[Fully Managed] Brian Bauer from Bauer Entertainment Marketing Ep. 167

Shannon: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast – a podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you on your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon, Penchy’s Partnership Coordinator, and I’m joined here today with a very special guest, Brian Bauer from Bauer Entertainment Marketing. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Brian: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Brian’s Background and Journey

Shannon: So, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, how you kind of got to this point, what inspired you to start Bauer Entertainment Marketing – everything you think is relevant in between.

Brian: Yeah, all the stuff. So the journey really – I grew up in the mean streets of North Chicago suburbs, and I’m the son of a piano teacher, third generation drummer. So both my parents – very much a very musical household, and I really kind of fell in love with music from an early age. I was playing and performing from very early on. I think I did some of my first performances in grade school at the talent showcase where I played Green Day’s Basket Case, just solo drums, nothing else. It sounded probably exactly as you imagined it would sound. And I’ve just loved it from pretty much day one. I knew I always wanted to kind of work in entertainment because it’s this side of just life experience and journey that makes it all worth living. It’s fun. I think, and flash forward a little bit, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a job when it’s something you’re passionate about and love.

Going through my high school and college career, I still continued to play. But I went to the University of Maryland – go Terps – studied psychology there because I decided to kind of keep my music outside of school. Prior to that, when I was sixteen, I went to a summer program at Berklee College of Music. Loved it, incredible, totally life changing, but it also helped me understand that I think music in academia wasn’t necessarily for me. But I was very interested and compelled by the human experience and what makes us tick and all those things. And so I really gravitated towards psychology.

During the summers through college, I was interning at different entertainment industry things like MTV and Universal and RCA and got to really cut my teeth in that world. And it was also certainly at the time where Napster, streaming, all that kind of stuff – Facebook had just really kind of become a thing while I was in college. Which super dates me, but whatever. And it was like this really interesting confluence of like, I am the last sort of generation to understand what life was like before the internet and after the internet, and uniquely positioned to help these companies with their social media and their stuff that they just didn’t really understand whatsoever.

Early Career Struggles and New York Experience

Brian: So after college, I was working at a record label that was sort of on the decline because they were so used to selling physical records. And now the streaming world was really coming up, digital downloads, everything. And so there was a lot of turmoil in the industry at that time. I got the opportunity to play and tour with a band – just incredible experience. Played South by Southwest, where Elijah Wood, the actor, was there, signed us to his label and got to record with him. Frodo himself, and he was just super genuinely amazing human and just a really, really cool guy and an awesome experience.

But while I was doing that, while I was touring and playing music internationally, it was really challenging to make a living. And so I would do social media marketing for these companies and all these kind of side hustles. And I was living in New York at the time in a very small apartment. I went from like East Village to West Village. And I think the place in the West Village, I could not even fit a bed into. It was a pull out couch. I mean, it was super small. But that was great. You’re in your twenties and that’s New York.

But it was the hustle. I truly think I had about as many as seven jobs at one time of just like everything from walking dogs to taking surveys to just anything under the sun to scrape by but make it happen. And I loved it and it was incredible. But I eventually got kind of tired of the rat race of New York.

Move to Nashville and Agency Leadership

Brian: I got this opportunity to move to Nashville and was moved to Nashville by a ticketing company. That ticketing company had me manage their marketing agency. And so when I got there, one of the three founders had already left from that agency. The other founder soon left to be a professor. And then the third founder was tapped to be the CEO of the parent company. So I found myself leading a marketing agency, essentially making all the mistakes that you do, but on somebody else’s dime. So it was incredible experience for me to be able to take risks and truly grow without having the risk of it being my own dollar.

Shannon: It’s nice to do that earlier on, I’m sure too, because they have more understanding about it because it’s more new. So it’s not like, oh yeah, you can see all this evidence everywhere. It was kind of just like starting-

Brian: And it was a perfect scenario because it married everything that I loved. Like I was doing the digital marketing for more like law firms, insurance brokerages, that kind of stuff. But this gave me the opportunity to do that for entertainment properties and also in live events, which I just loved. It also opened me up to the sports world, which I had not worked on up to that date. I got to go to NASCAR tracks, I worked with X Games, I worked with college bowl games. It was just so interesting to see like, these are just mini music festivals essentially. I mean, they would bring in massive artists and play these three day weekends and there’s camping and all this kind of stuff. And it was just this very congruent kind of experience, but seeing how all these kinds of events and experiences sort of share the same fans and me being in a unique position to sort of see them from different angles, which is really, really cool – from film festivals to restaurants to sports teams to all these things. It just really deepened my love for experience and bringing people together.

