Building a better marketplace: SeatGeek launches SeatGeekIQ

SeatGeek’s AI-powered marketplace intelligence engine applies data-driven Wall Street strategies to ticket sales – with proven results.

Over the past decade, ticketing for live events has made great strides to better serve venues, rights holders and fans, but it remains one of the most inefficient markets in existence.

The crux of the problem? Every ticket is unique. Event managers don’t always have the data or tools to set each individual seat’s individual value for each event, let alone when things change over time. Inefficient pricing and ticket distribution can result in fewer fans in seats and money lost to rights holders. But as AI advances, data can now be used to create actionable strategies. Combine this with a team of experienced traders with backgrounds in finance and live events, and you have a powerful solution.

Since 2016, SeatGeek has been the box office platform for teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS and more. The company has now used over a decade of data and insights to develop SeatGeekIQ, a marketplace intelligence engine designed to make the live event market more efficient for fans and rights holders.

SBJ recently met with Derek Zhou, head of SeatGeekIQ, to learn more.

Q: What fundamental inefficiencies have you identified in the ticketing industry?
A: Until now, ticket sales have lacked transparency, been associated with high transaction costs, and the market has been fragmented. Each ticket and event is unique, and demand is constantly fluctuating. So how do you set prices correctly as a rights holder? A sports team might look at last year’s resale prices – assuming reliable data is available – but how do you account for transaction costs or changes in demand when the lineup has changed? And if you’re a promoter booking a tour for an artist who hasn’t toured in ten years, where do you start? We set out to solve these challenges by using both primary and secondary market data combined with machine learning to set ticket prices in real time at a granular level, reflecting true market dynamics.

Q: How do you combine AI with human expertise to develop effective strategies?
A: Using AI, SeatGeekIQ can evaluate many factors – demand signals like the number of people searching for tickets and information like the number and price of available tickets – and accurately predict how these will affect ticket prices. While the AI ​​generates a strong starting pricing model, our traders, who have financial market expertise, overlay human insights from monitoring news, social media and other unpredictable factors. This combination allows us to optimize pricing and make strategic decisions tailored to our clients’ specific risk/reward ratio. We can now set parameters within the tool to align with the rights holder’s ideal outcomes – whether that’s maximizing attendance or optimizing revenue per seat.

Section-level pricing (left) is a relic of an era with limited technology. Granular pricing (right) enables demand-based pricing and reflects the true value of seats.

Q: Can you give an example of what this looks like in practice?
A: Imagine you’re selling tickets to a Lakers game in December and LeBron James gets injured. The value of those tickets almost certainly drops immediately. But how many people realize he’s injured, and how do you adjust your prices accordingly? The model learns that demand is weaker and automatically adjusts prices. And if a SeatGeek team member sees the ESPN alert, they can also set other parameters to help the model. We know that some fans are willing to pay more for an aisle seat, even if it’s farther from the court, than for a middle seat that’s closer, and that’s built into our pricing models. Being able to adjust the price of each seat based on supply and demand will help sell out your event and maximize revenue.

Q: Tell us a little about the product itself – how does it work?
A: The original version of this product was a separate service focused on solving information inefficiency in ticket sales. We pulled together fragmented data and used AI to improve ticket pricing. Now we’ve integrated SeatGeekIQ’s insights into our point of sale platform and ensure tickets are sold at the right price, in the right place, and at the right time from the start. This includes intelligent pricing for primary tickets, marketplace distribution for primary inventory, and secondary market management for venues that don’t use our point of sale platform. Now our customers who use SeatGeek for their primary ticket sales benefit from SeatGeekIQ pricing their inventory with no intermediate steps. They get better latency in price updates, better reporting because all their data is in one place, and they get the ability to use strategic pricing at the individual seat level by default while still retaining access to inventory that can be sold in other ways if the back office chooses.

Q: You have customers who have used previous versions of SeatGeekIQ over the past four years. What can you tell us about their experience?
A: We’ve seen fantastic momentum since launch – some of our customers are using the platform to manage 100 percent of their games. They’ve increased their revenue while maintaining scan rates above 90 percent, meaning those tickets are going to real fans who are filling the building. By better managing their inventory, they’re also seeing a much smaller gap between primary and secondary pricing. Having expanded SeatGeekIQ’s capabilities, we’re now rolling it out as a comprehensive offering to even more customers. By letting SeatGeekIQ do the majority of the work of pricing and selling tickets, our customers can spend more time on strategy and imagining and creating the next game-changing innovations for their fans and their business.

The complex puzzle of live event ticket pricing now has a comprehensive solution that meets the demands of today’s market. SeatGeekIQ gets the right tickets into the right hands at the right time.

For information about SeatGeekIQ, please contact Derek Zhou at [email protected].