Larry Witherspoon, CEO of Tickets.com, discusses the company's growth plans

As featured in Venues Today, April 2008:

On the Horizon
Larry Witherspoon, CEO of Tickets.com, discusses the company’s growth plans

By Dave Brooks

CHICAGO – Venues Today caught up with Larry Witherspoon, CEO of Tickets.com at this year’s INTIX conference here to discuss the market direction of the world’s second largest ticketing company and discuss its new ProVenue platform. Below is an excerpt from that interview:

Venues Today: How long has ProVenue been in development?
Larry Witherspoon: We’ve spent two-and-a-half years building from scratch and redefining how we wanted to approach our business model, and ProVenue is the result of that effort.

VT: Are any venues using the software?
LW: We don’t have any venues live, but we have it installed in six places where they’re still doing beta testing. It’s a web-based system with a common look and feel throughout and very big, easy buttons to push. It’s very simple to use because people are used to a web browser, and this is just intuitive to them.

VT: How many new clients per year would it take for ProVenue to be considered financially successful?
LW: I would expect that we will continue to see growth at 10-to-15 percent a year.

VT: How does Ticketmaster’s acquisition of Paciolan effect the growth of Tickets.com’s market share?
LW: As it consolidates, we’re really just down to a couple of companies of significant size and scale. We’re much more about enabling technologies for the clients and integrating with third-parties that help those clients sell more tickets. The competition has a different approach. They have a buy-and-build approach to keep everything in house.

VT: But won’t the acquisition give Ticketmaster a resource to develop additional enablement models?
LW: I’m not really sure what the play is. There are no real (Customer Relationship Management) gains on that side. I would pretty much call (the deal) a customer acquisition.

VT: At what point do you find yourself marketable just by not being Ticketmaster?
LW: There are some people who talk to us just because they want to try something different. They want to partner with someone, or work with a sponsor in a unique way. I think we are more willing to engage in these discussions.

VT: You recently announced the signing of the Vancouver (B.C.) Winter Olympics (2010). Tell us what you have planned.
LW: We’re tremendously excited. Vancouver is a place where we don’t really have a presence, so it’s a good way for us to get a market penetration going. It’s a large-scale deal and it’s a lot of people and a lot of tickets. This will be the first Olympics where they do access control at every venue.

VT: And you plan to ticket the Chinese venues after the Olympics?
LW: Our partner there is CSII, which is a wholly-owned company of the China National Sports Group and is owned by the China Olympic Committee and the Sports Ministry. CSII was formed to help market advertising relationships and provide growth and properly manage these venues. We’ve been brought on to help them define and provide ticketing services for various buildings.

VT: How’s the regulatory environment?
LW: It’s been good for us. It’s taken a couple of years of being over there and getting face time with people. Walking through the contract took some time, but they’ve been great. Typically the ticketing company gets paid a percentage of the list price on the ticket. It’s not a culture that’s big on service fees and extra charges. That’s a model that we’re happy to work with.

VT: Let’s switch over to the StubHub deal with Major League Baseball. Why wasn’t Tickets.com more involved in bidding for a secondary role?
LW: (Major League Baseball Advanced Media) and specifically Bob Bowman are big believers in having technology choices for the clubs, not to mandate, but to go out and get the best deal for baseball. That’s exactly what he did. He struck a very good deal to bring on StubHub to integrate all the teams and consolidate the secondary market. I can’t fault him — it was a proper business decision that he made.

VT: Did you bid on the deal?
LW: No, it was a straight play. The plan was to find a straight secondary provider and go with that group so you’re not blurring the line between primary and secondary. We’re okay with partnering and we’ve already done an integration to enable the digital delivery of all tickets. If we have a client that wants to do a deal with StubHub, I’m actually okay with interfacing that technology to fit the platform.

VT: Who owns the data?
LW: Baseball. It’s their client, it’s their fan and it’s their data and they will share it with (StubHub). In the integration we’ve done with them, that data gets captured in the back office and it can be utilized for marketing purposes.