Justin Burrows: Michaela. Welcome. Welcome to Commerce chats.

You are, with Made Media, based out of London.

Michaela Drapes, Director of Strategy and Consulting, Made Media: Yes. That's correct. Although our, our, our spiritual home is in Birmingham, which is where the company was founded. I am one of like three people who who work out of London. We're a fully remote company

JB: you're the strategic director

MD: I am the director of strategy and consulting. I joined the company a couple of years ago as head of strategy and we. I recently moved into this role as part of the senior leadership team, which is very exciting.

JB: And what does Made media do?

MD: We, are a specialist digital agency. digital. Strategy and consulting agency mostly what we do is we build incredible websites for arts and culture organizations around the world, around the English speaking world, I should say. so we have some lovely clients here in the UK and in Australia, and then about 70%, maybe even more at this point of our business comes from the US. where we have some incredible clients that I would, I would love to list a really starry CV of who we work with. So here in the UK we work with the Royal Albert Hall, which is one of the most iconic performance venues in the entire country, perhaps even the world. and Glyndebourne, a beautiful, a beautiful country house opera company that I had the privilege to go there recently. They sell out almost every season, every performance. And so it was really as a mere mortal, I would have I would struggle to go to a performance, but they they graciously gave us tickets, and it was truly amazing. There's a it starts at four. and then you have an hour and a half for dinner. There's also, you know, intermissions where you can go stroll the lawn with your Pimms Cup, that kind of thing. You can you can eat a meal there, or you can bring a picnic. so it's really it's really quite lovely. and Wales Millennium Centre, which is a really fun challenge because I don't know if you know this, but, Wales, in Wales, you can neither privilege English nor Welsh as the as a the prominent language in any of your communications. They have to be basically presented equally. And that is a very interesting challenge digitally, as you might imagine. So we did our level best to make give them a fully bilingual purchase path like marketing website and purchase path that required a lot of customizations with various translation tools as well as like manual translations that they, the Welsh speakers also enter into the system for the presentation in the purchase path.

Localization

JB: Yeah, yeah, I have a question about that because I've worked with a Quebecois company before and they have similar restrictions about you need to have French, you need to have, English. Yeah. So do you do localization if you're doing Welsh and English or is it like one of those things like road signs where you just have it side by side?

MD: No. And we do also have we also do the website for the National Arts Center of Canada, which very similar situation also has also needs to be anglophone and francophone. And it's very it's very the presentation there is very similar as well. Basically you give like basically on first load you give the user a choice. We don't we don't lean on localization because for various reasons, but mostly like you might have, you might have your computer set to be in Welsh, but you might want to do the transaction in English for whatever reason. So we don't force we always let the user make the choice when it comes to that.

JB: Okay. Yeah, that that's always something I think really interesting. As you know, e-commerce progresses. A lot of companies are growing into the international, you know, the international realm. And it's like the the trick is how do you keep a uniformity of brand while also being truly localized, which isn't just language. There are other, you know, other elements involved.

MD: Yeah, that's true. And that's why it's really great. On the on the Wales site in particular, you know, we on on some of the Spanish language sites we do. And like we just did a site, for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center that uses a translation service to do eight different languages. But in terms of, of, of Wales in particular, what's great about the manual entry is that they are able to sort of lean into colloquialisms, lean into. And I think because Welsh is such a wild and amazing and beautiful language, that it it does have a specificity that almost can't be conveyed through automatic translation. So we, we I would say almost all, all of the site is just there are just two different versions of every page on the marketing site. And then there are two different, like language libraries in the, in the in the e-commerce path to to feed all that in. So yeah. Yeah.

SRO: Handling Multiple Brands and Systems in One House and One Digital Platform

JB: That's really I find it really interesting, because the clients that you have, you call them, you have a particular word for them, you, their venues. But you also called them. Was it presenters? What was the word you would use to describe them?

MD: Yeah, I think it just it kind of depends on, on the field they're in. So like, you know, in terms of like say for instance our, our US clients. so we, I.

JB: Recognize a few of them. Right.

MD: So we, We have a bunch of, this will be a really good, like a nice encapsulation of what you're talking about. So we work with Lincoln Center in New York City, and then we also work with a bunch of the constituent organizations in Lincoln Center. So we work with New York City Ballet. We work which is my former employer. we work with the New York Philharmonic and the Chamber Music Society. All of which are constituent organizations of Lincoln Center. But they all have their own CRMs. They all have their own websites. They all handle their own ticketing. in my mind, Lincoln Center is a is a it's they're a landlord, but they're also a presenting organization. They don't have their own venues. and so they present their programming that they do in the, in, in the houses of the constituent organizations. and so, but like a more traditional presenting organization is somebody like the Royal Albert Hall where they like, you know, they may have, you know, all of the big promoters come in and have a concert or they present the BBC Proms, or they have their own programming. So they they basically are a what, what they call here in the UK, a receiving house where they, they receive the, the performance and then they put it on and then the performance moves on as opposed to like somebody like the New York Philharmonic, who lives inside David Geffen Hall. That's where they perform. They might tour, but the bulk of their performances are in their home venue. Well, but yeah. So I'll kind of, I think sort of the lingo of, of our, of our world is that, you know, some organizations have a home and they present there, some organizations just present others and some just tour as well. Or they do a mix, like chamber music Society tours and they play at Lincoln Center.

