VNC ’24: Oak View Group CEO Tim Leiweke interviews Cosm President Jeb Terry. (VN Staff)

Desert gathering is conference’s best-attended yet

PHOENIX, Arizona — A record-breaking 2024 VenuesNow Conference, the facility industry’s flagship event, wrapped yesterday (Oct. 16) at the Arizona Biltmore covering an array of topics ranging from the boom in women’s sports to sponsorship strategies, the business case for sustainability, the evolving security landscape and a host of other critical issues facing the industry.

Two keynotes, the first a question-and-answer session with OVG’s Chris Granger and Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark and the second a discussion between Oak View Group CEO Tim Leiweke and Jeb Terry, who heads up the new Cosm attractions that have rolled out in LA and Dallas.

The conference featured a reception at Footprint Center, a relatively new OVG contract, where attendees enjoyed robot-served margaritas, guided arena tours, a whiskey tasting and all manner of culinary delights.

“This is the point where our company explodes,” Leiweke told VN as he mingled with attendees enjoying the opening night event at the downtown home of the NBA Phoenix Suns

When Leiweke interviewed Terry during the following day’s keynote, attendees heard about the new 2,000-capacity “shared reality” experience that will debut next in Atlanta, though the timing is still a big uncertain.

Terry was coy about the food and beverage per caps, but assured Leiweke that the numbers are favorable and the scalability of the concept is sound enough that he envisions dozens of Cosm installations with a fourth soon to be announced.

Leiweke called Cosm, born of the company’s deep involvement in the planetarium industry, “maybe, the most entrepreneurial, brilliant technology I’ve ever seen, as it relates to our industry and to where sports is headed.”

“It’s a must see-to-be-believed thing, and it is a net new offering,” Terry said, explaining that Cosm depends heavily on the rights contracts it has negotiated with broadcast outlets, something that dovetailed with Terry’s own experience as a Fox Sports executive, and is “not cannibalizing anything,” but giving people the ability truly feel like they are in Citi Field while at a Dodgers NLCS watch party.

“It is additive to our industry. I’m not cannibalizing anything right now and making sure we are paying homage and respect to all their stakeholders,” he said. “And that’s really the key to our success right now, is our approach to the industry and making sure we’re additive to whatever position people in this room or other partners are in.

Terry said it hit him like a punch that the concept was workable, but then it was a matter of scalability.

“It was, what do we have to do to execute this at scale, and what we have to do to make sure it’s a vital business,” he said. “You can always invest in a science project, and it’s a cool one off, but it doesn’t scale, and that’s not what we intended to do.”