Baseball tries to be at the
forefront of technology in many
different ways.
And ticketing has certainly been
one of those aspects from
delivering the first printed
home tickets in the early two
thousands to delivering the
first mobile tickets in the mid
two thousands to continuing to
be at the forefront of
technology and making sure we
are ready for our fans when our
fans are ready for the
technology.
Once we have an established base
of identified fans, we can
create target segments and Then
with the target fan segments, we
can offer much more contextually
relevant experiences,
information or promotions.
We want to be able to provide
best in class technology that's
mature.
So we've been trying to get in
front of this for a long time,
kind of understanding and
knowing and believing that
mobile ticketing specifically
and digital ticketing overall
will certainly be a key
component of how our fans
transact with their ticket
system.
The second a fan is holding a
paper ticket that fan really
becomes anonymized to us.
The good news is in just five
years, we went from 50% paper
down to about 5%.
And as a result, we've grown the
number of identified fans in
attendance up to 36% today.
If you think about major league
baseball and minor league
baseball thumps 100 million
customers actually, probably
more than that annually.
So it's certainly a tall task to
get this technology in front of
our fans.
But owning the ticket system,
owning tickets.com has really
given us the ability to make
sure we can develop exactly what
we need and how we need to
deliver it.
I would say most E commerce
companies are, are really
striving for that, you know, 20
to early 30 year old customer.
As as of course, we are, we've
been able to see a 10% increase
over the last year in that
audience of ticket buyers by
having easier to digest, easier
to process ticket flows.
We're able to deliver the ticket
and the experience of the and
when they're ready to consume it
, the single biggest driver of
fan behavior is the ticket.
It's the one non negotiable
thing.
Everyone needs a ticket to get
into a ballpark.
And so that becomes the tip of
the spear really in terms of
influencing fan behavior.
The fact that M LB does not have
to outsource that or have a
dependency on a third party
vendor is a huge asset.
Go at entry is a system where we
can enable fans to literally go
ahead directly into the
ballpark.
They associate their account
with facial recognition, which
is an opt in system that each
individual can choose if they
want to implement for the
ballparks that we have in place
for.
And the concept that we have is
that you're able to walk from
your car, you're able to walk
through our security and you're
able to continue to walk into
the ballpark without ever
stopping.
We saw a very high rate of fan a
option relative to overall
ticket scans going into
ballparks which tells us that
fans like it.
And Then we see a high rate of
repeat usage of go ahead entry
for fans entering fan surveys
have shown a 96% fan
satisfaction rate on go ahead
entry.
So we we do it from a number of
different angles trying to
assess both raw numbers as well
as fan sentiment.
If you ever get a chance to use
, go ahead entry.
It kind of is a magical
experience and we actually walk
people walking through saying,
oh my God, that was so cool.
We usually remember walking into
a ballpark unless it was a bad
experience.
We now have people walking in
and remembering it was a great
experience.
The most rewarding part of this
has been seeing that we're
making a real impact on fans on
families and people walking into
the ballpark.
I mean, the pure joy that's been
on fans faces has been extremely
rewarding, especially for go
ahead entry.
I haven't really seen a feature
have that type of impact so
quickly.