Bubble, schmubble – LinkedIn got hosed by their bankers

Posted: May 20, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Business Musings | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yes, LinkedIn (LNKD) went public yesterday.  Some important firsts associated with the IPO – first social network to go public, first company that traded on Second Market to transition to the NYSE (or any public exchange for that matter).  Big props due to Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, and the entire LinkedIn team, past and present.  Contrary to the obligatory kvetching about “another dot.com bubble” – even Jim Cramer is getting into the act! (thank you, Jon Stewart) – LinkedIn is no fly-by-night company.  It’s got real revenues, real income, over 100 million users, and it’s taken almost 10 years to bring the company to the point where it was ready to tap the public markets and provide its investors with an appropriate exit and return.  So please, enough of the bubble chatter.

There is, however, one area in which this looks just like the 90s – the level at which the bankers priced the stock.  The notion of pricing in a “pop” – an expectation that the stock will trade up on opening day – is not new.   Investment bankers do this routinely to induce their clients to take the risk on a stock with no trading history.   But LinkedIn’s pop was ridiculous – priced at $45, it opened at $80, shot to $120, and closed at $94.25.   That means the institutions who bought the shares sold in the IPO (regular folks like you and me never get access to IPO shares unless we’re friends/family of the company) got in excess of a 100% return on their less than one day investment.

Now, I’m a capitalist through and through, and begrudge no one earning a profit, but I’m also a student of the Chicago school – that markets are efficient and security prices reflect complete information (i.e., I don’t know something you don’t know, and if I do, I can’t trade on it because that would be insider trading).  But clearly the bankers knew they were massively underpricing the offering (they were marketing the stock to those institutional buyers, so they knew what the demand was), and in so doing, screwed one client – LinkedIn – in favor of other clients – the institutional buyers.

Henry Blodget explains it best – and estimates that the amount LinkedIn lost is about $130 million –  so I won’t reinvent the wheel but rather provide you with his analysis.  And he of all people should know – he was voted the number one Internet/eCommerce analyst by Institutional Investor in 2000, only to be charged with securities fraud by the SEC in 2003 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget).

So, what to do about this?  The market for IPOs among bankers is very competitive – they not only make a lot of money in fees, but as the above demonstrates, they are able to offer their best institutional clients extraordinary returns on their investments, thus insuring they remain their best clients.  There are no doubt a number of IPOs coming down the pike in the next 12 months, including the big kahuna, Facebook.  Let’s hope the management of those companies do their due diligence, dig in the their heels, and make sure they, their companies and their shareholders don’t get hosed.

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I know she’s cute…but don’t stare at Katy Perry

Posted: May 19, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Business Musings | Tags: , | Leave a comment

I know I’ve been remiss in my postings (or lack thereof)….I promise to be back tomorrow to dissect the LinkedIn IPO.  But here’s a tidbit for you to chew on in the interim.  As if Katy Perry’s mere existence wasn’t enough to illustrate much of what’s wrong with the music business, along comes this gem:  Drivers Beware: Don’t Stare At Katy Perry | The Smoking Gun.

This is the plain English version of KP’s concert rider – the document that lays out all of her specific demands for her tour dates.  It is, in a word, appalling.  She is probably somewhere around minute 13 of her allotted 15 minutes, but someone in her camp has decided that pretending she is Madonna is the way to insure her longevity.  If you’re a fan see her now – it will probably be your last chance.

That Sheryl Sandberg is One Smart Chick

Posted: May 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Business Musings | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

By now you have probably read about the brouhaha over Facebook’s unbelievably lame efforts to get PR firm Burson-Marsteller to quietly place anti-Google stories of questionable import with some big media outlets, and Burson’s even lamer attempt to throw their client under the bus when the truth came out (Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear on Google).  Bad form, Burson – bad form.  Isn’t the first rule of crisis PR to own up to your mistakes?

What you may not have read is the current Bloomberg Business Week cover story on Sheryl Sandberg, COO and reining adult at Facebook.  (Btw, I will never get used to calling it Bloomberg Business Week – it’s a ridiculous mouthful.  Of course, I still call the Met Life building the Pan Am building, but I digress.)  I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Sandberg, but by all accounts she lives up to the hype – smart, capable, very good at what she does, and possessing many of the qualities that generally make women better managers than men (there, I said it).

