AudienceView President and COO Mark Fowlie, VP for Arts & Entertainment Maureen Andersen, keynote speaker and Futurist Garry Golden, CEO and Chairman Kevin Kimsa and VP Sales and Marketing Jeff Koets.
REPORTING FROM SAN DIEGO — Canadian firm AudienceView is planning to roll out a new cloud-based GA ticketing application to compete with tech upstart EventBrite. Titled MarketView, the scalable ticketing system offers stripped down ticketing services for small events and local producers who want to work with a regional ticketing system but can't afford an expensive enterprise system.
The announcement came during AudienceView's user conference AVConnect, which expanded to a multiday meeting for the first time in 2013 with a three-day event at the San Diego Hilton. While much of the conference focused on the core AudienceView application, the launch of MarketView and its potential for regional ticketing companies gave the executive team an opportunity to make a big announcement at their marquee event.
“It’s the most significant part of our strategy,” said AudienceView CEO and Chairman Kevin Kimsa. “I think it’s also an acknowledgement that the industry recognizes that there needs to be more cost-effective ways of getting tickets moved.”
Nightclubs, wine tastings, social events and small theatrical runs are a growing market for ticket services, and AudienceView President and COO Mark Fowlie said his firm plans to roll out MarketView as the industry’s first white label, self-serve, e-commerce and CRM solution. Fowlie said the system will go after the “long tail” of the live entertainment industry — the tens of thousands of events in North America and Europe that individually represent a miniscule fraction of the market, but when added together, can be quite significant.
The move is a direct shot at market leader EventBrite, whose platform is used by small event producers and promoters to quickly ticket GA events without an exclusive contract. EventBrite has seen a spike in its festival business with new contracts for the inaugural Tortuga Music Festival in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and the Hangout Fest in Gulf Shores, Ala.
While EventBrite is available to anyone, Fowlie said AudienceView will be selective about how it rolls out MarketView and might begin by partnering with its clients who already offer regional ticketing services. He said many of his clients are approached by event organizers to help ticket smaller local events, but often the costs of utilizing a large enterprise software system for a low-volume event doesn’t make financial sense.
“The reality is that it’s very hard to satisfy what the market's functionality needs with a commercial arrangement that equals a fraction of a dollar per ticket,” said Fowlie. “It’s not our customers issue — it's the market.”
Client Tera Farnsworth with the University of California, Santa Cruz, said she is going to look at rolling out MarketView for community events, especially as her university box office expands into the community and tickets more local, nonuniversity events. UCSC just teamed up with the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium to sell each other’s tickets. She said she gets many requests for community ticketing services, including the Watsonville (Calif.) Film Festival, who are looking for help with credit card transactions, but don't need advanced CRM tools.
“They could use the MarketView product to set up their own events and while we would guide them along, they could essentially do it all themselves,” Farnsworth said. “We offer full service ticketing, but some people don’t need that."
AudienceView’s white label approach means the application can be individually branded and customized for sponsorships and advertising. It will operate on cloud-based servers and require far less IT infrastructure than a typical in-house ticketing system. Kimsa noted that upgrades to MarketView can be made quickly across the entire platform — “and that’s something the venture capital community looks for — whether or not it’s scalable.”
While the product was privately demoed at INTIX, the International Ticketing Association Conference in Orlando in January, and demoed in front of clients during AudienceView’s AVConnect users conference, it won’t be publicly launched until later this month. Fowlie said he could have clients using MarketView by April 2013.
“This is not something we came up with six months ago,” said Fowlie. “We’ve been watching the market over time and the fact the market is maturing around what EventBrite has done, and we felt like this was the time to get into the market.”
Kimsa said the MarketView rollout was part of an enhancement upgrade for AudienceView’s core ticketing product.
“Down the road, we do believe that a lot of our customers are going to have to have the ability to self-serve their clients,” Kimsa said. “Part of our goal for this year’s AVConnect was to make them aware where the market is headed."
Interviewed for this article: Kevin Kimsa & Mark Fowlie, (416) 687-2000; Tara Farnsworth, (831) 459-2159