Starting Bauer Entertainment Marketing

Brian: I ultimately got the opportunity to spin off and start Bauer Entertainment Marketing, rooted in that experience doing this for somebody else. And so this was kind of my foray into like all right cool, this is – I’m going to write my own destiny here and make this happen. And slowly but surely, it’s grown. We are now approaching a staff of [number unclear] and international as well, which I’m just – yeah, really wild, wild rollercoaster experience, but incredible.

Shannon: Is it scarier to now do marketing on your own dime?

Brian: I don’t know about scarier because I think even when it wasn’t, I just cared so deeply for the success of the client that I like, I don’t think that’s ever changed. And their loss was, I truly felt was my loss. If whatever didn’t work out or vice versa, their win is my win. So I would say, if anything, maybe it’s just a little bit more fulfilling because it’s my dollar. So you got to put up or shut up.

Shannon: No, I think that’s incredible. And I think that it shows how passionate you are about the field specifically too, getting more and more excited about it and then starting your own agency to be able to do it yourself, which is really, really fun.

Building and Growing the Team

Brian: I think what’s also been incredibly fulfilling and fun and just blows me away is seeing kind of the journey that I went through and then providing the experience for my team as they grow. And we’ve got just like the most incredible squad of passionate, creative, effective marketers and we all share this belief that we want to bring people together for unforgettable experiences. And it’s just so core to who we are as people. We’ve got this shared value, but to see them kind of grow. And I want to make sure that they’re getting sort of an experience that, I candidly looking back at some of the stuff that I had to do as an intern, let’s say of, “Hey, our freezer has frozen over. Here’s a knife and chip it out. The CD shelf needs organizing. That’s going to be your afternoon today.” That kind of stuff – we don’t do that.

We don’t – we have a really robust internship program. We very much cultivate hiring from within and growing people. I mean our operations director now, she was an intern and she is one of our very – one of two hires that we hired two people to start the company. And it’s something that is just awesome to be able to provide them maybe an experience that I perhaps did not have.

Shannon: Yeah, no, that’s beautiful. It’s nice. It’s like a parent to a kid. It’s kind of like, I want you to have better than I did. But it’s nice because being able to give them that experience, you not only get like a very truly loyal and dedicated employee, but you also know that they learned the ins and outs of your business and that they have that experience. It’s really nice. It’s very difficult to start someone from scratch, even if they’re very well versed in the field.

Brian: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that we have definitely found some really great success in growing our team from intern to coordinator to project manager. There’s a journey that we like to foster.

RBC Blues Fest Success Story

Shannon: Well, so speaking of success, but for some of your clients, I actually have a couple of questions because I saw some crazy statistics on your website and I’d really like to talk about them because I think – yeah, of course, love to pick your brain on them. So specifically the RBC Blues Fest, the 709% increase in ticket sales – that’s incredible. Do you have like a unique strategy which you specifically put towards that campaign by any chance? I’d just love to hear about it.

Brian: Yeah, so really, RBC Blues Fest – 300,000 people over ten days. Really cool experience to work with them for a few years and help them grow. Our engagement with them ended pretty much mid pandemic unfortunately. The festival world has been hit pretty difficult. But our experience supporting them speaks to our general ethos, our general approach and kind of the lens through which we look at all of our service, which is performance based and really rooted in conversion rate optimization.

Because we could be spending a ton of time, money and energy on ads and social media and PR or whatever. It’s all driving people essentially to the same location – it’s to the website. And if it isn’t optimized or streamlined to convert or yield that traffic into the most amount of possible sales by just making it easy to buy, well, then it’s kind of all for naught. Like we’re spinning our wheels a bit.

And so our approach, we really try to work kind of backwards out and take a look at, all right, what is that process to buy a ticket? And I’ll tell you, I mean, during our onboarding processes, we very commonly find some pretty massive hurdles that consumers have to go through. We had a client that had their minimum order set to twelve recently where it’s like, OK, guys, like, of course, you’re not seeing conversions. It’s things like that, though, that happen because frankly, they’re very much in the weeds. And by us being a third party and being able to provide that perspective, we get to look at it through a fresh lens, fresh perspective. So that’s part of it.

And then it’s just kind of working out of that funnel and identifying, okay, great. So if we know essentially how much traffic it requires to convert into an order, and kind of work out of there, we can create this funneled experience that helps drive more awareness and consideration and decision. And then ultimately, more sales for them. So it’s having that kind of, I guess, tiered or funneled approach through the lens of performance. That’s very commonplace in retail, not so much in event marketing.