The article is a very good read, but the part that really caught my attention is how fb is selling advertising and how it plans to evolve its model.  Here, an excerpt:

“Social ads” on Facebook perch unobtrusively on the right border of the page and usually specify which of a member’s friends has “liked” or commented on that particular ad or advertiser. The data company Webtrends says that only around half of one percent of people who see these ads actually click on them; yet Facebook pulled in an estimated $2 billion in sales in 2010, Bloomberg has reported, and is on track to do twice that in 2011. Facebook executives argue that the click-through numbers are not that meaningful; they say that people remember ads better and are more likely to make purchases when their friends endorse products.

Advertisers appear to be buying that logic. The social network now serves up nearly one-third of the display advertising that Internet users see in the U.S., according to comScore (SCOR), and delivers twice as many ad impressions as its closest rival, Yahoo! (YHOO).

Sandberg wants to let advertisers burrow even deeper into the social fabric of the site. When a user checks into a restaurant using the Facebook app on their mobile phone, or leaves a comment on the profile page of an advertiser, that action gets broadcast into friends’ news feeds, where it can get lost in the clutter. A new tool called Sponsored Stories allows advertisers to pay to turn that member’s action into an ad, which is more likely to be seen by the user’s friends.

It may sound obscure, but if you’re an advertiser, there’s nothing better than converting customers into unpaid endorsers. Michael Lazerow, chief executive of Buddy Media, which helps brands advertise on Facebook, predicts that the largest advertisers will cross the $100 million spending threshold on Facebook this year. “The ones who were spending zero last year are spending millions this year,” he says. “The ones who were spending millions are spending tens of millions.”

Facebook’s tentacles now touch millions of other websites, from the Huffington Post to Amazon.com (AMZN), that use its reader comment system, and its “like” and “send” buttons, to allow their users to share their content with their friends on the social network. Under Sandberg’s direction, Facebook has begun preaching the mantra of what it calls “social design” to companies that want to remake themselves for the fashionable age of social media. It sets up Facebook brilliantly—those social ads may someday start showing up on any site that has a “like” button.

While the term “social design” sounds vaguely sinister, this is a pretty genius idea not only in its potential power but in its simplicity.  Sponsored Stories unleash the value created by millions of fb users who happily endorse a product they not only like, but because they’re endorsing it publicly, to their entire network, they obviously take some pride in the association.

I’ve no doubt that the naysayers will have a field day with this – that it’s somehow “wrong” to turn my positive comment on Shorty’s Widgets fb page into an ad.  You know what?  If it bugs you that much, don’t leave a comment on Shorty’s page.  Truth is, you’ll probably be hurting his business more than you’ll be hurting fb’s.

To read the article in full, check out this link:  http://buswk.co/myvMkw

Mangia…or how you can get cheap concert tickets

Posted: May 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Business Musings | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Last week I had lunch with my friend David.  We used to work together at SFX Entertainment (now known as Live Nation), and he has long harbored the idea of creating something like TKTS for concerts, sporting events and the like.  We talked about what such a service might look like and how it would be pretty easy to pull off technically.  The stumbling blocks, though, were two-fold.  First, is Ticketmaster.  We all know Ticketmaster as the go-to source for all kinds of tickets, but what most people don’t know is that venues use TM’s systems for inventory control.  Thus, any sale of tickets has to tie into TM’s systems.  Second, and far more gnarly, is the artists.  While everyone loves to think of TM as the evil empire with respect to inflated ticket pricing, the truth is control (and therefore blame) lies squarely with the artists.

So imagine my interest when I read this morning that Groupon and Live Nation (which owns TM) have teamed to, in effect, create a TKTS for live events  (Groupon Brings Group-Buying Concept to Concert-Goers With Ticketmaster Partnership).  Sounds pretty good, right?  Yeah, well, not so fast.  If you think this is going to be a cheap source of Lady Gaga tickets, forget it.  If you think it’s going to get you (dare I say it) Justin Bieber tickets for your kid, you’re SOL, which is probably a blessing.  If, however, you’re bound and determined to catch Journey this summer because you’ve missed 15 out of their last 15 tours, this deal’s for you!

