Work in concert
Think back to the last time you bought a ticket to a live event, whether it was a concert, a play or a sports match. Chances are it was a fairly straightforward process: see advert; visit website; get ticket. But that simple, three-step process is merely the tail end of a long and complex series of interactions involving talent, managers, agents, promoters, production companies and venues. Right in the mix, you’ll usually find Ticketmaster. The company – part of Live Nation Entertainment – buys tickets from event promoters and, in turn, sells them on to fans.
“People come to us to buy a ticket, and they expect us to deliver the ticket to them and to get them into the gig – that’s what we do,” says Sophie Crosby, Ticketmaster International’s vice-president of insight. But that’s not all the company does.
Behind the scenes, Crosby and her team of 39 people are amassing and analysing a huge amount of data about the tickets people buy, who they are, and what their interests are. For the past five years or so, Crosby has been fixated on the goal of creating a single customer view for Ticketmaster: of helping the business and its clients to get better and smarter at marketing to event-goers.
Crosby started down this path when she was a client of Ticketmaster, working for the events promoter Live Nation, prior to the 2010 merger of the two companies. “I wasn’t getting what I wanted,” she said. “I wanted to market more effectively.”
A face in the crowd
The live events business has traditionally “not been a very scientific one”, says Crosby. When it comes to selling new events – a pop concert, say – the course of action most commonly taken is to target all the people who have been to similar events before. Sometimes this will work. In the case of music festivals, Crosby says, the number of people who return year-on-year is “phenomenal” so targeting previous attendees is a smart move. But for other events – comedy shows, say – it might prove a less successful strategy. Miranda Hart fans, for example, might not want to see a Michael McIntyre show, and vice-versa.
“Action has to ensue as a result of insight, or we may as well not be here. If we have only delivered insight, then we haven’t done very well”
“But if you can pin-down and understand your audience better, you’ll be able to understand and find affinities that you wouldn’t have otherwise realised,” explains Crosby. Sticking with the Miranda Hart example, rather than trying to sell to people who’ve previously bought tickets to other stand-up comics, you might instead target people who have seen the play Jumpy, starring Tamsin Greig. People who have seen Jumpy are 163 times more likely than the average person to have also seen Miranda Hart live, says Crosby. That’s quite a correlation, and a clear opportunity to cross-market the two events.
Ticketmaster is able to work out these affinities thanks to the wealth of data it holds on customers. In the UK alone, Ticketmaster has some 11m individual customer records – boiled down from 46m separate transactions – out of which it is able to figure out whether people who buy one sort of ticket are likely to buy something else.
As well as the purchase data, and its associated demographic data, Ticketmaster also has a deal with Experian, covering 10 markets, that allows it to overlay Experian’s Mosaic segmentation on its own data. Crosby’s team is also developing its own audience-specific segmentation, in order to better categorise its customers according to their demographics and behaviours.
“We want to sell more tickets, better,” explains Crosby. In common with most ticketing companies, she says about 30% of the company’s inventory goes unsold. Helping reduce that number is one of the insight team’s core aims. “We’ve got to use this data, this science and our new tools, to ensure that we’re delivering the right message to right person at the right time.”
IF THE TICKET PRICE ISN’T RIGHT…
Making sure supply meets demand in the live event marketplace
Setting the price of tickets to live events is a fiendishly complicated thing. Price too high and you’ll have empty seats. Price too low and you’ll sell out quickly – but scalpers and touts, who resell them on to fans at grossly inflated prices, will have bought huge chunks of inventory. In both scenarios, the event promoters and performers lose revenue.
It’s a question of supply and demand, and how to strike the right balance was the subject of a Planet Money show in June (podcast available here). The show focused on singer Kid Rock and the tactics he’s using to try to cut the touts out of the loop. For starters, he’s upping the number of shows he puts on, ensuring there’s plenty of supply to meet demand. Meanwhile, for the best seats in the house, he’s working with Ticketmaster to adjust prices based on an ongoing analysis of how much tickets are being bought for and sold at in the re-sale markets.
Crosby says: “If we don’t take the lead on this, and we don’t start to look at pricing at the intersection of supply and demand, the people who win are not the people in the value chain – the artist, manager, promoter or venue. It’s just somebody who came in and scooped it up. It’s the proverbial guy in the sheepskin jacket.”