Shannon: Okay, that’s interesting. Yeah. Do you ever do any kind of physical or in-person approaches when marketing?

Brian: Physical and what? Sorry.

Shannon: Like in-person. So like street teams and that kind of stuff?

Brian: Yeah, I guess so. That’s what I was having. To some degree. I mean, I don’t think our specialty necessarily is in like, let’s say experiential marketing, where there’s activations or things set up to promote an event or a brand. I think our specialty in kind of, I guess the physical space would probably be more along the lines of like out of home advertising, which we do pretty regularly – from your radio, print, TV, billboard, that kind of traditional media tends to kind of live in that world.

But yeah, I mean, we’ll activate influencers pretty regularly. That’s another kind of mechanism that is really important, particularly for festivals. And so sometimes we’ll have influencers do things in the physical world where they’re perhaps like hiding a pair of tickets at a record store. And there’s kind of like that type of promotion. So yeah, that’s that’s kind of answers the question, I guess.

Navigating COVID-19 and Industry Challenges

Shannon: Yeah, no, of course. So you actually mentioned before about COVID. And I always wonder how people are successful during this time, especially agencies, because I feel like a lot of our work was really interrupted because of that event. I’m sure everyone’s work really was. So you still had cases in which you had helped clients during that time. What did you do? Do you have to do anything specifically differently in order to help them? And what were those things?

Brian: Yeah, it was a very interesting experience for us compared to most, I would say, because we actually ended up tripling in size during COVID.

Shannon: Wow.

Brian: Wow, indeed. Right. So that’s awesome. And I think we were very nimble, we were already rooted – because I founded the company, even though we’ve got our headquarters in Nashville, we have our workspace, we have team all across the country and now internationally – we were always rooted remotely. There was no transition during that experience. We were good to go. We hosted our first live stream, I think, maybe two weeks after the major shutdown in that March. So we were very quick to be able to pivot for our clients.

But I had read pretty early in the experience during the SARS epidemic that brands that kind of got out there with their promotion and just helped and increased their presence, ended up coming out the other end about 3X as opposed to those that maybe hunker down and just try to wait it out and remain quiet. And so we ended up really trying to, I guess, be a beacon and support those in our industry, because I’ll tell you, it may feel big, but it’s a really small industry and everybody kind of knows everybody. And we just wanted to help regardless of whether they were a client or not.

We were taking calls about, “Oh, you got furloughed, but I’m thinking about maybe starting a company around this idea. What do you think about it?” And just having those kind of conversations to hosting webinars and talking to our clients about, “Hey, you’ve got a bunch of sponsors that were counting on your event and a bunch of in-person impressions. Well now here’s how you can shift and retain that cash and provide value with maybe online impressions and other ways that you can do it.”

And so there was a lot for us to still do between that, the live streams, the drive-ins. A lot of our clients like festival clients were just elongating the runway, so they didn’t know when things would come back online, so they just kept postponing and so we just kept on working. And again, there was just weird confluence of us being present, plus a lot of people still wanting to experience stuff and this desire. When you cut off the ability for people to get together, that means that there’s a wanting for it even more. And so that is our job. That’s what we do is we bring people together for these shared experiences. We just saw really, really significant demand for what we were doing. And that ultimately ended up – we grew a whole heck of a lot.

Shannon: Yeah, I think it really says a lot that you’re able to be innovative in that time, because I think that that was what it really needed, especially for things that are typically in person. You get to be able to create those strategies and still have it happen is something that is definitely admirable.

Brian: Thank you.

Current Industry Challenges Post-COVID

Shannon: Well, it’s a weird space we’re in because we were pretty much the first to shut down, last to reopen. And it’s almost as if we’re experiencing our COVID era of impact now, this many years later, because the cost – and I imagine that even people not necessarily in the industry have just heard of all these festivals canceling and all these events not happening or tours canceling. And there’s this very challenging landscape right now in events where the cost for production for events has skyrocketed. And in turn that requires event producers to increase ticket prices.

So pair that with the economic situation that we’ve been in for the past several years where far fewer people can afford to go to these events. And so that’s not a recipe for success. And then you’ve got also too much supply. Everybody has come back online and there’s more events than ever before happening now. So when you have too much supply, it’s really expensive to put on these events and not enough people can necessarily afford attending all of these events. That’s what’s resulting in a lot of these cancellations. And so it’s just a really challenging time right now for the event space.

