leyland said, the Tigers are going to “give it their best effort” because it’s for the fans.  Your patrons may not be spending some of their last dollars to come to your shows, but perhaps you should act as if they are and play like a Tiger.