JB: So like from a just to stomp the art out of it and be a marketing prick. yeah. What is the like? What's the brand relationship in those things? I mean, like, what brand are you presenting if you're. I mean, because you're because art is arts are strange. Because you have the New York City Ballet, you have Royal Albert Hall. And those are those are different. But if one performs in another, who are you? How do you decide how to message to the user?

MD: That's so interesting. I did have to deal with this a lot. more so in my in my previous life working at New York City Ballet, on the digital side there, and it would depend on where we went. But most often, if we were touring, which actually for them doesn't happen that often because picking up and moving 100 dancers and 100 pieces of orchestra and all the costumes and all the sets and all the dressers and the ballet, the repertoires and the accompanists and the BTS and everything. It's a lot of work. but when they would tour it, would it kind of fell under two things. But generally when you get to your receiving house, wherever you're performing, they're the ones who handle the marketing and the ticketing. and so it's kind of like a co-brand at that point, like they are presenting you, they're doing the heavy lifting, but they are sort of leaning on you as the like, prestigious art organization to like, carry on your end. And this is really where things have changed quite significantly. I think with the the advent of digital advertising and digital channels and having your own owned digital stake in the ground, as an organization as well, like, you know, we could say like, oh, we're going to be at the, you know, at the Paris Opera House performing and the Paris Opera House would be the ones who are selling the tickets and doing all the local promotion and things like that. So there is I would say that's generally the way that goes. It's just a very, friendly, usually, hopefully, fingers crossed collaboration between the the venue, who might do the marketing and the actual mechanics of the ticket sales and the the artistic company that's coming in and performing, who may then also to promote the event on their on their channels.

One Event, One Checkout - 50,000 Permutations ranging from £5 to £4,000

JB: There's a lot of analogous functionality in, in kind of like arts facing commerce or whatever you want to call that experience. If I have an e-commerce site and I have a SKU and an item, and it has variations to it. We're talking like maybe it has five different colors, maybe it has six different sizes to it.

If I'm going to buy a buy a ticket or get into, you know, an experience, like say the Royal Albert Hall or the opera, it, it has a little bit more variations in that there are a lot of seats there.

MD: Yeah. I think there's so there you've really hit on the complexity, like you've really gotten to the crux of the complexity of what it is that we do and what the challenges are around what we do. Because first of all, obviously, you know, you're selling, one of my colleagues likes to say we're selling, a moment in time. We're selling a ticket to a moment in time and a location. And like, that could be anywhere, doing anything. and so, you know, you kind of have to abstract it sometimes to down to that to really start to begin to think about what it is that we do. and so one of the biggest challenges is really selling the value proposition of a seat. Like how do you convey, first of all, you know, you've got to get the person in the door and you've got to sell them on, on coming to your event. Right. Like, you've you've got to get them interested in, like, I don't know, a friend and I were talking about how we really wanted to go see, the Brodsky Quartet. Do, a Shostakovich program. Well, we're already sold on on on that. We want to go see this. but it's an unfamiliar venue. We, you know, we're ticketing professionals, but we don't know this venue. And we, you know, how do we know what seat is is good? how do we know why is this seat £775? Why is this seat £96? Why is this seat. You know, why are why are the prices like. And then so you also have to like explain. You know, you have to communicate to the user in a very short amount of time, usually on a very small screen. because most, most people are looking at these things on their phones. Now, what is it that you're buying exactly? if you've already sort of sold them on the experience, now you've got to get them into the right location and the right seat so that they then have a great experience. because that's the other part of it, too. Like that, that this is where sort of the touchy feely aspect comes in, like so much of the challenge of the arts is getting people to come back. And so that really begins literally with that, that first time you sell them a ticket, because you've got to be able to convey to them what they're getting, what the value is, what to expect, what is going to, you know, what they're going to see, what they're going to possibly even a little taste of what they're going to experience. And so you have to bundle all this up and throw it at them in a very short amount of time and help them make a purchase decision. and then hopefully get them through as quickly as possible so that they do not change their minds. so, you know, you can use things like, use like best available seating. You can give people like a really robust, seat map where they have a view from seat image, or they can sort of get a three. There's a there's a provider now that's out there that gives you like a 360 view of the hall, from your seat, which is is cool. I'm glad somebody is finally doing that. It's a little niche. It's a little strange. but it's great because a lot of times we, we do see a lot of people who are making a very serious ticket purchase, R&D, doing it on the on their desktop, on their laptop machine. They're not doing it on their phone. and so, you know, you really got to communicate everything about the value of what they're purchasing in the moment. as, like I said, as quickly as possible, and then get them through that purchase path as quickly as possible. and make it as, like, you know, people are used to now, like, they're used to the Amazon. They're used to the they're used to the like one click checkout. And this is the thing that we contend with quite, quite a bit is or they're used to like the airline seat selection experience. And we kind of try and consider all of these things in the work that we do, and we sort of pick and choose from the user experiences from all corners of e-commerce to really make that experience as seamless and lovely as possible for the user, because so much of, for for a lot of our very high profile clients who do have a, a vibe, shall we say, of, of an, of an elevated experience. They want that in their website as well, like they want they want that ticket purchase feeling to feel very bespoke. They want it to feel like something special. They want to upsell you, as the Royal Albert Hall does on a, you know, $4,000 hospitality package in a 12 seat box, sorry, £4,000, £4,000 hospitality experience in a 12 seat box. Like people buy these things they want to have. You can go.

