A new culture has merged with the old at Ticketmaster as Live Nation hires techies and blends them with the ticketing giant’s experienced staff. Talk to any of them and you quickly learn they are simply in love with the firm.
Cole Gahagan, Ticketmaster COO, is one who joined Live Nation in 2008 with former TM President Nathan Hubbard, and then moved to Ticketmaster five years ago. He was also with Tickets.com for awhile and founded a company called Vertical Alliance, which became Veritix. He is no newbie to the space.
The invitation that sold him on joining Live Nation was the plan to build a new division, Live Nation eCommerce, to include ticketing. “I did that in 2007-2008 and then, lo and behold, we decided to buy a company called Ticketmaster in 2010,” Gahagan said.
The vision for Live Nation Ticketmaster begins with TM Plus. “There was a massive opportunity out there in the secondary market that Ticketmaster wasn’t participating in and somebody else was,” Gahagan said.
First they had to build the technology that would give them entrée into the secondary market, and then they had to take something to market that was, by all measures, controversial.
“Even in this day and age of a legitimized secondary market, two years ago when we rolled this thing out we had to go team by team, building by building, theater by theater and say this is an important product and tool for your fans and it’s important to you and here is why. To a very large extent, we were bringing the secondary market further out of the shadows and into legitimacy and the results have been staggering,” Gahagan said.
TM Plus also strengthened Ticketmaster’s relationship with the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and National Football League. In fact it began with the NBA’s Sacramento Kings’ Chris Granger, who teamed with Ticketmaster to create NBATickets.com, a one-stop shop for primary and secondary tickets for any NBA team, Gahagan recalled. That morphed into TM Plus.
In 2010 and post-merger, Ticketmaster has done away with the fragmented brand approach of being a secondary exchange based on the team brand, where it competed with 70 other resellers, and has made it about the league’s market and all the teams.
Now Ticketmaster helps the leagues with primary and secondary ticket sales as well as special event sales, like the NFL’s Super Bowl or the NHL’s Winter Classic.
“They are all-encompassing partnerships; they are big, robust important partnerships to the leagues that span beyond just retail,” Gahagan said. “We are strategic partners.” Ticketmaster is involved in marketing, pricing and data analytics with those leagues.
Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation did not result in a mass exodus of venue clients, as had been predicted. “I am overwhelmingly proud of the number of clients over the last 10 years who have stayed with us and grown with us,” Gahagan said.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Digital ticketing will continue to grow in popularity, Gahagan said of the future. “It is so easy when I can see that ticket on my mobile device and I can do everything with it that I could do if I were physically holding it.”
Ticketmaster.com is a known and trusted site for fans, but “the reality is that the way that fans and customers buy across the web for all product is changing,” Gahagan said. They don’t just go to one site anymore. That’s why partnerships with Facebook and ScoreBig are so important to the future growth of Ticketmaster’s clients, Gahagan said.
The next thing is Ticketmaster One, the backend ticketing platform, which is an entirely new and engineered ticketing system for clients, Gahagan said. It will be the one platform for the live entertainment industry.
“It is fitting that in the company’s 40th year, we are rolling out, right now, the new application of this entirely new platform and we are beginning to sunset our old platform that has served our clients very well. This is what is going to take our company into the new era.”
Last year, Ticketmaster rolled out two apps – Ticker, which has the ability to report on events to the mobile device, and EventBase, an even-based app that allows venues to more quickly and conveniently build events, scale the house and make price changes. “Any building manager will tell you how much they are addicted to Ticker,” Gahagan predicted.
And more apps are on the way, each one imagined to help teams and venues better manage their business. “The way our tech team is building this is brilliant. We are not unplugging one computer and plugging in a new one. We are leasing these apps incrementally to the client while they continue to use our core platforms. Over time there will be more and more of these new apps and less of the core platforms.”
WHO IS THAT FAN
Amy Howe, chief strategy officer for Ticketmaster, was a partner in McKinsey & Co., for 14 years. “I am a newbie to ticketing,” she admitted, noting this month marks her two-year anniversary with Live Nation. She moved to Ticketmaster in January of 2015.
Howe’s focus is on understanding the 100 million fans in the Ticketmaster database and leveraging that data to engage them more effectively and in a highl-personalized way.
A year ago, Ticketmaster did a major refresh on its fan segmentation, Howe said. There are now six major segments, including the “Live Addict,” who buys tickets to 6-8 varied events per year; the “Genre Junkies,” who primarily buy concert tickets; and the Last Minute segment who buy the weekend of or a week or two up to the event.
Live Analytics has come up with an increasingly more nuanced perspective of consumer behavior, attitudes and preferences toward live entertainment, much more than just the type of content they consume. “The art in segmentation is to figure out those variables that really determine your behavior when you are on our platform,” Howe said. Marketing then develops customized programs to speak to those needs and behaviors.
Howe’s job is to step back and take a holistic view of that on-sale experience. “At any given point in time, what kind of demand are we seeing relative to the supply?,” she asks. When 10 million fans queued up to buy Adele tickets, 9.5 million left disappointed because they couldn’t get tickets. How do we communicate a message to them so that whole end-to-end lifecycle for the onsale is something positive for everyone, she wonders.
There is no one-size-fits-all message to 9.5 million fans and Ticketmaster didn’t have the luxury of integrated inventory for that onsale, but for most of its artists, Ticketmaster now has the opportunity to market back to you with some of that secondary inventory. “In some cases we can go back to the consumers that tried and were unsuccessful in their first attempt to get tickets,” Howe said of the current level of sophistication. Sometimes, Ticketmaster is able to go back and, at minimum, apologize and try to reengage them in its platform.
Justin Burleigh joined Ticketmaster from Salesforce in October 2015. He was working for Live Nation running a design-thinking practice, helping companies think about big transformations and innovation. He is officed in Phoenix.
Innovation has been in the DNA of Ticketmaster from the beginning, Burleigh noted. “At the heart of every single story throughout 40 years is the client and the fan. Those relationships and partnerships are just as important as anything.”
He considers “de-anonymization” the heart of the matter. “Understanding who the fan is and what’s important to them, their networks, friends and family is the goal. Do you really know their preferences, the experience they want to have?”
Burleigh believes the fan’s extended network is a goldmine. Their circle of friends speaks volumes about who they are and makes relevant and meaningful communication possible.
The conversation starts with segmentation but, over time, you can do individuals, said Burleigh. “We can exist in a world where we leverage what we know about the fan, not in an overreaching way, but in creating a connection. People love the connections they have with artists and the people who produce content. It may couple with a deep love of a venue because of esthetics and personal experience when there. Combine all that and we can do some interesting engagement.”
The pace of innovation today in a company that has been around 40 years is mind blowing, Burleigh said. He grew up completely attached to music, even playing in a band in the Southwest for a couple years. He likened what is about to happen at Ticketmaster this summer and fall to “those moments you’re waiting for your favorite artist to go on, you’re so excited with nervous anticipation of what’s about the happen. That’s what Ticketmaster is going to feel like for awhile.”
Ticketmaster One, which allows clients to manifest, manage, execute and report on events, includes EventBase, a one-stop shop for event management tools. Burleigh is excited about new capabilities coming out shortly.