18 Jul 2022 • 5 minute read

Why vivenu Fights for Organizer Independence

Data & Analytics
Event Management
The Statue of Liberty surrounded by fog

There’s a dirty little secret at the heart of the event industry. It’s about how a handful of companies have become so powerful and control so much of the market that they could effectively levy an expensive tax on everybody who does business with them.

Let’s call this tax the Distribution Tax. For legacy ticketing solutions, your business is just another revenue stream. The real money, for them, is in selling tickets to as many events as possible via their own branded platform, no matter the organizer.

To do this effectively, legacy providers need two things.

  • They need data.
    To sell as many tickets as possible, they need to know as much as possible about the people buying tickets to events. What interests do they have? What music do they like? Do they have a family? The answers to all these questions lie in the buying behavior and many other data points ticket buyers provide during their checkouts. The more data they have, the more tickets they can sell.
  • They need brand supremacy.
    To establish their own brand as the go-to place to buy tickets, these legacy providers need to make sure that it is their name and their logo that show up most prominently everywhere customers buy tickets. Every third-party brand that features distinctly on their properties is a hindrance to that end. The higher their brand recognition, the more tickets they sell.

In short, for both data and brand visibility, the same is true: If legacy providers have it, it means that nobody else can have it.

Let’s say you are the organizer of a huge festival. If you use a legacy provider to sell tickets, your guests will be aggressively targeted with endless e-mails trying to cross-sell them other events also sold by the provider. All these attempts at exploiting their love for your festival are, of course, branded by the provider.

So if you sell through a legacy provider, you better already have a solid fan base, because the provider surely won’t give you a chance to brand your online ticketing – or get data from the people who buy tickets to your festival so that you can build a strong, lasting fan relationship.

This is what the Distribution Tax is all about: Legacy providers taking your data and your brand visibility – and using it for their own gain.

In other words: You have worked so hard to build brand loyalty and engaging online experiences – and they will take both away in service of their own top-line growth, leaving you as the organizer in the dust and your business suffering.

How vivenu Delivers Independence

There is only one problem with this revenue stream: Your customer data shouldn’t belong to them. Your data should belong to you, and you only! As the organizer, you have built the relationships, the brand equity, and the mesmerizing experiences that your customers bought tickets for.

We have built vivenu around the principle that the resulting data should also be yours, period.

This is why vivenu lets you access, analyze, and export all data for your customers, their transactions, and the channels they used to connect with your brand and tickets. Granular data and a wide variety of pre-built reports and filter options make it easier than ever to explore - on a deep analytic level - segments of your customer base, uncover trends, and tap into the true revenue potential of your ticket buyer relationships.

With easy access to all data, organizers like the festival at the beginning of this article can go beyond the next level of fan engagement. Virtually endless possibilities for deep analytics can be distilled into actionable insights for customized offers and messaging, letting them unlock financial value across channels and strengthen their brand in the process. Done right, data-driven revenue optimization creates a virtuous cycle where every interaction makes your brand more attractive – and drives more revenue for your organization.

But of course, independence is not only about data. It also means that you and you alone should have control over the look and feel of your ticket buying experience. Unlike legacy solutions, vivenu simply fades into the background, so organizers’ brands can take center stage at all times. From the look and feel of online shops to the design of booking funnels, organizers like the festival from the example above can customize everything exactly to their needs. The result is a buying experience that is consistently branded unlike any other, allowing organizers to effectively leverage and build their brand by drawing guests in.

Want to see how vivenu can unlock independence for your ticketing? Book a meeting with one of our experts and get a glimpse at the future of ticketing, today.

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