Mac Presents’ Marcie Allen On Music Sponsorship Trends At XLIVE Conference
[UPDATED] MAC Presents founder Marcie Allen was a keynote at the XLIVE conference in Las Vegas this week, where the branding guru shared that tour sponsorships are no more. “First of all, you need to know that tour sponsorships are dead. I don’t sell them anymore. I can’t sell them,” Allen noted.
Allen said brands “feel like if they are going to do a logo slap, they are going to do a sports deal. You have to remember, music partnerships are $1.5 billion according to IEG and sports is $60 billion.” She was interviewed by Larry LeBlanc senior writer CelebrityAccess.
Allen, who began her career as an Atlanta festival promoter, made her bones with her savvy ability to build relationships between artists and commercial brands:
“Over the past five years, we have worked on numerous festival activations at big festivals like Governors Ball and ACL for Miller and Life is Beautiful for Samsung. With brands, there is festival fatigue. … Brands are not seeing their return on investment, their conversion on a lift in sales during the pulse period that they are sponsoring.
Brands are more interested in being part of an artist's album launch, philanthropic endeavors, social media efforts and branded content.”
Live Nation and AEG are doing multi-festival sponsorship deals and “It is very rare that a brand is going to sponsor ACL and not do anything else,” Allen said. “Buy-in at those major festivals is 1 million-plus; that gets you in the front door. Then you have to do your activation. You have to do any additional advertising. You have to amplify your activation on site by doing a deal with an artist who is already performing. You’re in for another $500,000-600,000 before you even blink.”
$750,000 To Play A Game For 30 Minutes
Allen delved into Esports, noting it has become so huge that MAC Presents got an offer for an artist to show up to an Esports for an event for 30 minutes and play a game for $750,000.
“I thought it was a typo,” she said. “Soon you are going to see an artist stream their album for the very first time on Twitch and in a game. The synergy between music and gaming, we can’t keep up.”
XLIVE, is an annual conference about “cultivating big ideas that create extraordinary live event experiences.”
