After decades of using Ticketmaster as their primary ticketing provider, an online content platform that promotes and sells tickets to some of the world’s most popular live shows set out to disrupt how theatre tickets are bought and sold by launching their own ticketing service.
By moving away from Ticketmaster and putting customer data into the hands of the theatre productions themselves, the company is transforming the industry and creating better, more personalized experiences for patrons.
But after a two-year shutdown during the pandemic, the organization faced an uphill climb to rebuild its digital infrastructure and bring audiences back into theatres, especially as the traditional demographic has also been shifting to a younger, more cost-conscious, and digitally savvy audience. The company faced the added challenge of driving ticket sales onto its own platform. But they knew if they could pull it off, the potential benefits for both customers and productions would be huge.
Act I: Bringing data strategy into the spotlight
Historically, live theatre has not been a very data-driven industry, and there wasn’t much incentive or pressure to revolutionize. This was a new opportunity to change that narrative.
The company knew that understanding the factors that drive purchase decisions is key to filling seats and delivering better insights into productions. But to get there, they needed to establish a modern data architecture with actionability and predictability. They partnered with Atrium to help them build a scalable data strategy and lay the groundwork to become a more tech-enabled, data-driven organization.
Data collected by venues (e.g., patron demographics, mobile interactions, and customer feedback) is extremely valuable to partners inside and outside of the industry. Unfortunately, this data has historically been dispersed across a number of fragmented platforms. Atrium used Snowflake and Tableau to bring all those disparate insights together to create the visibility and actionable insights that the company needed.
They chose to leverage Snowflake Data Cloud to automate data processing and platform integrations, which Ticketmaster had previously been managing for ticketing transactions. To capture the data from these transactions and create actionable views, the Atrium team built two Tableau dashboards that afforded a more immersive and expansive analytics experience than the previous Ticketmaster analytics: one called Traffic Trends, which focuses on website buying behavior, and a Demographics dashboard, which shows information about the people buying tickets.
With Snowflake, theatre productions have more visibility into their own data than ever before, and the Tableau insights allow them to do more targeted marketing for their shows.
Act II: Showstopping Audience Experiences
With access to data from both the theatres (e.g., marketing data, etc.) and the ticketing system (e.g., seat map, purchaser data, etc.), the organization now has a leg up in the industry and the ability to better personalize the ticket-buying experience for patrons.
With the positive business outcomes they experienced right out of the gate, they decided to double down on their investment in Snowflake and create a long-term data strategy with further expansion. One such expansion included integrating Salesforce and Snowflake.
With that strong data foundation in place, the company also tapped Atrium to connect and consolidate all market regions onto their existing instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for more streamlined marketing automation across the organization. We connected Data Cloud and Snowflake to bring in all Patrons, Tickets, Shows, etc., then segmented within Data Cloud and fed those segments into Marketing Cloud.
Act III: The Innovation Must Go On
Bringing (data) science to the arts can help preserve it for generations to come. At the core of our work with this client lies the establishment of a robust data architecture, paving the way for future AI-driven initiatives like concierge services and dynamic ticket pricing. The data we’ve been able to unify and harmonize will provide a real-time, predictive view of audiences that has never been available to the industry before.
Atrium incorporated our business into every aspect, including presentations — showing that they not only cared about the project but that they cared about our business. That’s the difference between a data engineer and a true consulting partner.
And by unveiling previously unknown insights like historical ticket purchase data and buyer behavior, this work has forged a data-driven roadmap, charting the course for the future. Understanding the demographics and purchasing patterns of audiences will also allow productions to make more informed decisions about which shows to book — and even what to produce. And using data and AI technologies to reduce prices and fees for patrons will make it easier for anyone to buy tickets, so all can enjoy high-quality live entertainment.
