INTIX Meets Amid a Sea of Change For Ticketing Biz

Angus Watson from the Ravinia Festival and winner of INTIX's 2012 Patricia G. Spira Lifetime Achievement Award is pictured here with Dan Goroff, director of the box office at the Philadelphia Phillies, winner of the Box Office of the Year Award; Amy Constantine Kline, winner of the newly created Young Professionals Award; and Joe Carter from Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, winner of the Spirit Award. (Venues Today Photo by Dave Brooks)

REPORTING FROM SAN ANTONIO — The advent of CRM, social media integration and cloud-based computing continues to disrupt the ticketing industry, as the biggest players in the market try to keep pace with lightning speed changes to the business.

The seven largest companies represented on the keynote panel at this year’s International Ticketing Association Conference in San Antonio all unveiled plans to enable clients to better understand their customers with data-mining and shareability.

Yet despite all the continued advancements in technology, a growing ticketing company with very little presence at this year’s conference is expected to shake the industry once it goes full tilt by the end of 2012.

axs ticketing, the AEG-owned ticketing company powered by Outbox Technologies and their colorful CEO Fred Rosen brought its first major arena client online last week and is slated to bring all of the buildings in the AEG Facilities umbrella onto the system by December. In less than 18 months, axs will go from tech start up to one of the biggest ticketing companies in the world.

On Jan. 13, axs launched its first arena on-sale for a Lady Antebellum concert at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo. Venues Today talked with Bryan Perez, AEG's president of digital, ticketing and media in an earlier phone interview this week.

“Now we have completed every venue type in our rollout,” said Perez. “We’ve done clubs, theaters, arenas, GA and season tickets via the LA Galaxy at the Home Depot Center (in Carson, Calif.)”

Perez said that axs will begin looking for new clients during its massive rollout phase, which covers 100 venues in the United States.

“It’s going to be very interesting for us during the rollout because we’ll still have some shows on the Ticketmaster system while we’re migrating over to axs,” said Paul Kavanaugh, manager of Ticket Sales and Service for the XL Center in Hartford, Conn.

Not to be one to be surpassed by its new competitor, Ticketmaster is getting aggressive with its own customer data tools, rolling out a predictive analytics component to help identify potential customers and price tickets according to demand. Those plans were part of Ticketmaster's presentation here.

“We've been sitting on 30 years of data for a really long time, without an effective set of tools to employ them on behalf of our clients,” said COO Jared Smith, noting that Ticketmaster just acquired Big Champagne, a large web and consumer analytics firm.

“We hope we can aggregate patterns of the data, whether it’s propensity to buy, purchase history or nonticket info to help you identify the right buyer for the right show.”

Interviewed for this article: Bryan Perez, (213) 742-7155; Paul Kavanaugh, (860) 241-4237; Jared Smith, (404) 682-9555