Event Recap: Steve Seiferheld ('98)

On April 9^th 2013, the ILR Sports Business Society was fortunate enough to host alumni Steve Seiferheld '98, Senior Vice President of Turnkey Intelligence. Turnkey Intelligence is the sports and entertainment industry’s leader in consumer insights collected from surveys. Seiferheld graduated from Cornell with a Masters in Statistics. In his time at Turnkey, he has worked with WWE, ESPN, NFL, Disney on Ice, and 18 out of the 30 MLB teams, in addition to many others. During his Skype interview, he reviewed professional career and offered advice to members of our club in how to get a job in sports. Read about it after the jump.

Seiferheld has a huge client base that spans all four major sports in the United States. Before he earned his job with Turnkey, his first job out of college was with Nabisco, where he helped drive consumer research for product development. Up until a few years ago, he was working with the Home Shopping Network. He reminded members in the audience that there are many ways to get into the world of sports and that sometimes you have to take detours to get there.

Seiferheld then discussed his job at Turnkey, which deals with market research with a sports focus. He explained that from the business side of sports, every fan is a consumer. However, not all consumers are fans. He explained his point further by posing the question “How does a sports team losing affect my life in any tangible way?” After a brief moment he responded that it should not, but it still does and that is what makes people fans.

Seiferheld’s job is based on discipline of market research which he defined as “doing research on your market.” If you’re selling something and you want to understand buyers better you need to do your research, however, there are a lot of different ways to go about it. This is where Turnkey steps in. One tactic they use is to focus on primary research - custom feedback from the clients. This can be done by surveys or conversations. Research is done on site and off site, depending on the type of surveying that is required. Turnkey is not always asked to analyze the data they collect either, sometimes the job is solely to collect it.

While explaining the importance of ratings he gave the WNBA as an example. While most people wonder why ESPN would pay the league $12 million a year, he explained that it was a brilliant move. During the WNBA season, baseball is the only other sport on television. If there is no baseball game, then there is nothing else to put on the station. The average WNBA game also garners between 300,000-350,000 viewers per game, so while it is only used as “filler,” it still fares better than most other shows. He gave the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League as an example. They are a professional male sports team. Yet they only garner around 4,000-5,000 viewers per game.

Audience Question: 

“Do you ever have conflict of interest with places and companies you work for?”

Answer: 

He has a confidentiality agreement, so he cannot share information with a rival team or organization. He can, however, when looking at customer satisfaction for a team, let them know whether they are on the high end or low end of the spectrum. He is not allowed to give specifics, though.

Seiferheld then took some time to critique some of his clients. One issue occurs when people ask him to do a survey without knowing what is wrong and why they are asking for the data to be collected. He explained that it is not worth anyone’s time if you are asking for a survey to be done just for the sake of being done. He also criticized sports teams who sometimes devote too much money to the on-field business, but not enough goes into the off-field portions. In his opinion, if more teams put money into these off-field portions, they could better the entire system and generate more revenue.

Jeremy Lin

When asked about the effect of Jeremy Lin last year in New York, Seiferheld explained how Linsanity single-handedly did things for the New York Knicks that Seiferheld could never do for any team. Even with all his expertise working with ticketing, sponsorships, and merchandise sales, outliers like Lin cannot be compared to. In his opinion, if Lin would have been in a smaller market, he would have still had an impact regardless, just a smaller impact.

Lottery Tickets

When talking about how fans are consumers, Seiferheld discussed how most states have lottery tickets that are co-sponsored with sports teams. He asked rhetorically, “Why does a sports fan want to buy this lottery ticket?” He did research on lottery tickets by asking people whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “I don’t mind losing money as long as the money helps my team win.” The results showed that more people agree then disagree. Yet there is still not way that the money spent on the lottery ticket is affecting the team’s performance in any way. However, people still feel as if they are helping the team win by buying lottery tickets associated with the team.

Boston Red Sox

Seiferheld went into a discussion about a specific case study with the Red Sox after their poor 2011 season. There was also a controversy over whether players were eating fried chicken and drinking beer inside of the team clubhouse. Turnkey was contacted to see if the Red Sox brand had been tarnished. Fans were surveyed on how they felt when they walked into Fenway. After collecting the results, which included words such as “heaven” and “museum,” and analyzing the data, Turnkey was able to decide that the Red Sox had nothing to worry about. Their image remained untarnished despite a bad season and small controversy.

Other Case Studies

Marathons: Event planners wanted evidence regarding how much money marathons bring into cities. This evidence is necessary because of the huge sums of money that events such as marathons demand from the city such as police officers, and areas to store stuff for the runners. Based off of data from hotels, a lot of money is made; this also gives hotels opportunities to sponsor marathons. The end results proved that marathons make a lot of money for cities.

College Sports: A college was trying to make the jump from Division 1AA to Division 1A. Research had to be done to be sure that the basic requirements to make the jump were met. The main requirement was that the attendance threshold of 15,000 students had to be met. After research, it was shown that more than 15,000 students regularly attended games. Moving up a division would also mean new, better opponents which would inherently mean better attendance from fans. Seiferheld worked directly with the athletic director on this case.

     Advice

To finish the event, Seiferheld gave advice to the members of the club on how to enter the sports industry.

-A pedigree in law, data marketing, statistics, and other attributes lead to being a better person to hire

-Read the Sports Business Journal

-Be willing to do anything to get into the industry; if you have to sort mail, sort mail

-Business majors get more preference than sports management majors

-Meet as many people in the industry as you can—connections are key!

We would like to thank Mr. Seiferheld for taking time out of his busy schedule to Skype with members of ILRSBS. His advice and his knowledge were truly insightful. His kind demeanor was also appreciated, as were his funny stories such as his signature being inside of the Green Monster in Fenway Park between Tom Petty’s and Bruce Springsteen’s. We hope to host him again in the future!