local media insider
Case study

Turning events listings into a profit center at Marquee Magazine

Early results from deploying Spingo's events platform show promise, steady flow of self-serve ad orders

Alisa Cromer
Posted
Marquee Magazine

Media: Marquee Magazine

Owner:  Brian F. Johnson

Market: Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins, Colorado

Key executives: Brian Johnson, Publisher, editor-in-chief; Marquee Magazine; Dennis Mulcahy, VP Sales, Spingo.

Initiative: Self-serve paid events platform supplied by Spingo

Summary: Marquee Magazine is one of the first partnerships for Spingo, a mobile first events platform with both a younger, higher end appeal that aims to give Zvents a run for the money. The tech company has signed several large  prestige accounts:  KSL.com, part of Deseret Digital Media, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. This case study on Marquee Magazine, rack and counter-distributed print and online weekly entertainment magazine, demonstrates metrics for a uniquely branded local events platform. Marquee distributes just 25,000 print issues a week throughout the tri-cities area in Colorado, with approximately 14,000 unique visitors to its website per month. The self-serve upsells have resulted in about sale a day, within weeks of launching with no direct sales. Marquee Magazine pays a small monthly license fee for the platform and service, plus a revenue share of user-generated listings that pay to be featured (Spingo told us the average customer pages $100 to $200 per month per property with this negotiated discounts for smaller media or multiple properties). 

Challenge:  As a regional entertainment magazine, Marquee magazine,  wanted a solution that would streamline online and offline calender listings and provide an efficient upsell for its heavily music-oriented group of promoters.

“From the time we started the calendar in 2003 we have been building it in word, typing the same venue and band 30 times each month sometimes,” Marquee Magazine publisher Brian Johnson said.  “There were spelling and continuity mistakes."

They wanted a white labeled platform that would streamline this process as well as supply an income stream. 

Strategy: Johnson selected relatively the new events platform, Spingo. The platform aggregates a combination of scraped, but human verified events,  and Marquee's own local promoters which were converted to self-entry.  The program as a number of unique components: 

• Pre-established database is manually verified by Spingo staff and edited to include the media customer's preferences. In the case of Marquee, events scew toward entertainment rather than, say, school board or committee meetings. Spingo staff claims that contacting promoters directly and manual verification of automated event scraping creates a higher quality than automation alone.. 

“We go out and curate all the events data on four tiers, from professional sports to amateur to local all the way down tier four, which is community theater, library events and such,” Spingo VP of Sales David Mulcahy told Local Media Insider.

“We put the data together in an interactive calendar on our client sites.   Every single piece of data is verified, including self-service entry, for categories, by human eyes. We have more than 50,000 relationships with venues and promoters. We make sure there are no duplicates, and that the URLs and details such as phone contacts are accurate.” 

• For an entertainment publication with a pre-existing base of contacts, the challenge is largely shifting relationships from sending press releases to self-entering events. Before launch, Marquee provided Spingo with acceptability guidelines for user-generated event content, which Spingo then moderated.    Additional events that arrive to Marquee by email are forwarded to Spingo for processsing, so that producers can become part of the processes. 

•  Much more visual look and feel. Events can be displayed as grid view, list view or map view. Rather than masses of lisitngs the views look more selective, and web savvy. View include by date, map, and type. Here is list view: 

Marquee events calendar map view

And the grid view: 

· The upsell to featured events listings allows advertisers to pay  run at the top of the right sidebar, enhanced with additional photos and showcased on Facebook and Twitter.  On the Marquee site, the online ad-entry submission has an upsell button that asks, “Would you like to feature this listing for $25 a week?” Each featured listing is showcased on the Marquee Facebook page and tweeted.  E-mail blasts are also offered by Spingo, and in the plans for the future. 

Marquee online users pay online through Spingo’s e-commerce platform:

self-serve online events entry form

 

 Graphic below shows detail page of Featured event listing, where users can click on the client web site to buy a ticket: 

Featured event detail page

Ticketing relationships are still a weak point in terms of usability compared to Zvents, which has a ticketing button on almost every listing promviding a three click to buy process. Still the better looking interface, designed more like a magazine, than zvents generic looking platform makes sense for a niche company awaiting the  upgrade. 

Marquee uses Facebook promos featuring featured ads: 

Marquee Magazine Facebook page

Marquee Facebook event coverage post

 

Spingo content managers return content to Marquee for reverse publication, the day before print publication deadline.  Marquee Magazine has a small but loyal readership so marketing is minimal, through house ads, social media, and occasionally a street team posted outside a concert venue to hand out print magazines.   

Sales

As a small event magazine with only one full –time sales rep, proactive sales efforts are minimal and sales are almost entirely self-entry. So far the self-entry platform has been a success, yielding about a sale a day. 

  Results:

·  At the time of this case study, Marquee Magazine has just started selling its Featured Events listings, generating approximately one new listing each day@$25 each (for 7 or fewer days) for projected gross revenue of at least $9,000 a year in addition to savings about about 50% of an FTE, about 24 hours a week producing the calendar.

· The deadline for reverse publishing has moved from four days prior to one day.

·  Users can now access events into subsequent months: prior to Spingo all that was available was the current month.

·  Up to 10 percent jump in online traffic and print readers.

·  While display ads have picked up slightly as a result of a single-digit increase in traffic to the full-featured online calendar, the magazine has yet to determine the exact jump in advertising spend.   

• User comments have been numerous and positive, especially from promoters using the site. 

  Lessons Learned:

“We had a little bit of a learning curve, mostly because of the amount of content we have,” said Johnson. “I get hundreds of emails a day, and they might be from a band, with listings of all stops, and only one line is about Denver. So, working out the process with sorting this out and getting it to Spingo took a little bit of back and forth. There were a few times when it was not loading correctly - little hiccups like that. It could have been a big problem, except Spingo responded right away. They don’t go an hour without checking their email. We’ve been really pleased.”   

Our take

 Spingo has a number of advantages we like: Its look and feel is more visual and better designed than the other leading events platforms. The company allows for more distinctly curated events for magazines or other sites with a targeted audience - one of their clients is a Mom's magazine.  It can quickly bring media companies without event self-entry upsells or who are starting without a substantial base of listings up-to-speed quickly. Paired with a telesales department - as is the case with KSL.com - the revenues can be substantially higher. Finally Spingo was designed for mobile first application and comes with an app. Only a full suite of ticketing relationships with a two click process will  make this a home run.

Alisa Cromer

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

marguee magazine, events, self-serve, self serve, e-commerce, ecommerce, spingo, mobile