From Super Bowl negotiators, a threat of “pay to play”

A bold request from the NFL shakes up a familiar scenario.

By — on / Negotiation Briefings Articles

As we gain experience negotiating, we become accustomed to conducting talks in the usual way. A bit of friendly small talk, a discussion of the issues at stake, followed by delivery of an opening offer, price haggling, and a search for mutually beneficial tradeoffs.

Rarely do we consider that we might be able to radically shape the outcome to our advantage. But the National Football League (NFL) attempted to do just that as it approached negotiations to choose a performer for the halftime show of the 2015 Super Bowl, scheduled to be held in Phoenix in February.

A bold proposal
The Super Bowl halftime show has long been a coveted opportunity for musical acts to court a huge audience. Traditionally, the NFL does not pay performers to play at halftime but has paid for their travel and production expenses, which can cost millions of dollars.

In recent years, artists such as Beyoncé have put tickets for their tours on sale immediately after their Super Bowl appearance, with lucrative results. Aware of this phenomenon, the NFL took a new tack when approaching its short list of candidates for the 2015 halftime show: Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Coldplay. Specifically, it asked them to consider paying a portion of their post–Super Bowl tour income or making some other financial contribution to the NFL in exchange for the halftime gig, Hannah Karp reports in the Wall Street Journal.

The pay-to-play proposal received a chilly response from the artists’ representatives; at this writing, the outcome of the negotiations remains unknown. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting the NFL’s bold attempt to reframe how its counterparts viewed the negotiation.

A prized photo
The NFL’s bold request hearkens back to a similarly brazen move from an earlier era in American history, as recounted by David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius in their book 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals (Harvard Business Review Press, 2006).

Back in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential campaign reprinted a picture of the candidate on three million pamphlets to be distributed during an upcoming tour. Too late, campaign workers realized that they had failed to secure the rights to reproduce the picture from the photography studio that owned them. Using the pamphlets without permission would risk a scandalous and expensive lawsuit. They could try to quickly negotiate to buy the rights to the photo, but the studio could legitimately demand up to $3 million.

George Perkins, the campaign’s manager, came up with a Plan C. He sent a telegram to the photography studio saying, “We are planning to distribute millions of pamphlets with Roosevelt’s picture on the cover. It will be great publicity for the studio whose photograph we use. How much will you pay us to use yours? Respond immediately.” A rapid reply arrived from the studio: “We’ve never done this before, but under the circumstances we’d be pleased to offer you $250.”

Changing the game
In 3-D Negotiation, Lax and Sebenius note that most of us would object to the misleading nature of Perkins’s message, which falsely suggested that the photo hadn’t been printed yet. Yet the story still offers several key negotiating lessons; the same can be said of the Super Bowl story. Here are three of them:

1. Look beyond price. In their attempts to hold down costs, both the NFL negotiators and George Perkins considered the broader set of interests of their counterparts, including their desire for publicity. When preparing to haggle over price, consider whether there’s anything else your counterpart might value even more.

2. Think about the other side’s no-deal alternatives. Our assumptions about how negotiations typically unfold can cause us to overlook the other party’s BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement. The NFL, for example, recognized that musicians might consider the chance to play the Super Bowl, even at a price, to be preferable to not playing the halftime show at all. Similarly, the Roosevelt campaign correctly anticipated that the photo studio would be loath to pass up a prime promotional opportunity.

3. Try a new frame. Rather than engaging the studio in joint problem solving over the question of photo rights, Perkins sent a telegram requesting a quick decision. Similarly, the NFL let it be known that it was negotiating with several top artists for the coveted Super Bowl show. By framing what you’re offering as a hot commodity, you might persuade the other party to take a second look.

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