Once Bill Powell and the Feld organization had contracted to play a non-existent building in Buenos Aires just seven months out, it was time to think beyond the building to the marketing, ticket selling and promotion of the event.
Powell had booked Walt Disney’s World on Ice (as it was known at the time) in Centro Costa Salguero, a new venue being built at the end of an airport runway in Buenos Aires. By any arena standard known to the industry, “under construction” was a lose description of the situation.
Powell knew he would be down there often, and he did end up making that trip every 10 days or so and would be bulldogging the venue operator. At the same time, he had to consider everything else it takes to make a show happen, from advertising to ticket sales to showtime.
Fortunately, he was able to interface with the local Disney Consumer Products division, which had been told by corporate to bend over backwards to make this happen.
“No box office and no ticket outlets existed. We decided to do flex tickets. The only ticket outlets were Tito Lectoure’s record stores, which had been used the year before, and they weren’t going to sell tickets to a competing building,” Powell said.
Because it was a U.S. company doing business in Argentina, they decided on flex tickets so the price could be based on the exchange rate of the day. If the Argentine austral was trading to the U.S. dollar 10-to-1, the ticket price was reflective of 10-to-1. If, in the afternoon, it went to 15-to-1, so did the ticket price. If by doors, it was 20-to-1, it changed again.
“It was the old-fashioned version of dynamic ticket pricing. None of the ticket stock had the price on it. They would sell what they could until they took a look at the pico de camio (exchange rate) and changed the price. They were taking austral to the bank hourly for the exchange rate.”
That was the gerryrigged system Luna Park had set up the year prior, when Feld sold the show to a promoter, Powell remembered. “We needed to be on top of currency fluctuations and had to get to the bank at regular intervals so we could repatriate the funds.”
In theory, that worked as a way to deal with the currency fluctuation, but the practicality of it was elusive. They did not have employees and outlets like Luna Park had. There was no distribution system in place.
“Those are basic things you take for granted,” Powell remembers. But not this time. He had to create it all from scratch.
This piece was one of the harder things he had to get right because if you don’t have a system to get the tickets sold and money back into the central box office and from the box office to the bank and repatriate it to the U.S. each and every day, you don’t have a business.
Electronic ticketing had happened in the U.S. by 1989 and “people were figuring out, at a rudimentary level, how to do a barebones ticketing system on an MS DOS platform. One person who had done that was Billy Williams. He was an old tour business manager for Feld. He had left and gone to work in Nashville. He had a brother who was a computer programmer.
“The Williams brothers had a side project developed, an off brand electronic inventory management system. You could scale a house. Every little ‘X’ was a ticket. You’d assign a value; that was your inventory. We looked at it. I think about it and talk to Tommy and Billy and decide it’s very rudimentary, but let’s take them down there and see what we can do.”
“In Buenos Aires, we quickly found out the phone lines were unreliable so there was no way to transmit data.” They would have to adapt.
Next, he purchased a 40-foot container and cut out eight bank windows and a door, added A/C, and called it a portable box office out at the empty Centro Costa Salguero site. Then they needed power. Even though no one would be going to it, they needed a physical box office somewhere to manage inventory.
Now, what to do for outlets? They had done a beta test and knew their system could sell a ticket, the printer would spit it out and then there was one less ‘X’ on the inventory. But where would people go to buy tickets?
Powell was starting to work with the Disney Consumer Products office. At that point in time, the Walt Disney Company was repatriating/buying back franchise rights of independent consumer product distribution companies throughout Latin America. Stephen De Kanter moved to Miami to run Disney Consumer Products Division and repurchase those rights.
“I knew the guy pretty well. He said you guys are very important to us down here. We don’t get a lot of movies and we don’t get a lot of live stuff on Disney except a skip-and-wave at a mall. It’s kind of important to us to have a big spectacle. Your success is our success for these local offices. He gave a heads up for the local consumer products people down there to assist any way they could help me. That was a huge, huge deal. It cut through a whole lot of red tape and allowed us, in a six-month period, to get plugged in immediately.”
Powell teamed up with a couple people in that office and a local competing promoter, Hector Cavalerro, who was married Valeria Lynch, an Argentine singing star. She was a fixture on Channel 12. He had good relationships with the number one TV station in Argentina.
“So I kind of figured that part out. I interviewed him a couple times and made a deal. Once again, we cut through the red tape. We don’t have much time. We’re not going to be knocking on doors. We’re going to be escorted in the doors. To have a place at the table, we needed partners.”
The genesis of media and marketing campaign was rolling with Hector.
Outlets for ticketing fell to the Walt Disney Co. At the time, they distributed Disney plush and toys at Esso gas stations. They were like European gas stations many, many years ago, Powell said. “There is a place you get gas and then there is a really nice place you get gas. Esso was better, at that time, than 7-Eleven, which combined its convenience store with Citgo gas.”
There were 30 Esso stations in Buenos Aires. Powell walked through that door with Disney’s assistance. The deal points were relatively easy. The Esso franchises got something for every ticket they sold. All Powell needed to do was figure out how to get them inventory.
He did not want to pre-box tickets, meaning print and pull tickets and take the physical product to them. Consignment was not the way to go because too many different people worked behind the counter.
Instead, they put the inventory on 7.5-inch floppies. These were reserved seats with multiple different prices. IBM personal computers were installed in every Esso store and each store was given inventory on a floppy disk. “Then we had Brinks make a sweep multiple times daily, delivering inventory and taking back the cash.”
With marketing and distribution somewhat lined up, Powell’s attention turned to repatriating the money. You can’t repatriate money without a bank account. You can’t have a bank account unless you are an Argentine company. He got a meeting with a big international accounting firm. It’s late January. Showtime is July 1.
“I’d like to establish a company in Argentina. I know you do business with us [Feld] in the U.S.”
“Well sir, establishing a company in Argentina is a very complicated process.”
“Okay, how long will it take?”
“It will take you a year and a half.”
He didn’t have a year and a half and also knew transferring from Argentina to the U.S. was more costly than transferring from Europe. And he was aware of a trade treaty between southern countries of South America called MECOSUR. It was a treaty between Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Uruguay, an international banking center, had the ability at a lesser taxation rate to transfer money back to the U.S.
“I went to the same accounting firm in Uruguay, and posed the same question.” The answer:
“Well, normally it takes a year and a half, but if you want to purchase a company, you can. I have one right here — Steel Yard.”
“That’s how we purchased a company called Steel Yard in Uruguay. That company had completed the process to be chartered, and the accounting company just had it on the shelf as a way to service clients. It was all aboveboard.”
It was all coming together, international finance notwithstanding. “We could get our money from the gas station to the box office, from box office to bank and from the bank back to U.S.”
To be continued….Based on a true story as told to Linda Deckard
Photo: Centro Costa Salguero sits at the end of a runway in Buenos Aires.