Over the last couple of months the Tickets.com executive team have been regular contributors to the ProVenue® blog. Some of you are already familiar with the leadership team here, but alas - some of you are not. Over the next couple of weeks let us share with you some unknown facts about this dynamic group.
Today we take a closer look at John Rizzi, SVP Product Management & Strategy. John started his tenure at Tickets.com almost 3 years ago and has quickly made a name for himself in the industry.
John Rizzi: Things You Won't Get From My Resume or Bio:
What you can see on my resume is that I've been in Technology for more than 20 years, what you won't see on there is that my favorite Tech saying is "yak shaving": sadly something I'm sure most can relate to.
If you read my bio, you'll see I'm married with two young boys - what's not there is that my wife and I got married in Vegas… by Elvis. While I AM a fan of the king, I love my wife even more for allowing us to have such an…. errrr…. affordable wedding.
My bio mentions that I went to Cal Poly Pomona (in the 80's) but what it doesn't say is I was the "R" in S&R Sounds DJ's. Those of you old enough might remember that the song that got everyone on the dance floor at frat parties, keggers, and school dances was the Romantics "What I Like About You"…. Uh huh huh…. HEY!!
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
INTRUST Bank Arena and Mercer University Both Convert to ProVenue®
INTRUST Bank Arena, an SMG managed facility, and all other regional Select-A-Seat venues have recently converted to the ProVenue Platform. INTRUST Bank Arena is one of the Midwest's premier arenas with a 15,000-seat capacity and host to several of the industry's top sporting events and live entertainment shows.
Select-A-Seat also provides ticketing services for several Wichita area clients; including the Wingnuts, Orpheum Theatre and the Grand Opera. The move enables the organization to recruit additional venues that would also benefit from a shared system (single database) to promote and increase ticket sales.
Mercer Ticket Sales (MTS), a regional ticketing distribution company based in Macon, Georgia, also joined the ranks of Tickets.com clients operating on ProVenue. The decision to move from the ProVenueMax system and invest in the ProVenue platform, along with Access Control for the Macon Grand Opera House, allows them to extend their regional ticketing service more readily in Central Georgia and beyond.
Residents of the Opera House, The Macon Symphony, will join MTS for their 2011-2012 season as well as Mercer University Athletics, which plans to add NCAA Division 1 Football in the coming seasons to complement its strong Division 1 Basketball program.
Select-A-Seat also provides ticketing services for several Wichita area clients; including the Wingnuts, Orpheum Theatre and the Grand Opera. The move enables the organization to recruit additional venues that would also benefit from a shared system (single database) to promote and increase ticket sales.
Mercer Ticket Sales (MTS), a regional ticketing distribution company based in Macon, Georgia, also joined the ranks of Tickets.com clients operating on ProVenue. The decision to move from the ProVenueMax system and invest in the ProVenue platform, along with Access Control for the Macon Grand Opera House, allows them to extend their regional ticketing service more readily in Central Georgia and beyond.
Residents of the Opera House, The Macon Symphony, will join MTS for their 2011-2012 season as well as Mercer University Athletics, which plans to add NCAA Division 1 Football in the coming seasons to complement its strong Division 1 Basketball program.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The Right Offer to the Right Person
By Derek Palmer, Managing Director, Executive Vice President, International, Tickets.com
In today's economic climate everyone is focused on providing the right offer to the right patron at the right time. Allow me to share with you my perspective.
Technology obviously plays a large part in this effort. The days of brochures and ushers asking patrons to fill out “contact me” cards in the lobby have given way to complex XRM systems that overlay pricing models and demographics to try and predict and (more importantly) shape consumer behavior. However, the thought process is the same and still seems to rely a great deal on the quantity and quality of data. I would argue it is even more important to have a plan of what you want to do with the data.
Organizations without clear goals for data management risk a condition I have heard best described as "paralysis by analysis" and a waste of valuable time and money.
Before investing in technologies to help manage your data you would do well to ask a few key questions:
1) What are we trying to achieve?
2) What are the key drivers and KPIs that we will use to measure our effectiveness?
3) What are our success criteria?
These are fairly simple questions and therefore it would follow that there are simple answers: We want to sell more tickets and make more money... But how do you achieve that seemingly obvious goal? And what if one doesn't necessarily lead to another? More importantly how do you ensure that you are connecting to the right consumers in the way they wish to be communicated with at the frequency at which they are willing to communicate with you?
Once you have communicated with your target audience, what is your call to action? Too often the immediate response to a slow moving event is to offer a discount to get “butts in seats”, if the goal is to sell more tickets, but does it necessarily make you more money in the long run?
There are many new technologies that allow venues to focus on more nuanced strategies around yield management. Stored Value integrations with merchandise and concession providers offer venues the opportunity to be extremely flexible in their offerings to consumers and in a targeted manner. Instead of giving someone a £10.00 discount on a ticket why not offer them £10.00 worth of value towards purchases at your concession stands or gift shops. In addition to the incremental revenue opportunities, guess what else you get? That’s right-more data. But in this case it is extremely specific data about that individual consumer and their spending habits.
