Just this morning, I finished up some creative work I had been doing on some online guest list tools for Peter Caputa, a good friend of mine and president of WhizSpark Corp here in the Westborough area. The guest list tools, and associated event sites, are part of the WhizSpark software suite, and are designed to help promoters collect and manage their nightclub guest lists online. Nothing overly fancy in skin or concept, just a simple three or four page site that allows promoters to send their potential guests to a set url where they can then collect and manage guest lists in a clean and efficient way.
For those familiar with the typical street-promoter method of club marketing, it is abundantly clear how using these tools streamlines the process tremendously for these promoters. Running these guest lists on-line is a vast improvement over the normal routine that typically involves collecting random names and email addresses from friends (and friends of friends) throughout a given week, and then sloppily submitting them to the club owner one hour before doors open. If the list is accurate, and if the doorman keeps track properly, the promoter *may* get compensated for each guest that they were able to wrangle into the venue. An inexact science at best.
With the WhizSpark tools, the promoter gets a customized mini-site for each guest list that he or she runs, complete with guest list collection forms, photo galleries, viral marketing tools and more. The guest list data is all collected on the customized site and sent to a pre-determined person (the promoter or club owner) at set intervals, all in an easy to parse format, making life as a club promoter much much easier.
It will be interesting to see if these three sites will garner any real traffic, and how the results will pan out in terms of the promoter getting more names on the list with greater ease than before. I imagine that simply centralizing the list is going to be a giant win for the promoters invloved, and if the net revenue made from building these lists stays exactly the same, the value of the time gained will be enough to call this a success. I firmly believe that with very little additional effort, there should be a significant lift in list size, AND a significant decrease in workload for the promoting team.
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All of this guest list tool building has got me thinking about the way nightclubs market themselves. More specifically thinking about how they market themselves online….or don’t market themselves online as the case may be. It made me think about nightclubs and about using online lead generation for guest list building, more specifically how this could possibly work for both parties (both parties being online ad networks and nighclubs). I am thinking online lead generation for nightclubs…here is the thought in more detail.
Nightclubs want to do all of their street-team marketing on a straight CPA (cost per action) basis, where the action is a patron showing up to the club and paying a cover charge. They (the nightclubs) will gladly pay for a sure thing, and dole out $5 to a promoter for each person the promoter brings to the door to fork over the $10 cover. This way, they know that if worst case, a person comes in, has no drinks, and leaves after 15 minutes, they have covered their acquisition cost and break even. No risk.
Not to mention, since many nightclubs (and likely promoters too) are a bit shifty when it comes to the business end of things, there is an inherent lack of trust in the nightclub promotion business and countless stories of promoters and clubs being screwed over by one another. The end result is that the clubs only want to pay out to promoters, in cash, at the end of the night, after the work has been done and the money made back….which keeps the more legitimate outlets away from trying to generate lists for these clubs.
However, the promoter has to realize that I won’t be hanging out at nightclubs until 2AM to collect payment. Nor, will I be bringing my 50 friends to get deaf to techno and pay for $10 drinks. No offense to anyone that does this. That part of my life is pretty much over, though. Been there. Done that. [more…]
On the other side, you have the large on-line networks who have access to enormous amounts of targeted traffic, and the ability to generate leads at an amazing clip for nightclubs in the larger metropolitan areas. Unfortunately, they see a CPA only setup, (a CPA setup where the barrier to the action being completed is high and very cloudy), and run as fast as they can in the other direction. Online lead gen networks, although potentially a goldmine in terms of reach and targeting for nightclubs, would NEVER run guest list offers on their networks under these circumstances.
Ad networks think in terms of CPMs. Even when they sell space on a CPA basis, they are always backing things out to average CPM’s to best optimize their network traffic. Since ad networks love CPM and advertisers love CPA, the natural evolution has been the birth of CPL, or cost per lead advertising. CPL is a compromise of sorts and let’s both parties hedge their bets and meet in the middle while splitting the risk. Networks take a lower payout for a more accurate estimate of earnings and guaranteed take, and advertisers pay a lower bounty for more data, and hope they can convert enough of them into paying customers to make it work. In the end, it takes guaranteed money away from the big networks, and pushes some of the responsibility back onto the advertisers to make data that they purchase convert.
Would nightclubs pay for guest list signups on a CPL basis? Say, $1 per signup online? Probably not. At $1 per raw signup, the risk level is awfully high for the club owners, and it would be too easy for them to get burned. Too easy for promoters to game the system and submit bogus records, and too much risk for the club. And we know, clubs hate risk.
Maybe a creative double opt-in method would work. I say creative double opt-in, because simply confirming your signup immediately after signing up on a Monday doesn’t do much to assure the nightclub that you will be showing up on Friday. People change plans, and they too hedge their own bets, soft committing to a variety of things for an upcoming weekend, and falling back to what they REALLY intend to go to by Friday afternoon. What if then, all users that signed up during the week for the Friday night list, were sent a confirmation message on Friday afternoon reminding them that they are on the guest list, and asking them to click a link to confirm that they are coming. What if instead of paying $5 for the sure thing, clubs paid $2 per confirmed lead? A Friday afternoon confirmation would surely carry less risk on a CPL basis than a soft lead submit on a Monday. What if in addition to getting them to double opt-in to the guest list, nightclubs also were able to keep all of the data that they purchased on a CPL basis and market to those subscribers each week as they pleased? What if the clubs now owned those records?
I mean, who knows…the x-factor here is that nightclub owners are tough to deal with when it comes to changing the way they market. These guys will easily spend $1000 on a truckload of flyers and have them stuffed under windshield wipers, but asking them to pay $2 per confirmed lead is like asking them to not put ice in the drinks. Worth a thought and a discussion though.
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