For those who may not know, every year the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference holds the First Pitch Case Competition. The competition is designed to give top graduate students the opportunity to work with a major sports organization to analyze and evaluate their most challenging issues. This year, teams worked with Ticketmaster to explore better ways for the company to improve its partnership with the NBA through a multitude of different technological advancements.
Alpha Award for this years First Pitch Case Competition goes to team from McGil University @Ticketmaster #SSAC16 pic.twitter.com/xMxU905ILS
— Sloan Sports Conf. (@SloanSportsConf) March 12, 2016
This year’s winning team came from McGill University in Montreal. The team included McGill graduate students Jorge Tatto, Deepti Kaul, and Christian Mathews-Gagne. Jorge Tatto, a Mexican-born student with a background in finance had the idea of creating a team to compete in the competition, but just days before the team registration deadline the team that he planned on working with dropped out. After finding out about what happened, a friend of Jorge’s put him in contact with Deepti Kaul and Christian Mathews-Gagne. The main goal for the newly-formed team was to build on Ticketmaster’s current technology to improve their season ticket experience and expand the secondary market.
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The team believes that there are three areas to focus on in order to maximize Ticketmaster’s potential; re-imagining season tickets, optimizing the secondary market, and maximizing fan experience. “Many young people don’t attend NBA games because they can watch seven NBA games at once from the comfort of their home, so we wanted to find a way to appeal to millennial customers for season tickets in the NBA,” Jorge Tatto shared with me.
In order to re-imagine the NBA season ticket holder experience, the team came up with a system called SeatShare which allows friends or strangers to share a season ticket. The idea allows fans to share tickets with their friends or they may be matched with a stranger that has similar seat and budget preferences. Once the seat holders agree on the seat location they are able to divide the tickets amongst themselves and then they can decide to either attend their games or sell their tickets on the secondary market. Another season ticket option that the McGill team came up with is the FlexPass which provides flexible seating to the ticket holder based on the demand of the event, fans can also pay a small premium for periodic upgrades.
With the rapid growth of the secondary ticket market, the team has come up with a way for Ticketmaster to compete with rival sites like Stubhub. By using a proposed system that gives the season seat holder two different ways to sell their tickets, the McGill team believes Ticketmaster will be able to take over the top spot.
The concept allows ticket holders to sell their tickets with two different pricing strategies, the first being Dynamic Pricing which allows holders to post their tickets and have the price automatically adjusted based on the demand and price range for similar tickets, making them easier to sell. The second pricing option is a tool called Pricing Tips which provides the seller with a price range that similar tickets are listed and allows the seller to determine how they would like to price their tickets. Pricing Tips will also notify a seller if their tickets are listed at a price that seems to be too low for the location, thus maximizing profit.
For the McGill team, one of the goals that they wanted to focus on was maximizing the fan experience. The team believes that Ticketmaster should begin to sell tickets for E-Sporting events which would allow them to cross sell NBA tickets, thus widening the NBA audience. They also think that using social media to find fan preferences will help Ticketmaster cater to what each specific fan is looking for.
They have proposed furthering Ticketmaster’s integration with Facebook by allowing fans to purchase tickets to events without leaving their Facebook pages, which will also allow consumer to see what events their friends are going to so they can make sure never to miss out on the action.
Finally, the team took into consideration that not all season ticket holders are able to attend every game and in order to give fans more incentive to go they have proposed a loyalty program called Ticketmaster Club. The club will give fans who attend a certain percentage of games the opportunity to receive discounts on their upcoming season tickets and even the chance to be honored on the Jumbotron before an NBA game.
In winning the competition the team has not only given themselves the opportunity to work with a major company like Ticketmaster, but they have also gained recognition for their school. “This was the first time McGill participated in this event and it’s a way to show that this school has potential,” said Tatto.