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Just the ticket

IOMEDIA's Virtual Venue ticket purchasing programme is proving a success at a number of large sporting venues accross the USA

IOMEDIA aims to change how tickets are purchased online, from a standard web form or 2D ‘airline’ functional transaction map to a fully realised, immersive experience. This approach leverages the emotional aspect of purchasing tickets to any live event and gives fans the ability to put themselves into their preferred environment before the event happens. By allowing fans to choose the specific seats they want, the company is allowing teams to emotionally connect with their fans during the ticket purchase. This leads to increased sales and conversion when a fan is debating their seating options. The standard systems that were in place before IOMEDIA developed the Virtual Venue offered no experience at all and left people to make their choices solely based on whatever the ticketing system deemed to be the 'best available' seats.

Because of this, IOMEDIA has been able to introduce turnkey solutions to transition the sports world to a digitally based environment, increasing effectiveness, ease-of-use and most importantly improving a team’s bottom-line. Once fans are given the opportunity to immerse themselves in an architecturally accurate environment, they have been seen to purchase the more expensive tickets because they were able to see the benefit of those views from seats.

Penn State Football was the first team to run a fully integrated programme with IOMEDIA and Ticketmaster, re-seating nearly 70,000 people (20,000 accounts). The team saw 250 accounts upgrade themselves each day, as fans did not have to call the Penn State ticket office. When the programme opened to the public, nearly 1,800 tickets for US$630,000 (pre-donation) were sold in three days, with an average time per transaction of 9 minutes. In a survey sent to fans, 91% said the programme was easy to use and hope to continue this programme moving forward.

UCLA launched an Integrated Virtual Venue to allow fans to select their seats in the new Pauley Pavilion 18 months before it opened. The results in the first month were US$120,000/day in online tickets sold, with 76% of ticket purchases taking place online.

With the use of the integrated Virtual Venue, the University of Washington Husky Stadium Club Seat pre-sale yielded US$4 million in new donation revenue within a 10-day period, and saw 90% (2172 seats) of Club Seat inventory sold out 18 months prior to the stadium opening.

The Portland Timbers' Virtual Venue Season Ticket Relocation programme saw over 12,000 season tickets sold, resulting in US$6 million in revenue. The programme serviced over 3,500 accounts online reducing the relocation process from four months to six weeks and decreased phone call volume to the Box Office by 80%. In addition, the system instituted a US$10 service charge per transaction, which led to additional US$35,000 in new revenue. The system also enabled the company to hire 10 fewer part-time employees, saving them roughly US$48,000 - 60,000 over a two month period.
 

IOMEDIA will be exhibiting at Stadia Design & Technology Expo 2012, 8-10 May 2012. Visit the company at Booth 3064