Introducing Dynamic Pricing program for your events is another approach to yield management. Some people will read that sentence to mean “raise ticket prices as high as possible” but in fact a Dynamic Pricing scenario allows just as many discount opportunities and in this case it is based on data. More importantly it allows precision discounting - just because one person in section 400 will only buy if the ticket is £10.00 under face value doesn’t mean the person next to them won’t buy at £2.00 under face value. It goes back to the right offer to the right person.
In today's economic climate everyone is focused on providing the right offer to the right patron at the right time. Allow me to share with you my perspective.
Technology obviously plays a large part in this effort. The days of brochures and ushers asking patrons to fill out “contact me” cards in the lobby have given way to complex XRM systems that overlay pricing models and demographics to try and predict and (more importantly) shape consumer behavior. However, the thought process is the same and still seems to rely a great deal on the quantity and quality of data. I would argue it is even more important to have a plan of what you want to do with the data.
Organizations without clear goals for data management risk a condition I have heard best described as "paralysis by analysis" and a waste of valuable time and money.
Before investing in technologies to help manage your data you would do well to ask a few key questions:
1) What are we trying to achieve?
2) What are the key drivers and KPIs that we will use to measure our effectiveness?
3) What are our success criteria?
These are fairly simple questions and therefore it would follow that there are simple answers: We want to sell more tickets and make more money... But how do you achieve that seemingly obvious goal? And what if one doesn't necessarily lead to another? More importantly how do you ensure that you are connecting to the right consumers in the way they wish to be communicated with at the frequency at which they are willing to communicate with you?
Once you have communicated with your target audience, what is your call to action? Too often the immediate response to a slow moving event is to offer a discount to get “butts in seats”, if the goal is to sell more tickets, but does it necessarily make you more money in the long run?
There are many new technologies that allow venues to focus on more nuanced strategies around yield management. Stored Value integrations with merchandise and concession providers offer venues the opportunity to be extremely flexible in their offerings to consumers and in a targeted manner. Instead of giving someone a £10.00 discount on a ticket why not offer them £10.00 worth of value towards purchases at your concession stands or gift shops. In addition to the incremental revenue opportunities, guess what else you get? That’s right-more data. But in this case it is extremely specific data about that individual consumer and their spending habits.
Introducing Dynamic Pricing program for your events is another approach to yield management. Some people will read that sentence to mean “raise ticket prices as high as possible” but in fact a Dynamic Pricing scenario allows just as many discount opportunities and in this case it is based on data. More importantly it allows precision discounting - just because one person in section 400 will only buy if the ticket is £10.00 under face value doesn’t mean the person next to them won’t buy at £2.00 under face value. It goes back to the right offer to the right person.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Record Setting MLB Franchises
By John Walker, President & CEO, Tickets.com
Recently I read where the 2011 Red Sox set a club record by reaching the “3 million tickets sold” mark earlier in a season (August 5th) than ever before in the franchise’s history. And in 2010, the Twins set a franchise record for attendance in their new ballpark. What’s the connection? Winning, of course. But not lost on me is that both teams were in their inaugural seasons of using ProVenue. That says an awful lot about the folks working in the sales and ticket offices for these Clubs – being able to manage unprecedented demand on a new system. It also says a lot about ProVenue and Tickets.com. We’re enjoying the push to these limits.
Recently I read where the 2011 Red Sox set a club record by reaching the “3 million tickets sold” mark earlier in a season (August 5th) than ever before in the franchise’s history. And in 2010, the Twins set a franchise record for attendance in their new ballpark. What’s the connection? Winning, of course. But not lost on me is that both teams were in their inaugural seasons of using ProVenue. That says an awful lot about the folks working in the sales and ticket offices for these Clubs – being able to manage unprecedented demand on a new system. It also says a lot about ProVenue and Tickets.com. We’re enjoying the push to these limits.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Is an iPad a Mobile Device?
By Mike Duffy, Director, Product Design – Product Management & Strategy
Is an iPad a mobile device? Most people I have asked start to give an immediate answer of “Yes” but then they hesitate as they really think about what I am asking. Google (or insert favorite search engine) the question and you will see that there is no consensus on the answer.
Digging deeper you will discover that the answer to the question changes depending upon why it is being asked. The iPad is a device that you can carry with you so it is “mobile” but many companies that support both a mobilized online site as well as a traditional PC site have chosen to serve the PC version and not the mobile version to iPads. A usage report for these sites would probably include iPad traffic in the non mobile category. For this situation the answer to the question is now “no”.
As we define our future online ticketing experience it is critical that we focus on how our customers will be interacting with our systems. We look at customer’s physical location, their device screen size, their device’s interaction capabilities (touch screen, mouse) and their market expectation. A tablet’s screen size is closer to a small laptop but includes a touch screen like most smart phones. Stretching a smartphone interface to fit the larger screen tablet does not make efficient use of the increased screen real estate. In some cases shrinking the traditional PC interface to fit the tablet may make better sense in the short term but doesn’t capitalize on the tactile interaction between the user and the device, or the mobility of the device. Solutions include the creation of a mobile application specifically designed for the tablet interface (see our other blog entries) or the creation of a device specific online interface.