JB: Wait wait wait wait wait. So you can go to the Royal Albert Hall. See, this is what. This is what blows my mind. Okay. Brodsky quartet, you're doing water music, something. Yeah. and you go in there and as a user, using the same website on my on my this, this same phone, I'm on my phone here, I'm going through their website and I can buy a £60 ticket, or I can buy a £4,000 experience with the same like checkout flow. Yes. That just blows my mind. Is that the same product? I mean, what is that that complexity, that multiple layering I think is, is really fascinating.

MD:Yes, it is the same product and that's one. And actually we are in the process now of taking sort of the Royal Albert Hall sort of ticket flow to the to sort of to the next level, because at the moment you can do this, but it's a little it's a little clunky. and they want to be presenting everything, I think the lowest price and they're really on at the moment. They're very focused on being accessible at all price points. So there will even be like a £5 ticket in that in that house. Yeah. Where you can also get a A400 £0 box. Yeah. With a with a waiter and or d'oeuvres and what have you. because this is sort of the, the mode that the I think especially the is happening in the UK at the moment is sort of because the cost lives, the cost of living crisis that we're having here, which is maybe hard to explain to Americans, but it is real, like the value of people's salaries has not kept up with inflation. And there's a lot of income inequality here. And the the arts organizations sort of have a mandate to really lean into to, to correcting that as much as they can. in their product offerings. and so, so we are in the process of redoing that purchase flow. So it makes it even easier to see all of the price points and all of the locations. And, you know, is this a is this a restricted view seat is do you need do you have accessibility needs. Do you want that premium experience. All of these things are communicated in one one go, which does require a lot of very specific focus on on user journeys and, and and personas and like thinking through like, okay, how would somebody who wanted this sort of experience go? Okay. Well, if somebody wanted another kind of experience, what is their user journey? Like we spend a lot of time investigating it and picking at and like untangling the best way for to sort of achieve every possible, successful purchase. But, backing up a little bit, we are, I would say probably one of the, one of the leading, agencies in the world for integrating with one of with a very, specific, CRM that is used by arts and culture organizations around the world called tessitura. it is a very specific and unique product. It was developed by the Metropolitan Opera in the late 90s, and its value proposition is that it provides a sort of 360 holistic view of your patron. Right. So you have their giving history and you have their ticket purchase history. And those two things are visible to someone on the in the CRM. So you can see like, oh, this person buys, you know, tickets to six events a year. and they give us $75 at the end of the year and you can start really, the idea is that you can use all of these data points to both cultivate your donor base and cultivate your, your, your, you know, your marketing pipeline and getting people to be return visitors. And like, it's sort of that that unified vision of the patron, and their whole experience with the organization is really the value proposition of this particular CRM. And but It being something that was developed and created in in the late 90s, should tell you right now what what it's like. And they are in the they're in the process of really modernizing and making a lot of changes, to the product that we are also having to react to. They were on they had like a Soap API for many years. They're now completely killing that off. They're sun setting that it's they're totally going restful now. So like every site that was ever built to integrate with it in a, in a meaningful way has had to go through a transformation of making sure that all of their back end integrations are all redefined. and so it's actually been quite, a, quite a process for our little corner of the world who uses this software. And it's quite it's, it's, it's not an insubstantial number of, of organizations ever. Every one that I named and then some use it and they're in there. In the museum world, they, they, you know, botanical gardens, zoos. We have a we do the website for the Mystic Aquarium. Mystic aquarium uses this particular CRM. So, they're very well entrenched in this space. And so we have carved ourselves out a little niche as being pretty much like a really, like, kind of cutting edge place that you go to if you want to really stretch the bounds of what is possible with that integration. So that's why we're that's why we work with Royal Albert Hall to, to really to make that ticketing path possible, where we work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and we do all the ticket sales for the Hollywood Bowl, which is, I believe, the largest venue that uses, the tessitura CRM. I think it's like I'm going to get in trouble for not remembering how big it is, but it's very large. The Hollywood Bowl, It's super big, super big. 16, 17,000 capacity. Maybe bigger. It might be twice that big, I don't know. I am very poor with numbers, but it's quite large. and, that's another like, you know, very proud, wonderful integration that we've done because they, they're in a hard core business like they are. The Los Angeles Philharmonic makes a lot of money and brings a lot of people in the door, and they do not mess around. And there are business rules are very complex. And their their throughput on busy on sales is off. Off the charts.

Busy On Sales: The Original Hot Ticket - How to Keep the Wheels On in a Traffic Crush (And keepings Goblins out)

JB: What is it? Busy on sales.

MD: Oh, I'm going to I'm, I want to say like on a stamp. So they say I was on a call the other day, and somebody defined it as more than 45 transactions a minute with this particular CRM. and that's like, I've seen more like, you can you can, you can we can get it to where there's like, where it can be a lot more hardcore than that.

JB: Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. So let's, let's talk about this because this is something that doesn't happen. Or if it does happen, it's very, very rare. It's like an exclusive drop or it's a publicity stunt or something like that where everybody is at your site at the same time. And especially for events that are special or have a unique element to them. I have a sense of like panic when I go in, you know, it's like, am I going to be able to get through? There was the whole Taylor Swift debacle. I don't think that was Tessa.

MD:No, no ticket. Ticketmaster would be is also like their one of their biggest competition like Ticketmaster wants to own the own the whole space. so what do you do?

