Lee Ann Gibbons is the Great Communicator of the Messina Touring Group. She communicates with both artist management and individual box offices to build shows and keep holds consistent. She also sets up all internal buys, monitors and distributes tour ticket counts to agents, management and office personnel, and is a key component in all discussions involving scaling and pricing of tickets. She oversees all the flexing of pricing as well as monitoring Pricemaster initiatives. She coordinates all the VIP tickets, Platinum and American Express plans and works closely with each tour accountant for settlement. She does all this with a staff of three.
“What a fantastic honor,” said Gibbons upon learning she won the 2016 Venues Today Box Office Star Award. “I love my job, and this is such great confirmation that I’m doing it well.”
Gibbons works in the Austin, Texas, Messina Touring Group office and previously worked for AEG Live/Messina Touring Group in Nashville. In-between, she worked at Austin (Texas) City Limits Live at the Moody Theater.
“I love to multitask and I love the constant schedule changes,” said Gibbons. “I love working with the different tours, the different artists and managers, and I love the fast-paced environment of the promoters’ world.”
Having a ticketing department is new to Gibbons in 2016. Previously, she was a one-woman show.
“This year was really big and we brought in a ticketing department which, before, was different camps putting up shows and centralizing it with me,” said Gibbons. “Being able to bring in additional people for support has been beneficial for the whole Messina Touring Group. We’ve been able to centralize the work,
and it’s making the ticketing so much better.”
“I went from a department of one to four,” she said. “It was a challenge in the beginning months trying to teach the new people while shows were going on sale, but what’s really rewarding now is that they are able to take point and people are going to them now. To see them grow is really cool.”
“The thing about Lee Ann that makes us fall to our knees with gratefulness is her even-keeled persona,” said Kate McMahon, executive GVP of Messina Tour Group. “We have a lot of big personalities in this office and we had an insane six months. A Lumineers tour, a Blake Shelton tour, Eric Church, George Strait, it went on and on. Lee Ann took it all in stride day after day.”
“Managing a tour like Lee Ann does is about being organized and being able to change things on the fly,” said McMahon. “Things get rescaled and then she has to redo the work and then check it again and she just did it over and over again, and never once did she get snippy about it. She handles things with grace, and we all left for vacation and thought how grateful we are that Lee Ann’s on the team.”
Gibbons had a big year. “There were a lot of tours in 2016,” she said. “We put over 200 shows on sale and I directed and guided them and got them up and running in all the different venues around the country.”
Gibbons was proud of accomplishing the implementation of a web-based system to handle all internal orders. “We revamped what we do into the web-based system, which makes it easier on the box offices as well,” she said. “We were excited to try this and are thrilled with the results.”
Gibbons was also gung-ho on the Pricemaster tool. It’s a tool that’s run by Ticketmaster that flexes pricing.
“Instead of going to the box office and having them change prices, the promoter is able to access all the inventory and change the prices through the system,” said Gibbons. “It changes automatically so there’s no down time. It changes scaling as you go through and determines the prices and makes recommendations for sales. A lot of different analytics go into it; this is all done without having to take down the show. It’s a great tool for increasing revenue. It’s been pretty beneficial for all our tours and it’s made things much easier for the box office.”
Gibbons was thrilled to be the first promoter who used Pricemaster. “We tried this on five of our tours,” she said. “We’ve used it before on sports, but this was the first time we used it in the concert world. It was exciting to put it together and learn how to use it and teach venues how to use it.”
Her most challenging ticketing experience in 2016 was the Eric Church tour. “We typically don’t do a lot of national on sales,” she said. “But we did a national for Eric Church’s presale with all the fan clubs.”
Gibbons put up 60 shows at the same time. “Just the volume of shows, all going up at the same time, not even spread across time zones, was quite a challenge. I then had to monitor them and make sure they were up and running.”
“Eric Church is adamant about taking care of his fans and he wanted them to have access to tickets at the same time to level the playing field,” she said. “This was a move to thwart the scalpers and bots. Eric is taking the lead on the war on scalpers.”
“I definitely feel like we have to find a way to re-price the tickets so they don’t get into the scalpers hands,” she said. “They hold them back and then put them on the secondary market. We need to do a better job of pricing the tickets to begin with.”
Gibbons thinks tours need to price on market value and not on a tour’s projections. “Anything we can do to stop people from buying and reselling we must do,” she said. “At the end of the day it’s all about the fans.”
Challenges of her job are “coordinating with management teams and making sure we are all on the same page. We have to bridge the gap between the artist managers and the box office; we need to work in everyone’s best interests. If a tour wants to do something we have to make sure it works for the venue as well. We’re all on the same team.”
Gibbons said the most rewarding aspect of her job was getting an email from a fan who was thrilled to get a ticket. “Sometimes I get an email with a picture from the show and I love it when I do,” she said. “Box office and ticketing can sometimes be a thankless job. When someone reaches out with a heartfelt thanks it really makes it worth it.”
“Lee Ann and her team do all the counts, distribute to the proper teams, and when we go on sale, they communicate our builds, pricing, all of our presale fan clubs, Pricemaster, American Express Platinum and VIPs,” said McMahon. “She takes all that information and communicates it to every single building we’re working with and then she constantly follows up with them. Keeping all the information straight and executing it properly is one of her number one jobs.”
“She’s a part of everything we do,” added McMahon. “She’s the voice of reason here.”