Comcast Spectacor, owner of the Wells Fargo Center and the Philadelphia Flyers, has launched a new events division as it looks to capitalize on resurgent demand for live experiences.
Spectacor Events & Entertainment will focus on booking and creating new events, said Emily Dunham, who was hired to serve as senior vice president of the new division.
Dunham has managed concert bookings and event hospitality for multiple venues over the last 20 years. Most recently, she served as vice president of corporate strategy for the Washington Nationals, where she worked with the sponsorship team and oversaw the non-baseball events held at the ballpark. Including Dunham, six people are helming Spectacor’s new events division, and the company is looking to hire for additional positions in the coming weeks.
Spectacor Events & Entertainment was born out of the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic last winter, when Comcast Spectacor hosted its Winter on Broad Street holiday lights event at a time when the entertainment industry had few national touring options. Winter On Broad Street attracted nearly 70,000 people, which Comcast Spectacor says demonstrates the appetite for homegrown events in the Philadelphia market.
The company will look to host a similar holiday light show this year with the goal of more than doubling its size, Dunham said.
Leading up to that, the new Spectacor division will kick off with two events.
On Aug. 28, Wells Fargo Center will open its floor to roller skating for the first time, complete with a live DJ. Local roller skating organization Great on Skates will offer skating and roller dance lessons. Tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for kids.
Then on Sept. 25, Wells Fargo Center will host the block party-style Philly Tailgate Games, which are presented by Yuengling Traditional Lager. Attendees can compete in games like cornhole, ladder golf and Jenga for prizes such as a year of free beer, tickets to concerts at Wells Fargo Center, and Philadelphia Flyers season tickets. Tournament tickets are $40 and general admission tickets are $10.
Spectacor Events & Entertainment looks to further grow its content to ultimately make the Wells Fargo Center a “365-day-a-year venue,” Dunham said. The booking team also secures events for nearly 190 Spectra venues across the country, so the events division will look to serve as a resource for those hubs to “leverage their scale and drive more content,” she added.
Spectacor Events & Entertainment will move to build out content in Philadelphia for a wide range of audiences, including families, millennials and Gen-Zers, Dunham said. A beer or food festival may drive thousands of event goers while a more niche event would be “purposefully smaller.”
“[We] expect to get to the point where we’re driving hundreds of thousands of additional tickets through Wells Fargo Center and other venues we work with throughout the calendar year,” Dunham said.
Feeding that demand will be a backlog of live events from the entertainment industry. A surplus of shows is planned for the next two years, Dunham noted, as many artists and performers tours were canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to Covid-19. Those happenings combined with artists debuting new albums in 2022 means there are “basically three years of content ready to go.”
Last weekend, Wells Fargo Center hosted Disney on Ice. It was the first time the event was held there in August, she said, but there was still a strong turnout akin to what Comcast Spectacor is seeing for ticket sales trends across the board.
In addition to maintaining established connections with live event companies like Live Nation and AEG, Spectacor Events & Entertainment is taking a look at new promoters and agencies that were redeveloped throughout the pandemic, Dunham said. For example, it's working with Latin entertainment leader CMN to bring Bad Bunny to the Wells Fargo Center later this fiscal year.
In anticipation, arenas and stadiums are gearing up to host a lot more content in a year than they typically would, Dunham said, and consumers are showing they’re ready to get back out there.