As you can see from the graph below, the iPad and other tablets are changing the definition of “mobile” as their use becomes more prevalent. As the technology continues to evolve we will need to define a more granular device classification system. The real question should be; “How do we optimize our customer’s experience for whichever device they choose to use?”
Is an iPad a mobile device? Most people I have asked start to give an immediate answer of “Yes” but then they hesitate as they really think about what I am asking. Google (or insert favorite search engine) the question and you will see that there is no consensus on the answer.
Digging deeper you will discover that the answer to the question changes depending upon why it is being asked. The iPad is a device that you can carry with you so it is “mobile” but many companies that support both a mobilized online site as well as a traditional PC site have chosen to serve the PC version and not the mobile version to iPads. A usage report for these sites would probably include iPad traffic in the non mobile category. For this situation the answer to the question is now “no”.
As we define our future online ticketing experience it is critical that we focus on how our customers will be interacting with our systems. We look at customer’s physical location, their device screen size, their device’s interaction capabilities (touch screen, mouse) and their market expectation. A tablet’s screen size is closer to a small laptop but includes a touch screen like most smart phones. Stretching a smartphone interface to fit the larger screen tablet does not make efficient use of the increased screen real estate. In some cases shrinking the traditional PC interface to fit the tablet may make better sense in the short term but doesn’t capitalize on the tactile interaction between the user and the device, or the mobility of the device. Solutions include the creation of a mobile application specifically designed for the tablet interface (see our other blog entries) or the creation of a device specific online interface.
As you can see from the graph below, the iPad and other tablets are changing the definition of “mobile” as their use becomes more prevalent. As the technology continues to evolve we will need to define a more granular device classification system. The real question should be; “How do we optimize our customer’s experience for whichever device they choose to use?”
Friday, July 22, 2011
Planning Your Mobile Image
By Ed Gow, VP Sales & Marketing, Tickets.com
According to the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry, at the end of 2010 there were 302.9M wireless subscriber connections in the U.S. Considering that the population of the U.S. at that time was 308.7M, the market penetration for wireless devices is simply staggering. Add to that the fact that the percentage of wireless-only U.S. households is climbing at 26.6% and most importantly, the revelation that the sale of smartphones has now eclipsed the sale of PCs.
What does all of this mean for the ticketing industry? Well, simply put, venues, arts organizations, attractions and teams must consider their mobile image when developing marketing plans and sales strategies. Organizations can no longer be satisfied with how their websites look, they must now take into account how the experience translates to a mobile user. Print at home is great, but mobile delivery must be an option …nothing short of an end to end mobile ticketing experience will do the trick.
So do you develop an app or a mobile site? That’s really up to you, but with the number of available apps growing on a daily basis, users are becoming much more selective about what they choose to download.
My two cents? Build a mobile site that can be integrated into an app.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Tickets.com, Inc. Signs Up as Rugby Expo 2011 Sponsor
Tickets.com, Inc. has been recruited as the official sponsor of Rugby Expo 2011, which will take place at Twickenham Stadium in London on November 23-24.
The global ticketing giant will provide an integrated ticketing system for thousands of visitors to Rugby Expo and will also lead a plenary conference session dealing with Dynamic Ticketing on the opening day of the event.
"These are exciting times for rugby around the world and we are delighted to be part of the major global forum designed to facilitate exchange of information and promotion of professional best practice in rugby," said Derek Palmer, managing director and international executive vice-president of Tickets.com.
Rugby Ventures chairman John Hockey added: "We are delighted to welcome Tickets.com back as sponsors of Rugby Expo. Not only do they play a vital role by providing the event ticketing system but the company is committed to the future success of rugby and to developing new approaches to helping clubs in rugby to maximise revenues from ticket sales."
Hockey said: “Rugby Expo 2011 has a fresh new look after assessment of feedback from last year's event. Day One will focus on the issues facing the professional and international game while Day Two will be dedicated to community rugby, with complimentary Day Two tickets being made available through County Unions." For more information about Rugby Expo 2011, visit www.rugbyexpo.com or call +44 (0)845 0740752
The global ticketing giant will provide an integrated ticketing system for thousands of visitors to Rugby Expo and will also lead a plenary conference session dealing with Dynamic Ticketing on the opening day of the event.
"These are exciting times for rugby around the world and we are delighted to be part of the major global forum designed to facilitate exchange of information and promotion of professional best practice in rugby," said Derek Palmer, managing director and international executive vice-president of Tickets.com.
Rugby Ventures chairman John Hockey added: "We are delighted to welcome Tickets.com back as sponsors of Rugby Expo. Not only do they play a vital role by providing the event ticketing system but the company is committed to the future success of rugby and to developing new approaches to helping clubs in rugby to maximise revenues from ticket sales."
Hockey said: “Rugby Expo 2011 has a fresh new look after assessment of feedback from last year's event. Day One will focus on the issues facing the professional and international game while Day Two will be dedicated to community rugby, with complimentary Day Two tickets being made available through County Unions." For more information about Rugby Expo 2011, visit www.rugbyexpo.com or call +44 (0)845 0740752
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