Shannon: That’s really interesting. Would you say then that personally you feel it’s a more challenging time now than it was during COVID?

Brian: I think so. I do. I mean, just from the standpoint of, I don’t know, in a very different way. I mean, obviously, of course, when you’re an event producer and you can’t actually put on an event – that’s awful. I mean, that’s absolutely insane. But now it’s just incredibly different because when a lot of decisions are based off of historical sales data and things like that, yet now the trends are all flipped upside down on their head, it’s very murky waters to navigate through when you don’t have as much – it’s kind of a new era in the event landscape. And so, yeah, it’s very challenging in a very different way.

Shannon: No, that makes complete sense. It’s actually very interesting to learn about because I didn’t even think about that. But it makes a lot of sense because I do notice ticket prices. I remember when everything was like maximum forty dollars for any concert that I could go to when I was younger. And now it’s nothing like that anymore.

Fighting Ticket Scalping and Fraud

Brian: No. And I mean, you’re getting into the realm also of kind of the scalpers and the fraud and all that kind of stuff. And I’ll tell you, one of the things that I’m really proud of – an initiative that we’ve been working on is to help with Google ads and how scalpers are using Google ads to sell tickets, what we call speculative ticket sales. So they’re promoting tickets that they don’t actually own yet. And it’s very confusing how they present them as if it’s from the venue or the artist to kind of fool fans into thinking that they’re buying tickets from the actual resource.

Shannon: Yeah, the primary source.

Brian: And once they buy it, then the ticket broker, the reseller will go out and then they’ll get the tickets. And it’s just – it’s really inflating the price. It’s super – it’s like total fraud.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s awful. Very scammy.

Brian: But it’s also like a really crappy experience for Google ad users. And so our take is that it’s in Google’s best interest to help remedy this to some degree. And we’re not saying, “Hey, like, ticket scalpers can’t advertise through your platform,” but we’re saying distinguish from the primary source and the secondary source with just maybe like a blue check mark or something that defines and makes it easy for consumers not to be confused about “all right this is what the actual source is.” And I think that that’s going to help everybody. It’s not saying you can’t take out ads scalpers, but it’s also making sure that the actual owners of the tickets have an opportunity to get them in the hands directly of fans in a less confusing and more direct way.

Shannon: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of incredible initiatives to kind of go back to how it used to be. I recently saw an artist go to different cities and have their tickets actually available at box offices instead of online so that to avoid the, you know, the inevitable scamming that people do end up doing when they buy twelve tickets and then resell them.

Brian: I was one of those guys in line at the Nine Inch Nails. Was waiting like old school.

Shannon: I really like that, though. I mean, it does suck because there is a discrepancy between maybe people that are disabled or are unable to come in person for different things, of course. But it’s also very – it’s really nice to get back to kind of that way of doing things because it is so unfortunate that people can just do that.

Brian: There’s a – I think it’s fixthe tix.org. I’m pretty sure is the URL, but there’s a really good initiative going to try to fix the system that we support those guys. And yeah, it’s really much needed and we need it from like a federal level. And I know globally things are happening as well. So Australia is doing some really good stuff. So yeah, I hope so.

Shannon: Yeah because I can understand why ticket prices would go up just because of the economy, everything’s going up. But it does – it really sucks because in-person concerts are such like a very important part of my life. I’ve been going to concerts since I was able to go to concerts with my parents and then by myself from then on. And it’s just – it’s unfortunate that money-wise, it can’t be a priority for me to be able to see live events. And I hope that there are different things in the process that change in order for more people to be able to do it.

Brian: Yeah, the pendulum has really got to swing the other way. I’m hopeful, but hope is not a strategy. And I know that we actually have to get some actual change happening.

Shannon: Yeah, but of course, as you as the marketing level of that process are not necessarily the reason why these prices are – not even probably not even any part of the reason why it’s becoming so pricey.

Brian: Our role is to help sell more tickets. And when they’re uber expensive to the point where people can’t, yeah, it’s much more challenging for us to meet our goals and do our job. And so we’re big advocates for affordable tickets because again, our passion, what gets us out of bed each day is getting people, putting butts in seats, getting people to these events and experiencing things together.

Balancing Creativity and Profitability

Shannon: Yeah, well, I think that’s a beautiful process, and I hope that you’re still able to do that. Hopefully there’s some change in how we’re doing the process from the ground up and not just at a certain point. Well, so to move over a little bit, if this wasn’t a worry, I guess, because this definitely contributes to probably part of this. So walking the line of creativity and profitability, how are you kind of able to honor both in campaigns normally?

