Sports Marketing Machine Podcast

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Jeremy Neisser takes a week off the tactics to ask the question underneath all of them: what business is your sports team actually in? A sideline conversation with a Chick-fil-A owner — McDonald's is in the burger business, Chick-fil-A is in the community growing business — becomes the frame for a complete rethink of what a ticket transaction really is. 
This is a solo episode recorded in the days after Jeremy lost his father-in-law, Tom, and it connects that perspective directly to how you write campaigns, read your database, and treat the people on the other side of the report. If you have been in sports long enough to feel the grind of the season, this is twenty minutes worth giving it.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
- The two-lens test that determines every idea your team greenlights, borrowed from a conversation with a local Chick-fil-A owner
- Why "we're in the sports business" and "we're in the entertainment business" are both accurate and both limiting
- The case for the memory making business — and what changes operationally when you accept it
- What a family is actually buying when they buy four tickets, and why the per cap doesn't capture it
- How the same game gets bought four different ways by a family, a date night couple, a company outing, and a fifteen-year season ticket holder
- Rewriting a generic "$12 tickets, buy now" promo into a message about the experience the game makes possible
- Why your segmentation strategy improves when you stop asking how to get someone to buy and start asking what they want to experience
- Reading a lapsed-buyer list as five hundred life changes instead of five hundred churn events
- How to send the win-back email without treating the recipient as a transaction to recover
- The career question worth sitting with: what will you actually remember from this job in twenty years
- The cost of an industry that treats long hours as a badge of honor, and the memories it can quietly charge you
- Why the places that feel like community to your fans usually have no idea they do

TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] – Why this episode breaks the weekly pattern, and why it's about perspective instead of tactics
[00:45] – The personal loss behind the episode and how grief resets what looks important
[01:30] – The daily grind every sports marketer recognizes: promo calendars, budgets, and 200 more people through the gate
[02:00] – The question underneath all of it: what business are we really in?
[02:25] – A sideline conversation at a nine-year-old's soccer game with a local Chick-fil-A owner
[03:15] – "McDonald's is in the burger business. Chick-fil-A is in the community growing business."
[03:45] – What changes when you see yourself as selling product versus growing a community
[04:52] – The sandwich becomes the vehicle for something bigger — and so does the ticket
[05:30] – Why that owner's idea meeting looks nothing like the one down the street
[06:09] – The answer for sports teams: we're in the memory making business
[06:45] – Four tickets, a $60 transaction, and what the family actually bought
[07:06] – The grandparent taking a grandchild to a first game, and what that child will remember
[08:04] – A July Dodgers game with Jeremy's daughter and father-in-law that became a lifelong memory
[09:30] – Why you never know which night in your building is the one that lasts
[10:00] – "But this is a marketing podcast" — how perspective actually improves your revenue work
[10:28] – Rewriting a $12 ticket promo into a message about the experience
[11:53] – Four buyers, four motivations, one ticket: family, date night, company outing, long-time STH
[12:30] – Asking what a fan wants to experience instead of how to get them to buy
[12:52] – 2,500 season ticket holders, 40,000 emails, 500 lapsed buyers — and the person behind each record
[13:30] – The real reasons people stop attending, and why you'll never know which one applies
[14:00] – Send the win-back email. Just remember who's opening it.
[14:17] – Why the strongest organizations are places where people feel like they belong
[14:34] – Twenty-five years in sports and the question of what you'll actually remember
[15:30] – The campaign that generated $25K versus the relationships you'll carry
[16:25] – Long hours as a badge of honor and the season's real cost
[17:00] – Building memories for everyone else's family and missing your own
[17:34] – The Habit Burger story: eighteen years of a routine that was never about burgers
[19:00] – How many families have a tradition at your ballpark that you'll never hear about
[19:57] – The closing question for ticket sellers, marketers, GMs, and external relations directors
[21:24] – A final reminder: call someone you love, take the picture, make the time

CALL TO ACTION
Take one ticket campaign you're about to send and rewrite it around the experience instead of the price. Then review your fan segmentation with a human lens rather than a revenue lens, and see what changes.