Quick education on the concert business:  It sucks.  It is a high fixed cost, real estate based business, and there are too few artists that can fill an amphitheater or an arena, and too many one-hit wonders and rock and roll dinosaurs.  Ticket prices are too high.  Artists are unwilling to lower them.  Promoters still feel compelled to pay artists guarantees that give them @100% of ticket revenue.  This puts artist and promoter at odds since the promoter is essentially in the beer/popcorn/parking business and therefore ultimately cares more about butts in seats and less about how much a ticket sells for as the show date approaches.

So tell me:  do you think Steven Tyler, coming off the success of AI, is going to allow his tickets to be discounted when he’s earning a guarantee?  Do you think he’s going to publicly admit that his show is sucking wind one minute earlier than necessary to ensure a reasonably full house the night of the show (no one likes to play to an empty house)?  And while a ticket purchased through Groupon is presumably discounted, there has to be some margin in there for Groupon, right?  So why buy from Groupon when you can buy from StubHub.com or any scalper (fyi, scalping, or “reselling,” is legal in most states) who is also sitting with unsold tickets they can discount more deeply because they don’t need artist approval or to compensate a middle man?

The only way this deal works is for acts like Journey and Queensryche and their ilk – bands that tour year in and year out, rarely if ever put out new material, and no one wants to see.  It also works for other forms of live entertainment – sporting events, the circus, and monster truck rallies.

Here’s my advice.  If you want to see a show, make friends with someone at the venue and find out when the “holds” – the tickets that are held back from the initial on-sale by the artist, the promoter, and/or the building for friends and family – are going to be released for sale to the general public (generally a few days before the show).  These are always the best seats in the house.  Stick to club shows – that’s where all the interesting stuff is going on musically anyway.  Or, get ready to see The Big Apple Circus.

Hello world!

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Personal Musings | 6 Comments

So…my first post.  Feeling some pressure to be erudite, funny and memorable.  Probably not gonna happen this go-round.

Truth is, several people have suggested over the years that I start a blog, largely because I tend to be very opinionated, and while even I would never insist that my POVs are always right (although I do think that Charles Barkley’s “I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It” may be the best book title ever), they generally are pretty well substantiated.  So there’s the motivation – ego.

The subject matter?  Well, that could cover a lot of areas.  A bit of background first – I have spent my career in media and entertainment.  I’m rather proud of my status as a “digital pioneer” (my own designation) since I’ve been toiling in this arena since the early 90s.  More specifically, I’ve worked at the nexus of content and technology.  And most importantly, I get so jazzed to see that so many things I’ve dreamt about/planned for/tried to build businesses around are becoming realities.  I also get really turned on by the chaos the current environment engenders – an inability to look past stodgy old business models is like nails on a blackboard to me, especially when the best reason someone can come up with for sticking with the tried and true is “because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”  So, expect me to dissect deals and announcements and generally point out good and bad business behavior where ever I find it.  I also love food – eating it and cooking it (especially baking), so I may wax rhapsodic over a chocolate croissant bread pudding every now and again.  I’m also a big, giant liberal (as a Jewish woman from NY I see that as my birthright), so I may get a little political on your asses.

The blog name?  That’s from the sixth grade.  Mr. Schneider, my teacher, had a nickname for everyone in the class, and that was mine.  Since then, Spam has been a nickname my nearest and dearest have used in some form for years.  However, while the likelihood of confusion between me and a can of questionable meat products (the most basic test used by the US Patent and Trademark Office in determining trademark infringement) is highly unlikely, I really didn’t want to get into it with Hormel.  Besides, if this blog thing works out, my swag will be way cuter than anything offered at the Spam Store (trust me – I own most of it).

So there you have it.  I promise to try and be topical and insightful in my musings.  Oh yeah, and pointed.  Because I’m not running for public office.

PS – If you spot any grammatical errors in my postings, please feel free to let me know.  I abhor improper use of the English language, and am wide open to improving my usage of it.  And as long as we’re on the subject, please feel free to comment on anything I post.  I love a good debate.  And I love to learn something new.  But remember….as Charles says, I may be wrong, but I doubt it.