Brian: Well, our creative process, particularly on sort of brand strategy and kind of really hammering out, “How do we want this brand to be perceived by others?” is still rooted in performance. So we’re not just creating pretty things, it’s pretty with a purpose. And it’s really important for us to have performance-based branding, where the choices that we make about a brand and all of the content and touch points to support that brand identity really all have to be rooted in our goals, which more often than not is ticket sales.

So our process certainly starts with understanding the audiences and what are the needs around each of those kind of personas? And then what are the products that orient towards those personas? Let’s say families with a family four pack or and kind of the challenge of, it’s a mom trying to decide what to do with the family this weekend, that kind of stuff and really trying to formulate “all right, what are these archetypes that we’re presenting this experience to? And how do we want them to perceive it?”

And so then, if we start there and we understand what the problems are, the challenges or the needs are, then it’s much easier for us to create visuals that correspond to that. And ultimately, with branding, our goal really is to drive more awareness and recognition and familiarity, and all of those breed trust. And you’re not going to sell anything, particularly tickets, if you don’t trust.

Shannon: Yes.

Brian: And so that is our process. And that’s why it’s so important for us to make sure that all of our brand touch points are very consistent. And so that’s the brand killer – as soon as something just doesn’t look or feel or meet that expectation that we’ve set, then that erodes the trust because that erodes the familiarity. So that’s our process in terms of how we sort of balance creativity with ultimately performance or profit with our brand strategy.

Favorite Campaign – X Games

Shannon: Do you have a favorite campaign that you’ve worked on that you think was like very unique or very special to you?

Brian: The one that I liked was one of the first ones that I just lived, eat and breathe. And ultimately one was X Games. And it was when the X Games, they were leaving LA, they put it out to bid, sort of this like Olympic style bidding across multiple cities. And I was working – my client was the Formula One racetrack in Austin and they put in the bid and I helped spearhead the marketing for that campaign.

We ultimately – it got very, very contentious with particularly Detroit and they wanted it so bad and God bless them, but right in the midst of ESPN’s judges going to different cities and I think the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy or something during that process.

Shannon: Yeah, it was like a whole whole mess.

Brian: Yeah, but I will also say that they were playing a little dirty and trying to sling some mud and all that stuff to us. I mean, it was an incredible experience. And so we ended up hosting essentially a mini X Games right in front of the Capitol in Austin. And we had like the half pipe and we had like everything and DJs and everything. It was insane.

Shannon: That’s awesome.

Brian: And yeah, and we ended up winning it. And then I got to actually do the marketing for X Games when it came there, which was their highest attended X Games, I think, ever. And we had just incredible music lineup from – was it Flaming Lips, Mac Miller, Kanye West headlined, which was very interesting.

Shannon: That’s crazy.

Brian: The Flaming Lips is my favorite band so that was like my – yeah it was bananas. I think we had Pretty Lights as well, which was yeah, so pretty pretty massive. So just yeah, and then going up to the top of the big air that like massive and just looking down and I was just like “this is this is this is my life, this is just bananas.”

Closing Thoughts

Shannon: Well, that sounds so exciting. It’s really great to be able to, well, one, as I mentioned before, how passionate you are about this to be able to go to these types of things that you contributed to creating is probably – must feel so fulfilling, because most marketers just get to see their work be successful. And that’s great. But there’s not like something that they can actually kind of show for it, if that makes sense. And for other people to enjoy that is just so – it sounds like an amazing experience.

Brian: It is. I mean there’s no question there’s – and I know you can tell and that’s why I’m so passionate about this because I know that what we do has a direct impact on changing people’s lives for the rest of their lives. It’s something just super special. I don’t take it lightly. Yeah, it’s just – it’s really rad.

Shannon: Well I think that is a perfectly wholesome note to end on because we’re actually out of time, but that’s genuinely one of the coolest things that I think anyone could ever do. I don’t know, that sounds incredible. So I’m really happy that when you’re passionate about what you do, I can see it clearly. But it’s nice to be able to enjoy it too. You can like doing something so much, but to actually enjoy it I think it’s a separate kind of thing. So one, thank you so much for sharing your passion today and all of the knowledge that you have. I think this has been an incredible experience, so thank you so much.

Brian: Pleasure. Well thank you for having me, I appreciate it. And yeah, looking forward to keeping in touch.Shannon: Thank you, yes please. And for everyone at home, don’t forget to like and subscribe to hear more awesome stories like this and see people be as passionate about their job as Brian is. I hope so. Thank you so much again and have a lovely day everyone.

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