Welcome back to the Brand Marketing Spotlight, where we analyze the ad campaigns and marketing techniques of the world’s most successful companies. Today, we’ll showcase Ticketmaster, a ticket sales and distribution company that is surviving 2020’s many challenges by building trust and facilitating relationships.
Ticketmaster boasts a massively successful digital marketplace but is often overshadowed by e-commerce platforms like Amazon or eBay. However, we should remember that Ticketmaster sells and distributes 15 tickets every second — which comes to just under half a billion per year. While roughly half of these tickets are given away for free, the other half earned $11.5 billion in revenue during 2019 alone.
So, what makes Ticketmaster so overwhelmingly popular? With the benefits of modern technology, theoretically, anyone could distribute digital tickets without a third party. But Ticketmaster’s actual value lies in how it builds trust and establishes client relationships at a scale that relationship marketers dreamed of for decades.
Ticketmaster’s 21st-century challenge
When Ticketmaster was founded in 1976, ticket selling looked very different from the present day. Its original goal was not to sell tickets but provide ticketing hardware and computer software for venues. The company transitioned to physical ticket distribution in 1982 and introduced digital ticket delivery in 2009 following a merger with Live Nation.
Moving from physical to digital business models introduced many unique challenges for Ticketmaster, especially in an industry that facilitates live in-person events. Take ticket reselling as an example. Venues often struggle with scalpers who buy tickets en masse and resell them at inflated prices. By making it easier to purchase tickets online, however, sellers must address bulk resales on a global scale – even as local regulations hinder the ability to take action.
And that’s just one obstacle Ticketmaster faces in the 21st century. To serve an international audience, Ticketmaster must implement highly personalized marketing campaigns that account for each user’s region, language, and personal interests. Unfortunately, the average Ticketmaster purchase covers three tickets, leaving marketers with only a fraction of relevant customer data. This dynamic creates vast gaps in marketing databases, making it challenging to promote future events or understand user needs. To move forward, Ticketmaster needed creative solutions that would enhance its digital marketing capabilities.
Product and brand presence can be the same thing
Ticketmaster’s recent growth is driven by one simple reality: Its product and brand marketing presence are intrinsically linked. From the beginning, its business model was to act as an intermediary between clients who host live events and fans who buy tickets. As digital capabilities became the norm, however, Ticketmaster’s only path forward was to expand and enrich client-fan relationships while addressing the modern needs of each group.
From a brand marketing perspective, Ticketmaster achieves these goals by simultaneously applying three techniques:
- Expand digital services: Ticketmaster is doubling-down on the inherent benefits of a digital platform and smartphone-friendly world to better serve customers wherever they are.
- Manage fan identities: Ticketmaster creates fan identities – detailed profiles of events fans attend and how they interact with the platform – to optimize their marketing efforts.
- Forge brand partnerships: With the right partnerships, Ticketmaster can guarantee exclusive events and business opportunities while expanding its brand visibility.
Ticketmaster presence and fan identities
The core of Ticketmaster’s modern strategy lies in its Ticketmaster Presence service. Described as a “fan identity platform,” the aptly-named Presence was introduced as an online service that replaces paper tickets with digital passes. In practice, however, it includes additional features that serve fans and enhance client marketing efforts:
- Secure digital tickets: Ticket fraud is a major hurdle for any digital distribution platform. Ticketmaster addresses this with a detailed user authentication process to verify fan identities. Not only does this ensure fans receive their tickets, but it protects performers and venues from fraud as well.
- Full chain of custody: Fraud protection is just the first benefit of authentication. Ticketmaster’s authentication API also tracks the complete chain of custody for each ticket, collecting valuable marketing insights in the process.
- Venue intelligence: Managing connections with hundreds or thousands of fans per event can feel insurmountable. Ticketmaster’s venue intelligence platform helps to streamline operations by managing access control and monitoring real-time fan traffic.
Each feature builds trust in Ticketmaster’s platform by emphasizing convenience and security, but that’s only the beginning. Performers and venues also gain an understanding of fans from the authentication API and venue intelligence that improves future events. From there, Ticketmaster’s Account Manager service facilitates communications by creating dynamic web pages with personalized content relating to each event. In other words, Ticketmaster establishes and enriches client-fan relationships with marketing tools that go beyond the initial ticket sale.
How Ticketmaster’s brand partnerships tie everything together
Offering a robust service is a crucial element of Ticketmaster’s success, but it can’t drive 15 tickets per second on its platform alone. It also needs unprecedented visibility — the kind that makes the Ticketmaster brand recognizable even among people who never buy a ticket from them. Ticketmaster generated this awareness by placing a heavy emphasis on brand partnerships with YouTube, Spotify, and many others.
What’s vital about Ticketmaster’s partnerships is the way they simultaneously drive both customer experiences and transactions. In one example reported by Total Retail, fans listening to Spotify artists can receive notifications about upcoming live shows they’ll perform in the surrounding area. With a click, these fans will view an integrated Ticketmaster page that includes all purchasing details. Once again, the product and brand marketing experience are virtually identical.
“Demand and enthusiasm for live events is global and multidirectional,” Ticketmaster senior VP and general manager Dan Armstrong told Total Retail. “By integrating with marquee streaming services, e-commerce sites, and global social platforms, including Facebook, Spotify, Groupon, Amazon Alexa, BandsinTown, Samsung, and YouTube, Ticketmaster helps fans connect with their favorite artists, teams, and performers. These integrations help artists that work with Ticketmaster sell incremental tickets.”
How Ticketmaster’s strategy helps it survive coronavirus
So, in practical terms, how strong are the client-fan relationships that Ticketmaster cultivates? In 2020, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better test case than COVID-19. The coronavirus pandemic didn’t merely limit in-person operations; it challenged the industry fundamentals as live shows and sporting events were canceled for the entire year.
Ticketmaster seems to be addressing this challenge, even as COVID-19’s threat continues. After a sudden revenue drop when the pandemic began in March 2020, the company is already recovering. Ticketmaster is making an effort to refund tickets for canceled events, yet strangely enough, most customers ignore the offer. An astounding 86% of fans are keeping existing tickets, two-thirds of which intend to apply them to replacement events in 2021.
If we take nothing else away from Ticketmaster, building relationships is crucial for any business. While it’s too early to say growth will continue unabated over the next two years, Ticketmaster benefited from its banked goodwill and the trust of fans and clients. The willingness to listen to customers and understand their needs created a level of trust that can survive a global pandemic. If Ticketmaster can achieve that during mass shutdowns, perhaps we can do the same.
