Pictured are Heather McLaren from Playwrights Horizon in New York, AudienceView CEO Kevin Kimsa, Carol Thomas and Casey York of Playwrights Horizon and Joe Guglielmo with Emerson College in Boston.
Emerson College, Boston
Based on the success of sites like Netflix and Pandora, Joe Guglielmo, director of Audience Services, ArtsEmerson, Office of the Arts, Emerson College, decided to build his own recommendation engine for buyers who visit the ArtsEmerson website.
“Instead of there being a microtargeted general upsell strategy across our whole site, our recommendations are micro-targeted based on event purchasing,” he said. That means not everyone who visits the site gets an offer message — just the ones who engage in a certain type of behavior.
“It can be as easy as ‘because someone purchased the Wednesday performance of Metamorphosis they could be messaged to spend an additional $20 and enjoy a drink before the show, because it’s opening night,” he said. “It kind of changes the way you think about everything. If you can tie two things together, in a way that creates added value, why not do it?”
Playwrights Horizons, New York
Hoping to attract more young people to the theater, Heather McLaren with Playwrights Horizons helped launch the company’s first Facebook ticket sales initiative using AudienceView’s AVTiki, a sales engine that embeds the purchase within the social site.
“It was very easy, much more streamlined than building a website,” McLaren said. “On the backend, it’s similar to the AudienceView platform, while the user interface is customized to our brand. The biggest challenge is letting people know they’re making a secure transaction without making them click a link to a private policy.”
The app is one of the first to allow friends to reserve seats for other friends. After purchasing tickets on Facebook, a user can place a hold on nearby seats — typically for four hours — and notify their friends through Facebook that they are available.
“You don’t pick from a seating chart,” said Casey York, Associate GM at Playwrights Horizons. “You just say how many seats you want and how many seats you want to hold on to — there’s a countdown and the invitee can see how many minutes are left.”
Less than five percent of initial buyers used the reserve-a-seat function, but those who did had a high redemption rate, York said.
“It’s great because now, our customers aren’t just buying tickets but they’re doing our advertising for us,” she said.