Looking to sell your Chicago Bears tickets this season? Well, there’s good news, Mr. or Ms. Season Ticket Holder. The Bears have a new “corporate partner” that can deal with that sort of thing.
It’s StubHub.com, an online ticket broker, and there’s easy access to it from the Bears’ Web site.
That’s right: Legitimate money for your tickets and, to the common fan, sanctioned by the Bears.
No more waiting outside Soldier Field in the cold, risking scalpers, frostbite and unwanted attention from Chicago cops to sell Bears tickets, right?
But before running off to boot up the computer, season-ticket holders want to think twice before deciding to miss that dog of a match-up, or unload a game you can’t make, or get rid of those tickets in December because it’s too darn cold.
You see, by unloading those games on StubHub, you could risk losing not only your season tickets, but also the expensive personal seat license for which you shelled out $3,000 or more.
If your tickets are auctioned off through StubHub for a price greater than what you bought them for through the Bears–which violates the season contract with the team– you could be tossed, losing your season tickets and personal seat license.
Same goes if you sell through StubHub and the tickets eventually wind up in the hands of an unruly hooligan who gets thrown out of the game. The Bears could hold you and your personal seat license responsible.
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Yep, you could be in big trouble for playing along with an official Bears corporate sponsor. And there’s probably not much you can do about it.
To make matters worse, the Bears organization isn’t warning you either, at least not on its Web site where StubHub has secured space at the bottom corner. They’ll explain the rules to you if you call and ask.
Welcome to the Bears’ version of sports marketing, where the motto might as well be “enjoy our new corporate partner at your own risk.”
“The partnership we have with StubHub is that they have certain access to [Bears] logos and marks,” says Scott Hagel, the Bears’ public relations chief. “The fact of the matter is we did not change any of our rules or agreements with fans.”
Which means, technically, the Bears aren’t urging you to go to StubHub if you want to get rid of your tickets.
“You’re certainly sending a mixed message,” said David Brenner, president and CEO of Paragon Marketing. “I don’t begrudge the Bears for doing it, but the consumer is not going to have it explained to them what could happen.”
Indeed, the whole ticket scalping issue has become a hot potato for teams, which would like to recapture some of the money lost in the reselling of tickets through brokers and other outlets.
So far, there has been little teams can do except sit on the sidelines.
For access to the Bears’ Web site and the use of its logos and reaching the ticket holders, StubHub agrees to pay the Bears an undisclosed, flat fee. The Bears don’t get a cut of the action for being the middleman.
That way, the Bears’ hands are clean and all fan and seat license agreements stay intact, including ones that can get you tossed.
StubHub, in return, gets to join a list of sponsors like Coca-Cola Co., Cadillac, Bank One and Comcast who don’t quite carry the same kind of controversy. Besides access to the Bears’ Web site, they also get to send mailers to season-ticket holders and run ads on Bears’ programming.
StubHub claims that their system is as safe for the seller as any other system and that it knows more about its buyers, because they register them, than if the seller sold the ticket on the street. The sellers are also registered.
“We’ve never had an incident,” said Eric Baker, co-founder and president of the 4-year-old company. He said that the behavior of the person buying the ticket has nothing to do with where that ticket came from. He also said that seat licenses are rarely, if ever, revoked.
Besides the Bears, StubHub has a similar marketing agreement in the National Football League with the Detroit Lions.
At least the Bears can hope for one thing. The next time a fan gets a hankering to support a Bears corporate sponsor by using StubHub, maybe he or she will at least weigh the consequences over a nice, refreshing Coca-Cola.
Hearst, Disney pull Lifetime: Lifetime the magazine doesn’t have the same endurance as “The Golden Girls,” the program that seems to have eternal life in reruns on the Lifetime cable channel. Hearst Magazines and The Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday that Lifetime magazine would cease publication after the October issue.
“While we are proud of the magazine’s successful launch, the translation into print was challenging given the current marketplace and did not yield the results we anticipated,” Hearst said in a statement.
Lifetime, launched with much fanfare in spring 2003, was the latest in a spate of magazines spun off from television programming, following Martha Stewart Living, and Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O, and, of course, Rosie O’Donnell’s Rosie, which went away in an explosion of litigation between the talk-show host and her publisher, Gruner & Jahr.
But unlike those magazines, Lifetime, based off the cable channel for women, didn’t have a major personality behind it that readers could rally around. That left readers wondering what Lifetime was supposed to be.
The magazine’s current rate base was 600,000, raised in January from 500,000. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Susan Wyland, and vice president/publisher, Susan Plagemann, will remain with the company in another capacity, the company said. Hearst will continue to focus on growing existing franchises like Town & County Travel, O at Home and Cosmo Style.
Judges’ corner: In one of the more impressive award judging lineups in recent memory, the revamped Chicago Creative Club Award show has attracted four well-respected judges: Kevin Proudfoot, creative director, Weiden & Kennedy New York; Jamie Barrett, creative director, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco; Shelley Lanham, chief creative officer, Draft NY; and Donna Weinham, senior creative director, BBDO N.Y. The award show is set for 6 p.m., Sept. 29, at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Quick hit: Chicago’s famous advertising export Charlotte Beers keynotes the Direct Marketing Association’s Annual Conference Oct. 18 in New Orleans. Beers spent many years at Chicago shops J. Walter Thompson and Euro RSCG Partners (formerly Tatham, Laird & Kudner) before going to New York to run JWT and Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. From 2001-03, she worked for the U.S. State Department on a public relations campaign to combat anti-American sentiment in Arab countries.