JB: What do you do if, like, you have somebody, you know, it's just a crazy ticket. and not only do you have a bunch of hardcore fans wanting to press refresh on your site, but you get all these, like, little tech goblins out there that are trying to snap it up and resell and or, oh.

Yeah.

JB: Use fake credit cards.

Yes. This is like, excuse me. I'm like, whoa, Justin, I hate these.

JB: Goblins. These little goblins, they're goblins.

They are goblins. The the what do you do? So oh my gosh, how do we get rid.

MD:Of the goblins?

So there's like, obviously there's a lot going on behind the scenes, as you might imagine in the tech stack. There's there's a lot going on, to make sure to mitigate a lot of these things. but I'll start. I'll start on the, on the, on the presentation side for the user. So, and then we'll, we'll go in. so one of the things that we've been talking about especially I've been talking about this a lot with, with my boss, the CEO of our company, James Bagley, who has worked in the ticketing, ecosystem for a really long time. he's he's sort of thinking about this like sort of fast and slow commerce aspect to ticket sales. and in that, like in a normal situation, in a normal transaction, you want to get people through as quickly as possible. Like I was saying, like, you want to buy four tickets to The Nutcracker, you just want to and you're like, your day is crazy. You just want to take your kids to The Nutcracker. You just want to buy those four tickets and like, cross that off your list, right? You just want to get on with your day. But, but if you are like, say, for instance, a super fan of, I don't know. Oasis, as shall we say, a recent example. I've heard of them, I guess, for our for our dear fellow Gen Xers in the house. So you may have you might have heard there was a big deal here in the UK. that was also yet another, like, sort of big deal. Kind of like messed up on sale situation. And this is where, you know, you start to think about how the slow commerce aspect of an on sale actually makes more sense, because you want it to be fair, you want to be conveying the, the, the, the sense of fairness and transparency about the process for everyone who wants to buy a ticket. So that's where things like looking for speed.

JB: I just want to make sure that if I let me see if I say this right, if I've queued up that I have my space in the queue.

MD: Exactly.

And so like, maybe, you know, so on we'll use that example as, as sort of representative example. But I can also talk a little bit more about what maybe a more like, like still a high demand but much less, high profile on sale might, might feel like, but in the terms of something like, like, like a big once, you know, once in a lifetime, maybe if it even happens. I've got I, by the way, I put my money on the fact that this reunion is not going to happen. I think they're going to I don't.

JB: I didn't want to say anything, but I'm I am morbidly curious, like I it is not a healthy way. My interest in this is not no, not healthy. But it's like last time I saw you, you hock a loogie on the stage and walked off. So what are you going to do now? Exactly.

MD: So I have, I'm, I'm getting ready to to put some money on the go down to the betting shop and put some money because you can you can wager on this because it's England and you can wager on anything. You can also wager on like what song they're going to open with, if indeed they do actually end up playing. But like, I got my money on the fact that this isn't going to happen. But anyway, the idea is that in order to get that fairness and transparency, you have what they call here in the UK ballots, which is the way that they do the Olympics or Wimbledon or even like something like Glyndebourne, the big opera, or even, the Wagner place. Why can't I remember the name of the Wagner place right now in, where they do the opera there. Anyway, there are places in the world where they have such a high demand for the tickets that they already have some of these things in place, and you kind of don't hear about it because they do it all the time. They use a ballot. They use a ballot, which is basically like a pre-registration form, right? Like they say, okay, we have here's the program. You send us what you want, we're going to put you in the hopper. We're going to do a draw. You have X number of hours or X number of days to complete your transaction or opt out.

MD: And if you opt out you might lose your place in line for next season. So yeah think wisely. so that's sort of like how those things work, which is how you end up getting, your Wimbledon tickets or your, your Glyndebourne tickets or what have you. And it's like slowing down the process to the point where you are forcing people to give you their choices. And then you say, here you go. You have been chosen to act on this now. Like literally the, the, the the slowness is so intense that it does give an air of absolute fairness to the process. Now, the thing that kind of broke down with, like the Taylor Swift and the Oasis like fans sign up things was that they did do those, but they didn't quite go far enough in terms of of even controlling the the availability or the the lottery aspect to the, to those pre-sales. And that's really like you can't you, you really have to slow it down to the point of literally stopping when there's that much demand. Now, on the other hand, if you have sort of like a mid-range artist who, like, sends out their Spotify fan, you know, presale code like they're, you know, they're like, do you know who Mitski is? Ask your kids. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure your kids love Mitski. She's incredible. She had a big, we had a situation a couple of like about a year, maybe like nine months ago or so. She had a big she announced a tour and all the dates went on sale at once. And it just so happened that like 4 or 5 of the venues, were people that we work with. And I would say at almost all of them, they didn't know who she was. So they were not ready for this experience. And all of their sites came almost like they didn't come down because we kept the sites up. But the traffic was insane. They were not ready for it, and they really should have had like, in that case, you have your your waiting room software, which sits kind of between your marketing site and your ticketing site, that kind of collects all of the people who come and just sit, wait.

JB: What a waiting room. What is.

MD: So there's so we have, we actually have this product in a couple of we have a couple of competitors in this space that offer like a queuing software that, so basically, you know, all the people who sit on the website and just refresh, refresh, refresh until it goes on sale this.

JB: Boo, don't do that.

