Olympic secondary sales beat budget

SportsBusiness Daily
Don Muret

Larry Witherspoon is entering his sixth year as CEO of the MLB Advanced Media subsidiary Tickets.com. During the Tickets.com Executive Summit in Long Beach, Calif., last week, he sat down with SportsBusiness Journal staff writer Don Muret and discussed the state of the ticketing business in the wake of the merger between Ticketmaster and event promoter Live Nation, as well as the Vancouver Olympics, where Tickets.com operated an officially sanctioned secondary ticketing platform for the first time in the event’s history.

Break down your Vancouver operations.
Witherspoon: We [did] 100 percent of the ticketing up there. We did the primary sales all throughout last year, and in December, we launched the secondary fan-to-fan marketplace. With that, we have the whole spate of tools for the Olympic experience, the ability for people to donate their tickets to charity, the ability for sponsors to do consignment of tickets when they have available inventory, and the cart of integrated primary and secondary tickets, where you can see both marketplaces and make a decision based on what you want to buy. All very cool new stuff. [The secondary market] has exceeded every budgetary expectation we did set. It was $10 million, but the problem we have is that it’s never been done before, so how you budget for the unknown was hard for us. Frankly, the matchups that occur play a big part as well. There’s a lot of national pride involved, and some people are going to be willing to go to that game regardless of what it’s going to cost them.


Tickets.com handled both primary and secondary ticketing at the Vancouver Olympics.

How do see the ticketing landscape changing?
Witherspoon: Three years ago, we reinvented our product [with ProVenue software]; literally started from the ground up. It’s been a painful process, and there’s a reason nobody’s developed anything new in the past 10 to 15 years in the ticketing world: It’s hard. What we really see to our advantage is our ability to provide technology to a venue or a team that allows them full control. So we don’t do the “Here’s a big check. We’re going to take a large part of the service charge.” What we do say is “Here’s our license. We’ll take a small vig on a service charge ticket, you control what you want to do with your service charges, [and] you take control of how you want to sell to the public.” We’ve seen some good results. The Seattle Theatre Group is a client that came on board with us and eliminated their print-at-home fees, first time people have done that in a long time, and dropped some of their service charges a little bit. Great press.

Do you see that applicable in sports?
Witherspoon: It depends. I think sports are a little different in that you have the governing bodies. I understand how MLB works, but I don’t know how much flexibility teams have in their service fee setup. From our system perspective, for sure, it gives anybody the ability to control it and manage it and manage their own ticketing system, which obviously lowers our costs, which allows us to provide a lower point to them, so then they actually get a little bit more control over their fees and prices.

Where do you see the growth in sports? Derek Palmer, your chief commercial officer, mentioned the lack of an NBA team as a client.
Witherspoon: Right now, we do about half of MLB and we have two teams [Twins and Royals] on our new product [ProVenue 2.0] and we plan on adding a lot more teams. I feel that arenas with teams feel they have a little bit more control over their ability to move without the threat of lack of content, of “Am I going to make Ticketmaster/Live Nation mad,” where they get worried about what acts [they] are going to get in and things like that. If you look at it from that perspective, then technology becomes a really big play for them, because everybody wants more data, more touchpoints with the client, how the process is working. We provide all that technology, and to drive it we partner in and integrate with third-party dynamic pricing, like we did with the San Francisco Giants and Qcue.

It’s been reported that MLBAM is in talks with AEG about possibly forming a joint ticketing venture. What can you say at this point about those discussions?
Witherspoon: Nothing really. I think as the industry has changed recently, there are a lot of people talking to a lot of different companies. Where that all will go is still to be seen. Obviously, not even in the context of AEG, but there are large regional ticketing companies, there [are] large Broadway companies that have relationships with existing ticket providers that are now looking around. Our ability to provide a self-operational model puts us in a good discussion point with anyone, frankly, at this point.