The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry.
Name: Brad Griffith
Company: Gametime
Position: Chief Executive Officer/Founder
Brad Griffith is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Gametime, a last minute sports and entertainment ticketing platform that was founded in early 2013. Griffith leads a team of 80 at the Gametime headquarters in San Francisco where he focuses on the continued optimization of the product and its evolution into other genres such as music and theater as well as a consumer selling platform. Gametime reached over $50 million in revenue in 2016.
After earning an Engineering degree from Stanford in 2001, Griffith followed his dreams to work in sports by working as a “Moneyball” style analyst for the Colorado Rockies and Chicago White Sox building statistical infrastructure to analyze player value.
Griffith attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2010 before helping launch Zappedy, which delivered customer analytics for local businesses and sold to Groupon in 2011.
1) How is Gametime combatting how tickets have been traditionally purchased? What one or two team/league partners have leveraged the platform in a unique way?
Gametime helps fans do more in life, especially the last minute. Millennials specifically love the ability to turn on a dime and rally a crew for an amazing evening. It’s a new lifestyle that’s really only possible today (with mobile), and we’re seeing fans use this new ability to double and triple the number of events they attend annually.
We find that younger people tend to be more flexible and that downtown venues offer lower barriers to participation. Teams and leagues are excited about filling seats and attracting millennial customers who will likely spend a lot over their lifetimes.
2) If you had to invest in one technology that would change the ticketing industry, what would it be and why?
High quality image recognition is the future. Computers are becoming as good at reading images as they are at reading text. With the growth of mobile and the phenomenon of a camera in everyone’s pocket, the number of images created is growing exponentially. This gives computers more data to help them identify what’s happening in each image.
The intersection of understanding these images will lead to amazing fan experiences. Leaders in image analysis will be able to deliver the right seat to the right event to the right fan at the right time. Gametime leads the industry in image quality and analysis, yet we still think we’re at the very beginning here.
3) If money were no object, what technology would you build or buy to help you do your job better?
I need a programmable intelligent agent to help me optimize. I trust Google to recommend the most important email (and it does a pretty good job), but need this tech across everything.
What’s the most important article/book to read? What’s the most important online course to take? With 90% of the world’s data being created in the past two years, the future is in verticalized intelligent curation.
4) As a sports fan, what sports-related service, app, product, etc., could you not live without and why?
I’m busy, and it’s hard to plan. So, Gametime helps me do more with friends at the last minute. The beginning of the company was all about last minute execution — my brother and I were trying to get to a San Francisco Giants game and didn’t have access to a printer prior to the game. So, I’m excited to be building a solution to a problem I couldn’t live without solving.
TV (and soon VR) is a worthy competitor to the live event. TV has maybe improved 5x (flat screens, high-def, 700 channels) in the past 10 years. We need to do more to make seeing it live easier and better so we can compete with TV’s rate of improvement. I need an intelligent service (see below) to make seeing it live 10x better for me than TV.
5) If you had to project 20 years into the future, how will most fans purchase tickets to their favorite sports and entertainment events?
We’ll have intelligent agents that know our utility functions for various events and seats. They’ll be constantly watching for opportunities and trying to fit time for fun into our calendars. They’ll network with our friends’ agents to see if they can make it. There’s no way we’ll manually sorting through push notifications in 2037.
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6) Give us your bold prediction about a form of technology that will be integral to purchasing tickets to sporting events over the next 12 months and why?
Open APIs will enable many different types of experiences — performers (leagues, teams and artists) will covet the ability to sell everywhere and specifically to the next generation of fans. The winners in the primary will help performers distribute and monetize better than their competitors. If you’re not open, or can’t execute on open, it’ll be tough to compete.