MD: So this mitigates that this basically collects all of those sessions and puts them like quarantines them from the rest of your site so that like, the site is still healthy. People who want to buy tickets to something else can still do that. You're not like, you know, your site isn't like, struggling. And basically so everybody who had been sitting on that page or who were interested in in that on sale have been shoved into a waiting room to wait on.

JB: You basically have created a completely separate checkout flow or journey, whatever you want to call it.

MD: No, this is just like a holding pen. It's like purgatory. Like we're going to let we're going to.

JB: Part of the conversion thing, like somebody's ready, they got their wallet out.

MD: That's true, that's true. But basically they are they are shunted into this into this waiting room where they are then going to be let out at a sensible rate of speed for the health of the site to then go through the regular purchase path. So they're sitting in this sort of like literally like a purgatory, but like they've gone to the event page and we've gone what, you're interested in this event? Welcome to the waiting room. And it's like, so like if you get there early, you just wait. And the thing that we do now with our with our waiting room software called Crowd Handler is like anybody who's in the waiting room, the like the the holding pen at like 10 a.m. for your 10 a.m. on sale. They're all sitting there. We completely randomize the locations. So then it's we try to be as fair as possible. So you are going to be it's not like when you got there, there's nothing to do with how long you've been sitting there. You're going to get a random position. And we do this to sort of discourage people from just parking. They're going to do it anyway. But and then on top of that.

JB: Being sweaty, that's what I learned from my kids. They're they're sweat lords. They get they're really way too early.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just. Yeah. Just waiting. Do you remember, like, having to go, like, wait in line for, like, concert tickets in, like, the parking lot? Yeah.

JB: I had to go down to to the to H E Butts, the HEB. You get all your tickets from HEB, and you would have to line up to get a little wristband to go. I remember doing that for to go see U2. The Frank Erwin Center. South by Southwest, which at that point was a much different thing.

Yeah.

That was so cool, because you walk around school with your, you know, your little wristband. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

MD: So this is, you know, this is sort of like a version of that. Yeah. You'll get to the front of the line eventually. But it is, it's very. So at that point, you know, you've been randomized and then we very closely watch the health of the integration with the with the ticketing CRM, because that API connection very can get real hot, real fast. We want to make sure that the traffic is moving through at a nice rate of speed. and so we want that throughput to be as smooth as possible. But sometimes it gets real bad. And you, it gets to a one in, one out situation, like somebody checks out, you throw another one in, somebody checks out, you throw another one in. but oftentimes what happens is then we have this, the software that we have that I mentioned, crowd handler, is pretty smart. And so when there's not a lot of inventory left, it starts letting people through faster because it knows that there's nothing to transact. And then the waiting room just, like, vanishes into the ether and that's it. And then people, people cry on Twitter that they didn't get their tickets or whatever. But you know what? It's it's done. And your site, you sold out your you sold out in 3 minutes or 5 minutes or what have you. And your site is still up and healthy, and people are making donations and transactions for other events and none the wiser, honestly. Yeah, because they didn't have that presale code or what have you. And so really it's that, it's that aspect of making sure that the whole like sort of digital ecosystem stays healthy throughout a busy on sale. And so what I didn't get to is that we also have so there's also a lot of stuff that happens on the back end to sort of help that as well. A lot of people use like a service like Imperva or count to block bad actors, bots, known bots and things like that, but, you know, bad IP addresses. Crowd handler also has an anomaly detector and will auto block based on various factors known server farms, you know, distance from. You can say, okay, maybe, you know, not people who are trying to buy a ticket to an event in Pittsburgh who are coming from Indonesia. I don't know, maybe they're probably not really legitimate traffic, stuff like that. So, you know, there's a lot going on behind the scenes as well. And like I said, in the tech stack, that sort of help keep this water tight as well. So there's a lot of there's a lot of moving parts on a, on a busy on sale to make sure that, like I said, that the the rest of the people on your site are none the wiser that you don't have your SEO going, like, why is the site down? Like, yeah, you know, that's a bad deal.

JB: That's a bad deal. When the SEO is like, is the site? It seems a little slow to me.

MD: Exactly.

You don't want that. We don't. We never want that. We never want that. And the thing is, is that most, you know, most on sales, even like big ones are, are we're kind of at the point now where we'll monitor them for folks. But honestly, you know, most of them happen without incident at this point. Like, we we've just really got it down to a science and we really want. We really feel like this is such a really important service that we provide for our clients because it, you know, this is their business. Literally selling tickets through their website is I mean, yes, they present the art or they, they create and present the art or what have you, but the you got to get the butts in the seats and you got to take the money. It's. Yeah, it's just part of, it's part of what we do and we, you know, our, our that's our mission is to make that process as, as seamless and beautiful for people as possible.

Customer Segmentation In Elizabethan Theatre (which we still use)

JB: Well, I think that's. Yeah, that's it's interesting because that you talk about that ephemeral experience, that one place in time. and like, I still can remember, like every play I've seen, like on Broadway or Off-Broadway, you know. And I can remember where I sat, what it felt like, And it is, it is really, I don't know, I think that's that's really interesting. One thing I think is interesting is that in a certain way, you know, the I think about the Globe Theater and how you had the Groundlings that would eat nuts and throw nuts at the actors. And then there were people who had seats up at the top, and you could pay extra for a cushion, or at least so I read.

It's it's a little the same thing.

MD: I mean, it is. Yeah, it is. And I think also too, you can actually still have that experience. Next time you come to London, we'll go to the globe and you can, you can pay extra for your seat cushion.

