Ticketing has always been attractive market. Every month, if not every week, a few of the key players. to equity investors, but 2017 has begets news to that end. With INTIX coming Maureen Andersen, CEO of INTIX, is of been a particularly active year for up in Baltimore Jan. 23¬25, Venues Today the opinion it’s driven by a quest for ticket and acquisitions and mergers in the looked at the reasoning behind this trend with client inventory more than technology and that it is more frequent in the performing arts this past year.
Marc Jenkins, senior advisor to Providence Equity, which is the investment arm that invest¬ed in Patron Technology, sees it as investment opportunity in a fragmented market.
“The overall strategy starts with the investment pieces. Right now, the space across the ticketing industry is relatively fractured,” Jenkins said. “When you think of all the various providers, from Ticketmaster to the smallest of companies, there are hundreds of them. Their products, generally speaking, suffer from a lack of investment.
“For an investor, the idea is if you bring these pieces together, you can attach more investment to them and you can bring them out to market.”
In the last six months, Patron Technology acquired Show Clix, Ticket Leap and Seat Advisor. The Patron Technology Platform, which is made up of Patron Manager and the three acquisitions, transacts over 100 million tickets per year. “Across the platform, we have over 8,000 ticketing clients ranging from big to small,” Jenkins said.
To Kim Damron, president of Paciolan, which was acquired by Learfield and acquired TicketsWest and WestCoast Entertainment, it’s a combination of inventory and comple¬mentary businesses. She does see some empha¬sis in the arts, which is a sweet spot for Learfield even though it is best known as a col¬lege sports enterprise.
“There are companies, too, that realize it’s harder to run a ticketing company than they thought and there’s consolidation because of that,” Damron said. “Ticketing is very complex and the more power you can put behind it the better.”
Jenkins believes it starts with the opportu¬nity to improve the product for both sides of the table, the customer/fan and the client/pro¬moter. By bringing the pieces together, Patron
can afford to invest in them and, hopefully,
bring a new level of service to both. “Any pro¬
moter of a live event would say there is room
for improvement in the space,” Jenkins said.
“All consumers’ expectations are getting
greater and greater.”
For Patron, the driver to acquisitions is
improving technology. For example, they are
rolling out Patron Manager’s Customer
Relations Management (CRM) capabilities to
Show Clix clients. “That only happens because the business is together now,” he said. “It’s a
super¬custom integration with Salesforce that
can be imported over with Show Clix clients
looking for functionality.”
The key driver then is “when we find
new companies that can benefit from this con¬
solidation and we can invest in them and
improve the product,” Jenkins said.
Andersen opined that the impending
implementation of open platform ticketing
technology is what’s driving the acquisitions
and the goal is inventory. Jenkins demurred.
“We see the need in the market and we see the evolution of client and fans getting more and more digital and we see the need for improved¬upon products.”
All agreed that the ticketing space will con¬tinue to move around a lot in 2018. Jenkins thinks it comes down to better identifying the fan and better serving them, a hunt everyone is in.
“TicketsWest is a nice complement to our business; they service clients as Paciolan does and are very customer¬centric,” Damron said. “For us, it’s an opportunity to grow.”
Whether the driver is technolo¬gy and/or inventory depends on who you are, Damron added. “We have fantastic technology; for us it was to grow our client base. We’re not look¬ing at technology piece unless they’re not in the ticketing space.”
Paciolan handles about 120 million tickets annually. TicketsWest brought 100¬plus clients into the fam¬ily. “We didn’t look at the number of tickets. We looked at the quality of their clients, like Portland’5 [Centers for the Arts in Oregon], where they just had “Hamilton” on sale. They are complementary to our business.”
Learfield is on the same page, having also acquired Mogo Arts, for which 160 of its 200 clients are arts.
Paciolan’s parent company has just approved a multimillion¬dollar incremental investment in the prod¬uct, heavily focused on the perform¬ing arts business as well,” Damron said. “They understand we want to
grow in live entertainment in general.”
Predicting a lot more activity in 2018, Damron added, “I love the home we landed in and I love TicketsWest. I’m very pleased with how this year ended for us.”
The trade show floor at INTIX will look a lot different this year thanks to all the acqui¬sitions and mergers, but that’s a good thing.
“As we go into a world where there’s an open market, it won’t matter as much where you get your ticket; he who has the most densi¬ty and data and inventory, that’s what I think it’s about,” Andersen concluded.