How Ticketing and Live Events Come Back in 2021 Will Shape the Industry for Decades to Come
The coming weeks and months will tell us a lot about the future of live events. While some venues have gently reopened and others remain in the planning phase, the pandemic’s reset of our industry is playing out in real time.
The re-emergence of live events was top of mind for those (virtually) attending INTIX Live!, the International Ticketing Association’s 2021 Digital Conference. At its closing panel, “Ticketing 2030, A Bold Conversation: Digital, Diverse and Distributed,” I joined with several industry leaders and our message was consistent, there is reason for cautious optimism for 2021 and beyond. Despite the challenges of pandemic shutdowns, ticketing will quickly come to mean something far greater and more powerful as stages and seats become full again.
“People are going to be prioritizing the things that they have come to realize they really care about,” says Rebecca Thorne, Head of Ticketing for Burning Man since 2007. “So really dialing things in and speaking to the right audience is going to be absolutely key. The more clearly we understand them and more clearly we can speak to them and give them what they are looking for … will perpetuate into the future.”
I joined Thorne along with Amy Graca, Vice President, National Ticketing for Caesars Entertainment; Michael Lorenc, Head of Industry, Ticketing and Live Events for Google; and Anthony Esposito, VP, Ticket Operations, Atlanta Braves in a conversation moderated by Maureen Andersen, President and CEO of INTIX.
The main takeaway was this: How ticketing will look in 2030 is entirely dependent on how our industry takes the lessons of the last year and chooses to move forward. Here is how the panel thought some of these ideas might take shape.
How the world changed is how live events will change
The coronavirus has accelerated three forces that could change the way people consume entertainment, says Lorenc. First, people are more able and likely to consume online video, from Netflix to YouTube. Next, e-commerce, already on the rise pre-pandemic, grew 44% in 2020. Finally, many have embraced virtual collaboration via Zoom and Google Hangouts.
These habits could change everything from how patrons discover events to how they experience them, Lorenc points out, with the potential for a hybrid of in-person live events and complementary digital experiences, like a look behind the scenes or greenroom access.
“I think that will impact distribution,” he says. “Yes, they want to go back to live events, but they would like to have some kind of digital momentum.”
Consumer adoption and technology improvements have both pushed the entire industry forward.
Mobile can capture more than a seat
In the same way people have grown more comfortable with e-commerce, use of mobile devices to find, buy and deliver services is now commonplace. Venues should have no qualms about pushing mobile ticketing even further.
“For a long time, for little theaters or walk-up [box offices], buying a ticket was a last-minute decision,” says Thorne. “I think we are going to see a big move toward year-round engagement … The live experience is the anchor. But then there will be other digital ways to engage and stay connected throughout the year.”
Thorne continues, “That really is more of an affiliation rather than a one-off experience.”
Esposito sees mobile as an opportunity to establish loyalty in new ways. In the sports world, for example, fans can use their mobile devices to scan parking passes, additional tickets or concession purchases. Many stadiums and arenas sit centrally in an entertainment or downtown district where fans can earn loyalty points by spending money at nearby restaurants or shops during the offseason.
“It is going to be about how do you keep them engaged year-round, so loyalty is easy when you are in-season,” says Esposito.
This shift to mobile, which Graca of Caesars notes amounts to eliminating the line at the box office, frees ticketing staff to anticipate other challenges or opportunities based on new data streams and insights.
A new deal for secondary markets
The pandemic has upended the longstanding push-pull between venues and marketplaces, and vendors. Venues have long wanted to know who exactly was in each seat to develop relationships and market to those patrons. Now, however, venues absolutely need to know who is coming because of COVID-19 protocols.
That shifts the power dynamic as venues start to own that audience relationship while using marketplaces for transactions. That is a major change from what we’ve seen the last 10–20 years.
There is a lot more opportunity to create useful tools for buyers to have DIY control over their tickets, from rollovers to refunds to transfers.
Says Thorne: “I think that before the pandemic we were already seeing … a trend of events taking control of their own secondary markets and actually giving their audiences tools to have that agency to sell back their tickets or buy tickets that are being resold, and to have the confidence knowing that they are staying in the ecosystem.”
This could mean more of a digital license model, where venues and organizations have flexibility over certain tickets, like VIP or student tickets, to get real visibility and understand your audience whether it is a single channel or multichannel.
A non-transferable, non-refundable ticket to Hamilton could be $25, but a fully transferable and resalable ticket might be $500. It is the same seat, just different licensing options.
The proof, and opportunity, is in the data
Reinforcing ticketing as a revenue generating initiative will be a vital part of reopening plans. This new opportunity for growth is rooted in customer and pricing data available through digital ticketing.
This can be especially transformative for nonprofit venues and performing arts organizations. While some may have been slower to adopt digital ways of working for various reasons, they can now have the option to implement battle-tested digital ticketing. An option that consumers have already grown accustomed to and that provide new insights about their audiences.
With people ultimately coming back to live events “in droves,” Google’s Lorenc believes the venues that have the right marketing strategies and the right data insights will be able to segment in sophisticated ways and target those heavy users, or “super fans,” differently than the more casual customers.
This is why when we imagine live events in 2030, it is impossible not to talk about how our industry reopens in full and the many changes that will make it happen. The future is now, and ticketing will play an even larger role in bringing people together in new and even more meaningful ways.
Thank you to our panel of industry leaders for such an insightful and important conversation, and to INTIX CEO Maureen Andersen for moderating and creating a virtual INTIX experience (its first) that will serve as inspiration for many others as we find our way forward together.