QUOTE PULLS
"I think we're in the memory making business." — Jeremy Neisser

"You're still selling chicken sandwiches, but the chicken sandwich becomes the vehicle for something bigger." — Jeremy Neisser

"The best sports organizations aren't just places where people go to watch games. They're places where people feel like they belong." — Jeremy Neisser

"If we're not careful, we can spend so much time creating memories for everybody else's family that we forget to create them for our own." — Jeremy Neisser

"There are real people on the other side of those transactions. People who might be creating memories they'll carry with them for the rest of their lives. And you get to play a small part in making that happen." — Jeremy Neisser

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The last episode set the size of your marketing budget. This one decides where every dollar goes — because you can have exactly the right number and still spend it in all the wrong places. Jeremy breaks a sports marketing budget into three buckets (top, middle, and bottom of funnel), lays out a 45-30-25 starting allocation for a balanced live-event team, and shows why most teams are closer to 80-15-5. 
If 80 cents of every dollar is chasing people who have never bought a ticket, the problem isn't the size of your budget.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
- Why setting your budget and allocating your budget are two completely different problems — and why solving the first one doesn't fix the second
- The three jobs your marketing money has to do: get attention, convert interest, bring buyers back
- Exactly which channels belong in top, middle and bottom of funnel, with real examples from billboards to automated journeys
- The 45-30-25 starting framework for a balanced live-event marketing budget, and when your team should deliberately break it
- What a $100,000 budget looks like split correctly against a $400,000 single-game revenue goal
- How to spot the imbalance that actually matters — and why 80-15-5 is a finding, not a rounding error
- Why "we email our past buyers all the time" isn't the same as investing in your database
- What real database investment looks like: segmentation, automated journeys, tested offers, and retargeting buyer lists on paid social
- Why the cheapest fan to acquire is the one you already acquired, and what that should do to your budget
- How the same Meta budget can serve all three funnel stages depending entirely on who you target
- Why not every dollar should be held to the same 4-to-1 return, and what to measure at each stage instead
- Why first-party data is a structural advantage sports teams have over almost every small business — and how most teams waste it
- The free Marketing Report Card that grades your current allocation and shows where you're over- or under-invested

TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] – The question a right-sized budget creates: now where does it go?
[02:02] – Recapping the 4-to-1 return as a starting point for budget conversations
[03:25] – The three different jobs your marketing dollars have to do
[05:10] – Top, middle and bottom of funnel defined, with the channels that live in each
[08:32] – The 45-30-25 starting framework — and why it's a starting point, not a rule
[10:54] – Running the math: what $100,000 looks like allocated correctly
[11:42] – Why "we email our buyers all the time" doesn't count as investment
[13:23] – The cheapest fan to acquire is the one you already acquired
[15:05] – Why you still have to keep filling the top of the funnel
[16:33] – Channels don't automatically belong to one bucket — the Meta example
[18:21] – Stop asking what channel. Start asking what job.
[19:18] – Why not every dollar should be measured against the same return
[21:14] – First-party data as a sports team's structural advantage
[23:30] – Acquire, convert, return, grow — instead of acquire, acquire, acquire
[24:24] – How to audit your own allocation this week in under an hour
[25:46] – What the free Marketing Report Card does and how to read the grade
[28:08] – Final takeaway: spend with a job in mind, not just a channel

CALL TO ACTION
Take every marketing dollar you spent last season — or plan to spend this one — and run it through the free Marketing Report Card at revelocitysports.com/report-card. Put in your channels and your spend, cash and trade, and it sorts everything across the funnel and grades your allocation. It takes a few minutes and it will tell you whether you need more money or a different plan for the money you already have. If you want to talk through what it shows you, the 30-minute conversation is free too.

QUOTE PULLS

"You can have the right amount of money and still have the wrong marketing plan."
— Jeremy Neisser

"The cheapest fan to acquire is the one you already acquired."
— Jeremy Neisser

"Don't ask what channel you're spending money on. Ask what job that channel is doing."
— Jeremy Neisser

"We're telling people we exist. We're not inviting them to the game."
— Jeremy Neisser

"The bottom of the funnel deserves real budget. Not leftovers."
— Jeremy Neisser

"Before I ask for another $50,000, I want to know whether we're getting everything we can out of the $100,000 we're already spending."
— Jeremy Neisser

