Scheduling Conflicts
Hi Friends!
If you’ve known me or followed me on social media for any sliver of time, you’re aware of my dedication to the sport of boxing. It’s something that I’ve been actively training in, on and off for many, many years and it’s really the only sport that I follow as a fan as well.
If you know anything about boxing, you’re also familiar with its general, organizational chaos. Four belts from four different sanctioning bodies, multiple promotions from all corners of the globe, all competing for the best fighters and for their share of not only in-person event revenue, but oftentimes television, pay-per-view, etc. When you break it all down, it can really be mind-numbing, but yet somehow, almost every weekend, there’s a huge event that everybody is focused on, that undeniably pulls in millions and millions of dollars and the wheels keep turning.
When most people envision boxing promoters in their heads, they think of larger-than-life personalities with ridiculous catchphrases, colorful personalities/personal style and extremely cutthroat tendencies. So how is it that they of all people, manage to make this system continue to work? They clearly don’t like each other, they’re clearly always out to get each other and because of this you would think that there’s no way that everybody could possibly be successful (let’s not forget, that boxers are generally right there, among the highest paid athletes in the world too).
Despite all the chaos surrounding the sport of boxing, promoters do two things continuously that keep this ship afloat:
1. They are very conscious of each other’s schedules
2. They work within a time block structure with venues and media networks and once those are established, they respect that and stay out of each other’s way.
This is exactly the reason why you never see a Canelo Alvarez pay-per-view competing with a Gervonta Davis event. Even across the pond, you’re never going to see a situation where Anthony Joshua is fighting in the UK at the same time that Terence Crawford laces them up in Omaha. These guys know that when you split your audience, you run the risk of losing people in the process.
This past weekend, we had five very separate auction events in the classic car and motorcycle space. Now, while I understand that a muscle car sale in Florida is likely to have a different crowd than an all-Porsche event in California and a motorcycle auction in Staffordshire. Yet, it still creates market fatigue and forces people to pick and choose. There’s a lot of cross pollination that occurs within this space and people tend to go to the same places while in the process of figuring things out. This means that there’s competing messages out there and there’s no singular focus on one important event. All of this reduces the significance of everyone’s events collectively. Even if I like Heavyweights, if a Naoya Inoue is fighting a Bantamweight title fight that’s what I’m watching. If Dimitry Bivol (also not a heavyweight) is fighting the same day. I might think twice and now I’m at least subconsciously in a position where I’m ranking the importance of both events and now neither are the event. This is simply not a winning strategy, so boxing promoters almost never do it.
I also understand that there’s an imperialism component to this as well. If I have my event the same time as this guy has his, maybe I can hurt his event while I’m building my brand and kill two birds with one stone. The problem is, your consigners end up on the losing end there as it’s almost like deliberately draining your own swimming pool right before your big backyard party. More subaqueous marketing, a less direct message and less bidders (especially on the internet or on the telephone). Plus, there becomes a point whereas an enthusiast or a bidder, you just can’t find enough hours in the day to handle all of this in any kind of coherent capacity.
I chose to watch the Bonhams Motorcycle sale this weekend, which was great, but after 5 hours of that, I did not have the time or the attention span to consume any of the others. If basically any of the events that took place this weekend happened in a singular fashion during any other given weekend (separate from each other and anything else), I probably would have watched all of them intently.
I know for a fact that there’s no way I’m alone in this as well.
I’ve received several comments and messages over the last year where people expressed frustration with car shows being scheduled recklessly and against each other. Although car shows are fun and important, they’re not the significant driving economic factor for this industry as a whole and this kind of activity looks to me like leaving money on the table for auction companies and consignors alike and creating unnecessary hurdles that buyers have to climb over to get what they want too.
As we’ve discussed here before, the primary function of an auction company is to bring the best items that are available to the market and then to attract the largest number of the most qualified buyers possible. If you’re competing with four other events (that are not adjoined via something like a car week of course), you’re failing at least 50% of that objective.
Things like what happened this weekend are kind of not a good idea and I think we can all agree probably shouldn’t continue to be a thing. It’s not healthy for the marketplace and that’s not good for the hobby.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge
