Getting tickets to a professional sporting event used to be an experience. You would order online and wait a couple days for them to come in the mail. Once you finally had them in your hands, they were beautiful as most featured a nice design and one of the team’s premier players.
That experience is now all but obsolete thanks to the arrival of mobile ticketing. M-ND (pronounced “mind”) is a social-experiential company that is working to bridge a gap like this. They’re doing so by helping improve the way that brands reach their target audience.
Take for example the work M-ND did last season for the Philadelphia Eagles. Thanks to the aforementioned mobile ticketing, fans were mostly left with a folded up email printout — not exactly a keepsake. “They were having a disconnect with their season ticket holders,” M-ND CEO Jim Hopper said.
Season ticket holders missed the experience of the actual ticket. Starting with training camp and into the preseason/regular season, M-ND set up displays around the stadium. At these displays, fans could post a picture on their own social media and have it come into the platform. From there, M-ND makes it look like a real ticket. “It was cool making the trek down to every game and seeing some of the same families come down there and tailgate for a little bit, have a couple burgers, come into the stadium and the first thing they’ll do is come right to our M-ND lounges,” Hopper said.
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Using data from the displays, M-ND gives the Eagles an analytical report after every game. “They get all of the users, usernames, how many likes/comments/shares, who the top influencer people were,” Hopper explained before mentioning some examples of what could eventually happen. “So the (Eagles) can go back and say, ‘Hey, thanks for coming to the game. Next time you can come through the VIP entrance,’ or we can give them passes for the field before the game.”
The commemorative ticket generated at the display could also be used to offer fans a discount on fan gear. M-ND plans to utilize the feature to give a team like the Eagles yet another piece of data to track.
All of this could create opportunities the Eagles in the future to use M-ND to tap into their sponsorship.
M-ND has also worked with organizations like the Anaheim Ducks, Barclays, the Billboard Music Awards, etc. It’s currently in the process of closing a deal with about 30 other sports teams and arenas — both domestic and overseas. “We’re going to have about 3,000 of our M-ND terminals deployed by the end of the year,” Hopper said.