JB: Yeah. I think that'll be, that'll be that'll be great. It's a facsimile though, right. Because the original burned.

MD: It is a facsimile. Yeah.

JB: Because don't don't yank my chain. Michaela. I would be like, oh, forthwith. Let's anon.

MD: Anon. Anon. Verily. Verily.

The Box Office as the Original E-Commerce Platform, Also, Thoughts on the accuracy of HBO series The Gilded Age’s Depiction of Cultural Institutions and how we love it anyway.

JB: No. I find that that's really interesting in that the bones of the arts are still there. Like, you still have subscribers. You still have, you know, people working together to, like, create their own tools. I find it's interesting in many ways, that type of transaction, almost like more closely mirrors the modern, like e-commerce digital commerce world than, you know, like going to a store. I mean, you're coming in and you have a ticket that represents something, because you're not actually buying a thing. You're buying the promise of a thing online. And that's what theaters have done. They've got. So I was watching, have you seen this? This show? It's kind of trashy, but I love it. It's called the Gilded Age. Have you seen the show?

MD: Okay, so first of all, I just have to, like, preface this by saying that I do not, as a rule, watch a lot of TV, but but I travel a lot and I travel a lot. And so I'm often at the mercy of what is presented to me on the back of the seat, in front of me, on my little screen. Yes. Or the arm or the swinging arm or what have you. Yeah. And and I. So one of my secret shame is that I read all the episode recaps of shows. This is very ridiculous. I read, like, all the, like the press around, all the thinkpieces about TV shows, so I can have conversations with people about things that I have never watched, that I can fake my way through a conversation at a cocktail party, or like a conference, coffee break or whatever. This is my secret shame, but I literally don't watch that much TV. However, when I was like when when I was on a flight and the Gilded Age came up, I like, I got so excited because I really wanted to watch it because it's so bad. It's so bad. But also too, when the season two came out and it was all about the development of the Metropolitan Opera, I was like, yes, you know, they used to be my neighbor, you know, and they're I know a lot of nice, nice, fine folks who work there. All good friends of mine. they're just such a lovely, lovely crew that work there. and there, I know, like, their marketing team and a couple of people from their fundraising department that I've worked with over the years. But everyone who works there is like the the pinnacle of arts, of arts, you know, workers in the, in, in probably in the world really, they're very serious about what they do. But, you know, they had like, tie in events with it. They had like a special, like, I don't know, step and repeat, like with the cast and stuff that, you know, they all came by. but I was so excited to watch it because it was, like, truly outside. So there's two other things that I've. Three. So there's. I was actually talking about this this weekend. somebody asked me how I felt about Black Swan, and I was like. Like ballet people hate Black Swan. Ballet people hate Black Swan and orchestra. People hate tar for like, kind of a similar reasons. Because they make us. They make us look like they make us look bad. And I mean, to a certain extent, it's a little true. It's a little too close to home.

But I was I mean, but when it came to the Gilded Age and the whole, like, Academy of Music versus Metropolitan Opera, drama, I was just like. I was so into it because it was just like, this is. This is my world. These are this is like a.

It's like, I recognize that. Yeah.

Although I have to say that was the Metropolitan Opera House that was in the 30s, that, and it was. That's the one before this. I think there was another one, actually. There were several, but that was the first one. It was in it was in it, I want to say it was in the somewhere between the 20s and the 30s on Broadway, which is still kind of a grody part of town, but, you know, but yeah, that's where it was initially. And I think the Academy of Music was over on the West Side in the 20s somewhere. Anyway, I used to know this, but it's kind of. Lost.

A New Vanguard of Techno-Grandmas as Change Agents

JB: I, I think it's interesting because a lot of the things that they talked about like still go on where you are fundamentally a lot of these you're working with arts organizations that they have to fill their bowls. They have to, you know, they have to eat. so there is a lot going on in the background in terms of like these subscriptions getting people, you know, and I'm assuming that like a lot of that trying to get your. While you may be acquiring new customers, I would imagine that retention and increasing interactions with customers especially I mean, maybe at a certain point it becomes more development than it does actual commerce.

