Venue managers get very creative when seeking top talent to play a secondary market. Which is why Matt Gibson decided on a major and unique promotion to welcome Bon Jovi to town more than a decade ago.
“All of the lessons I learned were from being dumb, including this one in particular,” he told Based on Truth. “I came from design and marketing and communication. So I always looked at what we did from that angle. And we did a really dumb marketing stunt; dumb because I didn’t think it through as much as I should have. I should have talked to certain groups before I pulled this.”
It’s tough to land top talent for Spokane, Wash. “We work very, very hard at it. We went out on a limb and bought Bon Jovi ourselves; we were really excited,” he recalled. It was 2013.
As a marketing push, they decided to name the building after the band for a specific period of time, a couple of months leading up to the show.
The proper name of the building is Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena, though that moniker is only seen in press releases and official documents. The decision was made to drop “Spokane” and temporarily rename the venue Bon Jovi Veterans Memorial Arena.
Gibson knew enough to retain the veterans affiliation, having witnessed the uproar in other cities when title sponsors tampered with the “Veterans Memorial” portion of the name.
However, the veterans group in Spokane was very unhappy anyway. “We heard a lot of grumbling on social media and a few emails that we were pulling this,” he said, even though they took great pains to retain Veterans Memorial. “People did not appreciate us messing with the building’s name, even for a finite amount of time.”
The night of the show, one person came out wearing a Redskins football jersey and carrying a cardboard sign that said “Spokane Arena insults veterans.”
“It was one person sitting for 20 minutes on a street corner near our building and that was the picture the paper used the next morning to describe what had happened. In fact, the reporter said in the narrative, ‘Spokane veterans groups flock to the streets in protest of the name change to Bon Jovi Veterans Memorial Arena.’ It was one guy for 20 minutes.”
He learned to never underestimate the power of a photograph or a story in the news.
“Once people read that, there was nothing I could do to fix it, other than fall on my sword and contact all of the news media and go online and apologize profusely. It went badly.”
He also learned that sometimes the identity of your local civic building really, really means something to people and don’t discount that.
The concept had seemed like fun. This concert was a big coup for Spokane and they wanted to make a big announcement. It came with an incredibly cool logo for the new name.
But the process of protesting also brought to light that on the front of the building and on all the neon signs inside, the building name was simplified to Spokane Arena. Not only were they pairing veterans with a rock band, but veterans weren’t even important enough to be on name on the side of the building. “We had discounted their contribution to America.”
Gibson clearly wasn’t going to catch a break on this one.
“I didn’t even come close to anticipating this. It blew me away.”
It snowballed into a public relations nightmare. The arena board sent Gibson to communications class and set him up with a consultant.
“They took me to the woodshed. There was nothing I could do, once it was out. The more I protested or tried to explain, the worse it got.”
Lessons learned:
• Just shut up and apologize and take your medicine and move on. It doesn’t even make sense, but the court of public opinion is the toughest judge you will ever face.
• Seek participation and buy-in, it’s invaluable. If he did it again, he would immediately get, at the minimum, the veterans’ approval. And if he couldn’t, he wouldn’t do it. “Just because I think something is fun and cool, it doesn’t mean everyone else will think that.
He put that lesson to work two years later when the Gold Star families wanted to erect a public memorial on arena grounds. It was a really great partnership, working together to find the proper placement, commissioning the artist and landscape designers and figuring out if there was a budget for maintenance. “I made some good friends and we still talk. The important thing is, it was important to them.”
“When you’re running a venue, it doesn’t really matter what you think personally. If it’s something your community wants to do, by all means try to shepherd it as positively as you can and make it happen.” — Based on a true story as told to Linda Deckard