Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming MAY 2015 50 Insights the K-pop here multiple times. We have our own track record of how they might perform. We also are mindful of things around us. So, for example, if an act that we really want may have played Hong Kong prior to us, or are going to be going there three months after, it may impact our decision because we’re getting a lot of our audience from Hong Kong and they may not go twice. By turns it’s art, by turns it’s science. It’s fortunate that we have some really good people in those roles. The people who head up our box office operation are a strong factor as well. They watch continuously the acceleration and the pace of ticket sales, which we look at every day to see how we’re doing. That helps us gauge our marketing of the events and to know whether to turn on the tap or turn it down in terms of support. Whether it’s through offline advertising, online advertising, social, additional PR, etc. There are shows that hardly need marketing. Sammi Cheng is a good example. In the amount of time it takes for me to say we’re putting on a show, she’s sold it out. In the time it takes me to say we’re putting on a second show, it’s sold out as well. So there’s very little need to do any form of advertising or marketing behind that. I wish every show were that way, obviously. We carefully track how things are unfolding and we also look at past history to suggest whether I should be nervous now with the pace of sales. Or I look for causal explanations. For example, is there a particular holiday going on at the moment that’s making people think about something else, so they’re not thinking about buying tickets at that moment. In which case we’d expect it to pick up again immediately coming out of that particular season, at which point maybe we’ll goose it up a little bit with some additional marketing support to reignite the sales. We had great success with Cats , which was 13 performances over 9 days. And the interesting phenomenon with Cats was the pace of ticket sales actually picked up each day during the run. It had great word of mouth, and it picked up considerably to where something like 94% of all tickets were distributed, and the gratifying thing is 89% of tickets were sold for cash. Three of those performances were mid-week, which traditionally was a bit of a slower period, and that gives us confidence now as we go into summer with Beauty and the Beast , which is going to be here for six weeks from June 13 to July 26, when there’ll be 18 mid- week performances of that show. Beauty and the Beast is, I think, the most valuable By the ‘90s, the concept of entertainment in Las Vegas had been transformed. “Yesterday’s loss leaders have become today’s profit centers,” remarked a 1997 Wall Street Journal article describing the entertainment scene on the Strip. “Shows like the China National Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra go into the Venetian Theater, and the challenge is there you’re programming a 1,700-seat venue versus a large arena venue.