MD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really it's really interesting because, you know, that if you look at the sort of literature coming out of our field and all of the research that's been done and all of the, you know, there's there's a million consulting agencies or who are all saying, like, subscriptions are dying, rethink your subscription model, this, that and the other. But it it honestly just depends because there are some people who are really, really dedicated subscribers because what a subscription gets you is like a discount and a seat, your seat, and oftentimes a seat that you can keep depending on the kind of organization it is and the house that it's in. That's your seat forever. Basically, as long as you renew and you can like ask for a better one next year or, oh, maybe I got laid off and I still need to go, but I need to downgrade this year like you can you can, you know, you can move around the house if you want to, or you can stay in your same seat every year for 50 years and then bequeath your seat to your niece who loves ballet. And then they come and true stories, true stories and but like and also to, you know, that's such an important but what you kind of don't think about maybe or if you pause and you think about it like, why is this, why is this subscription model so important? Well, it gives it gives revenue before the performance is actually begin. Because then you have you have some liquid cash to like actually mount the production. And so this is why the subscriptions are so important. And that's why it's been such a, such a challenge as the business model has changed because it has, it really has shifted like this. Subscriptions used to be like the bulk of of the business and sort of over time that has shifted. even in places where subscriptions are still a huge part of their business. you know, it's it's still it's still a shift. And so, you know, over the years, you've had to figure out new and exciting ways to get people to keep coming back, but never be dependent on throwing discounts at them to get them back in the door, like so. That's the real challenge. Like, you know, I have I came up at the knee of of a marketer who was like, we never discount anything. We only add to the experience, which I think is a really interesting way of looking at like selling a premium, sort of a premium experience is like, yeah, you never discount it. You, you, you, you pump it up, you give more for value. and so that's, that's sort of there's so you know and it really it's so your pricing strategy and your approach to dealing with whether or not subscriptions are sort of falling off or not in your market is so dependent on your specific product, your specific market, your audience, everything like there's no one size fits all solution for for a lot of these organizations in terms of like rethinking their, their revenue streams. and that's why also to this is the work that we do is ultimately at the end of the day, so very, very bespoke because no, no one organization does things the same way. No one organization presents things the same way they have. Like there may be similarities, like the seats are still in rows or what have you. Yeah. Or yes. They all put on, you know, like I could I'm never surprised by this. Like how many performances are in an orchestra season or a theater season. Or a theater season is like 6 to 7 productions a year. An orchestra season is like, you know, 100 to 150 shows a year. Like, you know, there are some there are standards, but within that there are so many layers of like ways of doing things and ways of talking about, you know, all our packages or we talk about our packages this way and we sell them this way, and this is why we do them this way, because it usually goes back to the piece of paper that they used to use for the subscription form.

JB: I wanted to ask you about that. I wanted to ask about that because, you know, we'll get clients that will have started in a channel, like, I mean, the paper catalog. There's several names out there that are like, you know, they have an online thing, but their thing was like Vermont Country Store, you know, L.L. bean. Yeah. So, like, are there do you have some clients who are just like, you have to fax it in to this number, or I would say only or are they all online now?

MD: Finally, I would say like it was during my time of working. So I started it at New York City Ballet in 2012, and we still took orders by fax. Fax orders would still come in. And in my time there, I, you know, we were slowly shifting, shifting, shifting, shifting people to transact online. And it wasn't necessarily a huge push. I always used to joke about the grandmas with iPads, who were really the ones who were driving that shift. They were getting comfortable with the technology, like they, you know, and it it was so it was it was very slow. And then all of a sudden it was like, you know, compound interest, like the, the, the shift from people buying online to like coming to the box office or calling was just like it flip flopped overnight. And obviously post Covid, it was even more so, like people are now even more they, they I would say even now, like, you know, after reopening and being, you know, in the past like three, four years, like, like I said, kind of at the beginning of the conversation, people expect. They absolutely expect the same quality level of interaction and technology as they're getting with any other e-commerce site, whether that's Amazon, whether that's their bank, their airline, whatever. You know, people are less and less understanding now of the fact that your e-commerce path is janky. They're aware of fraud. They're aware of, like when something doesn't look secure. And if you are presenting even anything that looks remotely janky, you're at a disadvantage.

JB: Yeah, those interactions with third third parties, if you don't do those right, you're it's terrifying. Yeah. And especially speaking of the the the the ladies with the, you know, grandmas with iPads. I mean, they're like they get inundated with that stuff and it's it's really frustrating. So being able to provide a secure you know, it's it's interesting. It's an interesting dynamic in terms of expectations. Yeah.

MD: And I would say like we really struggled with, with, with patron education about third party resellers for a couple of years. And I would say, like now people are a lot more savvy to that. Like, people are less likely to show up when the Bolshoi. Well, they wouldn't come now. But like I always used to hear these stories from the box office treasurers about how when the Bolshoi came and danced at at Lincoln Center, that people showed up with like the the worst looking faked ticket paper tickets. Yeah. And they were just like, how why, why why did you buy this? Like, it's clearly not legit. and I always kind of carry that story with me because, like, you just, you know, people want to believe or they just want. Everybody wants to believe that. Nobody wants to believe that something is too good to be true when presented. But I think people are actually definitely more savvy now. I think the consumer education is there. And I think I think we we've shifted from people showing up with, you know, with, with tickets from bad actors that the shift is really now towards, and it's been a real imperceptible but very noticeable, noticeable shift in the past couple of years, with basically people buying tickets with stolen credit cards and then putting them on legitimate resale sites. Yeah. so that they do actually go through they're not like a, they're not trying to sell the same ticket to 20 people. They actually have an individual ticket and they've put it on SeatGeek or one of those things, what have you. and it's a legitimate transaction. It's like it's basically like money. It's it's money laundering, right? Yeah. And then and then the the the fraudulent credit card transaction gets dinged. They get, you know, the they get the organization gets the charge back and they take the hit. and so this is actually where we see the most sort of fraud. That's the worst of the fraud that happens now.

Are chargebacks and fraudulent transactions? or people using stolen credit cards to test the numbers by doing, like, small donation amounts that then do chargebacks and it can get can get really problematic. and, you know, a lot of credit card processors do not care that you are a nonprofit, you know, do not care that you are, you know, a charity. They don't care. They, they they've got to charge back. What are you going to do about it? So. Yeah. that's that's really the the most annoying sort of fraud stuff that we see now that we're trying. That's sort of the next frontier of the mitigation. And that's where those services like, you know, like iovation or count come in. And because they do the, you know, they will try and flag a transaction as fraudulent at the point of payment.

The Artistic Temperament in E-Commerce: Industry Affinity and harnessing passion in supporting systems.