Take the FREE Marketing Report Card 
Episode 181 - How much should you spend on Marketing? 
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Budget season starts the same way at most sports teams: pull last year's marketing number, add a few percent, move on. 
In Episode 181, Jeremy Neisser makes the case for building the marketing budget from the revenue goal backward instead — take your single game ticket revenue target, divide it by four, and start the conversation there. 
He breaks down why four to one is the right baseline (and what it's really paying for), cleans up the ROAS versus ROI confusion that costs teams real money, and argues that a budget that's performing should function as a floor rather than a ceiling. If you're being asked to grow ticket revenue 25% on a 5% budget increase, this is the episode to send to your GM.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
- A ten-second way to set your marketing budget: take your single game ticket revenue goal and divide it by four
- Why four to one is the right planning baseline for direct marketing spend on single game tickets
- Worked examples you can drop straight into a budget conversation: $200K goal starts at $50K, $400K at $100K, $1M at $250K
- Why your advertising line is not your real marketing cost — salaries, CRM, email platform, creative tools and agency fees all sit behind that revenue
- The difference between ROAS and ROI, and why using them interchangeably makes your marketing look better or worse than it is
- How to spot the moment your revenue goal quietly turned into a 10-to-1 or 20-to-1 ask
- Why rolling last year's budget forward with a small bump disconnects the number from the goal entirely
- The difference between a maintenance goal and a growth goal, and why they require different budgets
- What to do when marketing is outperforming midseason and asks for more money
- Why a budget that's producing should be treated as a floor you can build on, not a ceiling you protect
- The measurement and attribution work marketing has to do to earn the right to ask for more
- Why the smaller budget is not automatically the better budget

TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] – The question every team asks when offseason budget planning starts
[01:42] – Why "here's your number" never answers what marketing is being asked to produce
[02:12] – The 4-to-1 rule: $1 in ad spend should target $4 in single game ticket revenue
[03:05] – Running the math backward on $200K, $400K and $1M revenue goals
[04:08] – Why four to one is a planning baseline, not a law of marketing
[05:00] – Your marketing budget isn't the full cost of marketing
[06:28] – Why two to one shouldn't excite anybody, and what four to one buys you
[07:24] – ROAS versus ROI, and why marketers mix the two up constantly
[08:50] – What the four-to-one baseline is actually covering behind the scenes
[09:45] – Applying it to a real team: a $500,000 single game ticket goal
[11:07] – When a team genuinely can hit 20 to 1, and why that's the exception
[12:31] – The $40K-to-$45K trap: rolling last year's budget forward
[13:27] – Revenue goal up 25%, marketing budget up 5% — the math nobody says out loud
[14:30] – Why "do more with the same money" stopped working in a crowded attention economy
[15:51] – Maintenance goals versus growth goals are two different assignments
[16:17] – Midseason: marketing is running six to one and asks for another $20K
[18:06] – The biggest idea in the episode — treat the budget as a floor, not a ceiling
[19:20] – Where diminishing returns actually start, and how to spot them
[20:29] – Earning the right to ask: what marketing owes leadership in return
[21:40] – Attribution is messy, and why that's not a reason to stop measuring
[22:18] – Starting the budget conversation from the revenue target, then adjusting
[23:44] – Why the smaller budget isn't automatically the better budget
[25:10] – Coming next week: how to actually allocate the budget across the funnel

CALL TO ACTION
If this episode helps you frame your next budget conversation, share it with someone in your office — a colleague, your GM, or whoever is holding the marketing number this year. Next week's episode picks up where this one ends: where that money should actually go, and a scorecard for how your allocation stacks up.

QUOTE PULLS
"Four to one isn't the ceiling. It's the hurdle." — Jeremy Neisser

"Your marketing budget shouldn't be an expense you're trying to control. It should be an investment you're trying to maximize." — Jeremy Neisser

"If I can put a dollar in and reasonably expect six back, why am I trying to stop myself?" — Jeremy Neisser

"We start with last year's expenses instead of starting with this year's goals." — Jeremy Neisser

"The smaller budget isn't automatically the better budget." — Jeremy Neisser

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Sales are soft for Friday's game and someone says the word every ticket office reaches for: discount. Jeremy Neisser makes the case that a price cut and a value add are two completely different promotions — one lowers what fans expect to pay from here on out, the other raises what they believe they're getting. He walks through the research on reference pricing, a study of MLB bobblehead promotions from 2012 to 2023 that moved attendance without touching ticket price, and real packages from the Blue Jackets, Bulls, Dynamo, and Rocket City Trash Pandas. Then he gives you the five places to look for value before you ever subtract from the price.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
- Why running discounts often enough quietly retrains what your fans believe a ticket is worth
- What a reference price is, and how a repeated $5 off resets the number in your fan's head
- The difference between changing your price and changing your offer — and why only one of them costs you revenue
- Research showing fans value promotions for being fun, different, and worth talking about, not just for the savings
- Why "we got hats with our tickets" travels further than "I saved $4"
- What an MLB bobblehead study from 2012 to 2023 found about gate giveaways versus special ticket packages — and what both had in common
- Real value-add packages you can copy from the Columbus Blue Jackets, Chicago Bulls, Houston Dynamo, and Rocket City Trash Pandas
- The five buckets every add-on comes from: food, merchandise, access, recognition, and experience
- How to find high-perceived-value add-ons that cost your team close to nothing
- Why the word "free" can make a fan value your giveaway less — and the one-line fix
- How to build exclusivity and scarcity into a value add so it drives a specific game
- The filter to bring into your next promo meeting before anyone reaches for a promo code

TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] – The Monday problem: soft sales, a Friday game, and the instinct to discount
[01:39] – Why discounting feels obvious — we're all trained to hunt for deals
[03:04] – The hidden cost of discounting too often
[03:58] – What a $20 ticket sold for $15 actually communicates to a fan
[04:54] – Reference price explained: the number every fan already carries
[06:15] – The Michael's picture frame problem, and how price sensitivity compounds
[07:10] – Value adds change the offer instead of the price
[08:10] – Why fans value a promotion for more than the savings
[08:39] – The Chandon, Wansink, and Laurent research on what people get out of a promotion
[09:31] – The psychology of getting "a little something extra"
[10:53] – The Savannah Bananas story: what surprise and delight actually looks like
[11:23] – The MLB bobblehead study: giveaways moved attendance up to 13%, ticket packages about 8%
[12:51] – Two approaches, two attendance increases, zero dollars off the ticket
[13:19] – Blue Jackets family value pack, Bulls family packs, and the Houston Dynamo four pack
[14:18] – The five buckets: food, merchandise, access, recognition, experience
[15:46] – Concrete add-on ideas inside each of the five buckets
[17:13] – Low actual cost, high perceived value — and why your building is already full of it
[18:12] – What this means for a GM, external relations director, or ticket sales director
[18:40] – Why "free" can backfire, and how to name the value instead
[20:06] – The question to bring back to your team
[20:35] – Running all five buckets in the meeting before you approve a discount
[21:32] – Final takeaway: our job isn't cheaper tickets, it's a more valuable game

CALL TO ACTION
If this sparked an idea, share the episode with someone in your office — then leave a rating or review on Spotify or Apple. It puts the show in front of more people trying to do exactly what you're doing: grow a fan base and sell more tickets.

QUOTE PULLS
"Discount often enough and you start teaching your fans to wait for the cheaper ticket." — Jeremy Neisser

"I didn't change the price. I changed what you get for it." — Jeremy Neisser

"Two approaches, two real attendance increases, zero dollars off the ticket. They didn't make baseball cheaper — they made going to that baseball game more valuable." — Jeremy Neisser

"Low actual cost, high perceived value. That's the whole game. And your building is full of this stuff — you're just not selling it." — Jeremy Neisser

"Our job isn't to make tickets cheaper. Our job is to make going to the game feel more valuable." — Jeremy Neisser

Links mentioned: 
1. Non-monetary promotions provide benefits beyond saving money
Pierre Chandon, Brian Wansink & Gilles Laurent, Journal of Marketing, “A Benefit Congruency Framework of Sales Promotion Effectiveness.”
Read the Journal of Marketing study
2. Free-gift framing can create a “feeling lucky” effect
Liu, Wei, Yang & Keh, International Journal of Research in Marketing, “Feeling Lucky: How Framing the Target Product as a Free Gift Enhances Purchase Intention.”
This is particularly strong because the researchers ran four studies, including a field experiment involving actual purchases, and found that certain free-gift framing increased feelings of luck, which increased purchase intention. 
Read the Feeling Lucky study
3. Calling something “free” can reduce its perceived value
Priya Raghubir, Journal of Consumer Psychology, “Free Gift with Purchase: Promoting or Discounting the Brand?”
The experiments found evidence that consumers can value a product less when it's offered as a free gift. Providing alternate price/value information helped inhibit that effect — which supports the idea of “Limited-edition hat — a $25 value” rather than simply “FREE HAT!” 
Read Raghubir's free-gift research
4. Sports-specific evidence: special-ticket packages and giveaways increase attendance
International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 2026, “Special ticket packages and stadium giveaway promotions and the effect on demand for live sporting events.”
Researchers analyzed MLB bobblehead promotions from 2012–2023 and found special-ticket packages increased paid attendance by 8%, while traditional stadium giveaways increased it by as much as 13%. 
Read the sports marketing study at Emerald Publishing
Real-world sports examples mentioned
Columbus Blue Jackets — Family Value Pack
Starts at $35/person and includes a game ticket, value meal and OhioHealth Chiller skate pass. Blue Jackets Family Value Pack
Chicago Bulls — Family Ticket Packs
Includes a ticket, hot dog, chips and fountain drink. This is a great example because it's so simple: ticket + dinner. Chicago Bulls Family Ticket Packs
Houston Dynamo FC — Family 4-Pack
For 2026, the Dynamo announced a $99 package for Saturday matches that includes four tickets plus $40 in concession credit.  Houston Dynamo 2026 Family 4-Pack
Rocket City Trash Pandas — 2026 promotional calendar
Their official MiLB announcement details their premium giveaways and special-appearance strategy.  Rocket City Trash Pandas 2026 promotions
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Teams describe what they sell. Fans describe what they're doing. Nobody at home says "let's buy a five-game flex plan this summer" — they say "what are we doing Friday night?" In Episode 179, Jeremy Neisser breaks down four rules for closing that gap: write for the first timer, sell what your buyer was already trying to do, make your offer repeatable, and stop making your team the main character. It's a practical messaging reset for ticket pages, group sales pages, promotions, and every email you send this season — with a free worksheet you can drop straight into ChatGPT or Claude.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
- Why "flex plan," "membership," and "hospitality" quietly cost you sales even though they sound like plain English
- How to measure clarity by the first timer instead of the season ticket holder who already knows everything
- The exact rewrites that turn ticket-office language into fan language ("five-game flex plan" → "pick any five games")
- Why "Thirsty Thursday" still needs the $2 drafts spelled out next to it
- How to start your marketing with what the buyer was already trying to accomplish instead of your inventory
- Why the same mom in your CRM is three separate sales across April, June, and August — and how to message each one
- Where segmentation stops short: knowing who someone is doesn't tell you why they're buying today
- The difference between friction ("can they buy it?") and repeatability ("can they sell it for you?")
- The handoff test for group offers your HR director has to pitch to 40 coworkers
- Why most of the people in your building on a Friday night didn't buy the roster
- What to do with roster, affiliation, and prospect messaging instead of abandoning it
- The four-question test to run one underperforming offer through this week

TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] – The pattern you can't unsee: teams describe what they sell, fans describe what they're doing
[01:22] – What's coming: four rules for fixing the gap between team language and fan language
[01:52] – Why clarity always wins, and why cute and clever doesn't sell tickets
[04:13] – The free PDF worksheet — and how to load it into ChatGPT or Claude to write better copy
[04:43] – Rule 1: Write for the first timer, because clarity is measured by the person who's never been
[06:34] – Why "Thirsty Thursday" needs "$2 drafts all game long" attached to it
[08:00] – Rule 2: Sell what they're already trying to do — nobody wakes up wanting a group outing
[08:54] – Three live rewrites: company picnics, end-of-season youth nights, and premium hospitality
[11:20] – One mom, three reasons, three sales: April, June, and August are different buyers
[13:43] – Rule 3: Make it repeatable, because in sports your buyer has to recruit other buyers
[16:08] – Friction vs. repeatability, and why a two-click checkout still isn't enough
[17:52] – Rule 4: You're not what they came for — the hardest rule for teams to accept
[18:22] – Who's actually in your building on a Friday night, seat by seat
[20:44] – "How we view things drives how we do things" — the Chick-fil-A framing on creating value
[23:06] – Side-by-side message comparisons: all-star shortstop vs. run the bases Friday night
[24:59] – The four-question test to run before you send anything
[25:28] – Ask one question of your last ten messages: who is the main character?
[25:58] – Practical takeaway: pick one offer that isn't moving and rewrite it this week
[27:25] – Why clearer messaging is how sports grows from here
[27:55] – The people actually coming to your games, and why the fan is the main character

CALL TO ACTION
There's a free PDF worksheet for this episode in the show notes — download it, drop it into ChatGPT or Claude as part of your copywriting instructions, and use it on your next email or ticket page. Then pick one offer that isn't moving the way you hoped and run it through the four questions. Questions about your messaging? Email Jeremy at Sports Marketing Machine.

QUOTE PULLS
"Teams describe what they sell, but fans describe what they're doing." — Jeremy Neisser
"Don't make people learn your language before they can buy from you." — Jeremy Neisser
"Friction asks, can they buy it? Repeatability asks, can they sell it for you?" — Jeremy Neisser
"The problem isn't that teams talk about themselves too much. It's that they advertise the one thing most of their fans don't buy." — Jeremy Neisser
"Players leave. Rosters turn over. Seasons end. Memories don't." — Jeremy Neisser
"Our job isn't to be the hero of the story. It's to set the stage for the story the fan gets to tell afterward." — Jeremy Neisser

Links mentioned:
David Salyer's Chick Fil A - video clip
154 – How to Make Your Group Sales Page Easier to Buy From
FREE DOWNLOAD - LINK
Take the download and use it inside ChatGPT or Claude for instructions to help you write better copy
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