Stuart Elliott: As Circus Folds Its Tent, Marketing Executives Look Back

It turns out that there39s a robust roster of alumni of the Ringling Bros and Barnum ampamp Bailey Circus who today hold highlevel posts not only in advertising media and consumerproducts marketing but also in fields such as entertainment marketing professional sports event marketing and even the amusement park industry For many of those circus veterans their jobs with quotthe Greatest Show on Earthquot were the first ones they landed after graduating from college in the 1970s 1980s or 1990sI found out about this cadre of marketers with circus roots after Feld Entertainment which has owned Ringling Bros since 1967 unexpectedly announced that it would be shutting down the show citing problems that ranged from declining ticket sales and rising operating costs to changing public tastes and battles with animalrights organizations There are two national touring circuses one will give its final performance Sunday May 7 in Providence RI and the other will say goodbye two weeks later at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale Long IslandOf course the circus veterans are sad about the end of what they call quotthe big showquot which traces its roots to a circus started by PT Barnum himself in 1871 But they39re equally as unhappy about the loss of what was they declare an invaluable way to start a careerquotThis was the training ground for so many successful people where we all learned our craftquot says John Zamoiski a longtime cable TV and promotion marketer who is Managing Director of SourceCXM in Norwalk CTIt was Zamoiski who reached out recently to tell me about the circus backgrounds of so many senior ad and marketing managers across the country He39s sort of the ringleader if you will of a large group of them who stay in touch and are planning a reunion to catch the very last Ringling Bros performance on May 21quotThere39s this old saying 39Sawdust gets in your blood39quot says Ken Wachter President of the PMI Entertainment Group in Green Bay WI offering services like venue management to show and event production quotIt39s sad to see it leave the road I39ve got a lot of great memoriesquotWachter Zamoiski and the others I spoke with began at Ringling Bros in a post known as regional marketing director They39d arrive in a city six or so months before the circus came markets like Birmingham AL Corpus Christi TX Detroit MI Fresno CA Lexington KY Pittsburgh PA and Worcester MA and armed with a couple of credit cards and a howto manual handled innumerable aspects of the upcoming performances such as quotscoping out the venue hiring the groupsales agents hiring a local advertising agency meeting with the local media reps handling promotionquot Zamoiski says and quotbringing everything to a crescendo just as the show openedquotYou learned how to negotiatequot he adds quotNothing beats sitting across a desk from someone to make a dealquotThen there were unexpected tasks as when Zamoiski once had to put on makeup to join a clown for the taping of a TV program quotYou did what you had to doquot he says quotand it served you the rest of your lifequotquotI owe my career to the training I gotquot as a regional marketing director quotright out of collegequot says Hank Salemi President of the Six Flags Great America theme park in Gurnee IL amp160quotIt was a tremendous grounding in the liveentertainment business a tremendous educational experience second to nonequotThe manual Salemi received when he took the job covering quotadvertising public relations promotions operations working with the box office the concessions the novelty merchandisequot is quotsomething I still usequot he addsJeff Cogen Chief Business Officer of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team in St Petersburg FL likened the announcement by Feld on Jan 14 to quotthe day the music diedquot the expression used by Don McLean in quotAmerican Piequot to refer to the plane crash that killed three rock stars on Feb 3 1959Cogen who also has worked for the Detroit Tigers Texas Rangers and three pro hockey teams raves about the circus as one of the five best experiences of his life quotYou had to become a real person quickly and make bigboy decisionsquot he says in realms as varied as arranging quotcash trade deals with a television station tieins with a newspaper for ticket salesquot lease negotiations and public relations Until Ringling Bros quotI39d never seen a press releasequot he confidesquotYou could make mistakes as long as you learned from themquot Cogen continues remembering a notable faux pas selecting someone to be an honorary ringmaster at a performance quotthe night Irvin Feldquot founder of Feld Entertainment quotpersonally selected an honorary ringmasterquotThe circus quotencouraged all of us to be entrepreneurialquot says Joe Gold agency principal at the Gold Group in Salem MA which specializes in services such as experiential marketing public relations and entertainment and sports marketingFor instance regional marketing directors would ask each other quotwhat was the best promotion you ever didquot he adds and quotyou39d try thingsquotWachter still talks about how in the days before GPS when he drove from one radio station to another to talk up the circus39 impending arrival he39d quotlook for the big radio tower so I39d know where the station wasquotIt was an incredible responsibilityquot Gold says that quotall came down to sales how many tickets you sold what was the average ticket price what was the maximum revenue for that nightquotYet quotwe were not salespeople we were marketersquot he adds charged with figuring out quothow did customers come to the arena what were the triggersquot He cited as an example determining whether ads and promotions aimed at people who live in Queens should suggest they see the show at Madison Square Garden or if they ought to quottake the train to UniondalequotA highlight of the interviews for this column was listening to the bigtop jargon sprinkled throughout the conversations Wachter talked about quotscaling the housequot figuring out how to price the tickets for the various rows or sections of an arena Cogen used the phrase quotcircus folkquot And Zamoiski says he can quotremember putting Meredith Vieira on an elephant in Providencequot where she worked at a TV station before leaving for New York CityNote Look for the next Stuart Elliott Report a quot20 Questionsquot column on Wednesday May 24Click the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Stuart Elliott: As Circus Folds Its Tent, Marketing Executives Look Back

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