Band together
Crosby has built up Ticketmaster International’s insight team over the past three years. The 39 people that report to her are split into several groups: There’s the strategic analysis group, within which sit two dedicated research people who are tasked with understanding customers, industry trends and the competition; an analytics team, which pours over client data; a data designer (more of which later); and search engine optimisation and web marketing analytics specialists. Then there are the 14 people within the data services group who are responsible for using Ticketmaster’s transaction data to create Crosby’s sought-after single customer view.
Crosby also has a customer relationship management and business intelligence team “and they’re very much focused on getting the full benefit out of our data warehouse”. A small team of insight product people are on hand to guide the development of Ticketmaster’s data analytics and marketing tools, Live Analytics and Live Messenger, both of which leverage the data warehouse assets and are used internally as well as externally.
Live Analytics, as the name suggests, is a reporting platform designed to give artists, venues and production teams insights into how, where, and to whom they can sell tickets – as well as to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns – while Live Messenger, is an email and SMS marketing tool.
Sophie Crosby, Ticketmaster International’s vice-president of insight
Getting these tools into the hands of clients is an ongoing process, says Crosby. “We’ve rolled them out to about five so far.” As yet, she says, the company has seen nothing in the way of pushback from people wary of the encroachment of data and science on what is clearly a creative-driven industry. “I think creative people are hugely enthused by data,” Crosby explains. “Sometimes it just helps to underpin what they knew all along, but other times it really helps to show marked differences in things like audience, spread or distribution that they had not realised.”
Crosby gives the example of a company that hosts a series of events in London each year. “They sell a few hundred thousand tickets, so it’s quite a big deal,” says Crosby. “But until we did the research for them, they presumed that people were only coming from London and the southeast, so that’s where they were marketing too.” The analysis showed a fairly even distribution of attendees across the country, however.
Another aspect Ticketmaster looked at was ticket pricing. The event organiser was wary of pricing the best seats – the front seats – too high. But by analysing the rate of sale, Crosby’s team was able to show that it was actually the most expensive tickets that sold first and quickest.
What the client chooses to do with that data is up to them, says Crosby. Do they market more widely? Bump up the price of the top-selling tickets? “Our plan is not really to tell our clients what to do, but to give them all of the available data and insight to allow them to make the best decision for them.”
Ensuring change ensues
Doing nothing with the data, however, is the one option Crosby is not happy to see on the table. “Nothing that my team does is of use if we cannot deliver change to the business – if the business and our clients cannot embrace it, use it, make sense of it and do something with it,” she says.
“We’ve got to use this data, this science and our new tools, to ensure that we’re delivering the right message to right person at the right time”
The reason Crosby has a data designer on staff is “to make sure that the data tells a story and that people can do something with it… We’re very keen on trying to ensure that the message gets through”.
Crosby sees this messaging work as one of her core responsibilities. Despite heading up insight, she admits: “I’m not a statistician. I’m not an expert in research methodologies. I have a good grip on what I want, but I’m no expert. Everybody in my team is cleverer than me. But where I hope to be a useful person is in communicating to the company and to clients about how we should use insights to change the way we do business. Because that’s where data projects can fail: if you forget that the business has to take up the insights, embrace them as their own and change what they do as a result of it.”
Crosby stops and sketches a triangle on the wall, made up of four horizontal layers, which are labelled, from bottom to top: ‘data’, ‘analysis’, ‘insight’ and ‘action’.
“That triangle is really important to me, and I always stress that we have to get to that top piece: ‘action’. Action has to ensue as a result of insight, or we may as well not be here,” she says. “That always makes the blood drain from my team’s faces when I tell them that, because it’s hard for an analyst to think about forcing a business person to take action – but it’s one of our key priorities as a team.”
For Crosby, the insight process doesn’t end with the delivery of a report. A week later, she’ll start knocking on doors, enquiring after that piece of work and what the client – whether internal or external – plans to do with it. When people commission research, they know they want answers – but they’re not always sure what to do with the answers when they have them. As an insight team, she says, “you’ve got to take that fight to your users and stakeholders… If we have only delivered insight, then we haven’t done very well.”
- This article was originally published in Issue 3 of Impact Magazine

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