JB: Okay, okay. Last topic, last topic, last topic. so in the arts, it is a business. But you're dealing with artists in my experience, like, for example, working in fashion or clothing industries, that even if somebody is in the e-commerce department, they identify themselves as being part of the fashion industry. and so what is it like to go up to somebody and say, your back end is janky in a technical sense. like, do you hurt their feelings? Are they hard to. I mean, is there a different way that if I was going into a typical merchandiser, I might be like, you know, y'all gotta y'all gotta get get good? is there a different way you you handle the artistic temperament if it so exists?

MD: I yes, absolutely. I would say I mean, I did I did my time in the outside world, as you know, in the, in e-commerce and in like, in, you know, a bunch of basically not in the performing arts world. I did work in the outside and I did definitely have to. There was a definitely a mind shift set once, once I got into that space of really, you know, there's a lot of people who are very passionate about the work that they do. A lot of times they've been at the organization for a really long time. That's often maybe less so the case now than it was five years ago. But like, you know, people have been there a really long time. They can sometimes be very set in their ways, which is maybe sometimes also a bit of a thing. but yeah, I think there's a lot there's also a lot of residual pride in being a part of creating amazing art. and so I think there is a sensitivity that goes into the discussions, maybe not so much around ego, but really a sensitivity around communicating that you understand, like the importance of the value of presenting what they what, whatever they do, whatever art form that it is that they do that a sensitivity to, to that sort of balance between the, the dirty commerce and the, the beauty of the art that like, it's really the struggle is often like that, like their existential struggle sometimes between how do we how do we talk about what we do without devaluing it? while making it really accessible to people? And so I think but yeah, like if I go in somewhere and like, their business rules are dumb, I sometimes have no problem saying to a box office guy like, why are you why have you set this up this way? Like, you know, what is.

JB: Wrong with you? What were you thinking? You should be ashamed.

MD: No, no, I may not be that rough about it, but sometimes we do. Like, we can be a little bit, you know, like. Oh, well, you know, some of our other clients have had some success in approaching this particular problem in this way. Yeah. And then it's a lot of times it's it's very much like, oh, we didn't think about it that way or oh, we have this reporting issue, or we have this one use case that maybe doesn't quite fit in this particular model of, how you might want to do this. So I think I if I would say that, yes, a lot of the people that you encounter in these place based place places are oftentimes, you know, frustrated artists and, but who also feel like very, very passionate and very attached to what they do. And, you know, I worked with a bunch of people at New York City Ballet. They they worked in the call center or in ticket services because they got free tickets and they could go to the ballet every day. They had that job so that they could do that. Like there are just some people who are like, they're so dedicated to the art form that they find a way to, like, work with it and in it. and it's really delightful. and I think sometimes there is a challenge of, like, there's this sort of stereotype of that maybe, like, not everyone you encounter is going to be like practically minded or business minded. And I think that's also changing. I think that, you know, so many, so many of these arts organizations now, they make a lot of money. They they operate very much like a media company or something similar where they've kind of adopted that, like content creation and monetization model that is very much very sophisticated and very aligned with with a lot of the ways that that a, you know, a big media conglomerate might, might market their stuff. and it's, you know, there's a very there just is a very fine line between, you know, not making it this, you know, horrible crass commercial experience and then and embracing the, the fact that you are bringing beauty and joy and, and magic to people's lives in a way, like you said, that that literally stays with you forever. There's these, these Dutch, professors who specialize in, like, leisure studies. And they have this, this way of talking about memorable versus transformative experiences. And there's a very specific like because they're social scientists, they're like, these six things must happen for it to be like a transformative experience versus just a memorable one. And you read it and you're like, that's. And then you read it and you're like, yeah, actually there's something to that. Like, you know, an experience can be memorable, but like to have one be like fully transformative and change your way of thinking and like, you walk out of that beautiful theater and you're your eyes are opened. You see the world differently. Like that happens in our world every day to like hundreds of people who walk in the doors of the venues that we work with. and that is, I think, everybody who works in our world, that's I think at the end of the day, if you really ask people, that's why we do it, you know, that's we want, we want. We want to give people every day is a every day is a chance to give somebody a transformative experience that can really, like, change their life. It sounds cheesy as hell, but it's so true.

JB: Well, on that note, I am changed by this conversation.

MD: I'm glad.

JB: Michaela drapes, strategic director, head of strategy. What was your title again? Director.

MD: Director. Strategy and consulting. I did just get a promotion. So the head used to be there, but is no longer there, so it's fine. It's great.

JB: Well, thank you very much for joining me. Michaela. Director of strategy and consulting from Made Media. yeah. I'll have to find out about these Dutch professors and what they're on about. Thank you for, walking me through, this, this commerce experience in events and and in ticketing. I think there are a lot of things here that are just really always applicable, like the engagement with your your I have to call it a brand, but you can actually say you're engaging with your art. And I think making it accessible is part of that and communicating that connection and understanding. I think it's something that vendors, integrators often overlook, is that they get down to the to the technical details of, you know, will you need to do this and that. But the first thing you have to do is really say, I understand what you are and what you're doing. and it's really nice to hear how you deal with doorbusters. and goblins. I think we covered a lot, a lot here and, groundlings and all of that and and all of those unique experiences that make the arts and presentation the arts. So anyway, thank you so much for joining me.

MD: Thank you. Justin, this was so fun. Thank you.