TICKETMASTER
Creative Director, Brand/Product
Prior to me starting 2017, Ticketmaster’s brand was surprisingly inconsistent and hard to identify with. Sure everyone had heard of Ticketmaster… it was the most popular place to buy tickets, but no one could tell you what we stood for, sounded, looked, or felt like. My goal was to change the perception of our audience, from we’re just here to sell you something, to we’re fans too, we want to get you hyped, help you get ready for the show, and create lifelong memories.
In my time at Ticketmaster, I led a wide variety of exciting and challenging projects including a complete rebrand, a carefully phased out and iterative approach to a massive overhaul of our digital presence, and have introduced and tested many new experiences across web, mobile app, email, social, broadcast and OOH. My areas of focus have included the core editorial experience, utility, and service around our style and grooming content, performance, and optimization, as well as building and deploying many successful 360° marketing campaigns. Working with our product and engineering partners we were able to increase our NPS by +42pts over 2.5 years across our website and app. Working with our marketing partners we were able to grow our total social following across platforms by 850K over 2.5 years.
As Creative Director, my goal was to marry business and brand goals with user needs by constantly testing new ideas, talking with users, understanding data, and comparing campaign results. I was also responsible for the creative vision and output of our internal agency; the look, the feel, and the tone of our brand; and for leading and keeping our creative teams at the top of their game.
Some of the more important consumer-facing projects I’ve worked on include a website redesign, homepage and category page redesigns focused on ease-of-use, recommendations, favoriting, and a major overhaul to our email product suite as well as launching new content franchises, Ticketmaster Friday 5, Ticketmaster 10 and Ticketmaster Insiders across our socials and blog.
Each project below was worked closely on with Ticketmaster’s amazing creative, fan marketing, insights, editorial, sales, and engineering teams. Have a gander below to learn more.
The Rebrand
Historically, Ticketmaster’s made many attempts to rebrand, much to no avail. Be it internal teams or external agencies, our then President, Jared Smith felt the essence of the brand was not being captured. When I joined the team, my first task was to build an internal creative agency focused on rebranding and creating a new consumer and enterprise experience for our fans and clients across multiple products and platforms.
To kick things off, we set up a war room for all of the creatives to work in on a daily basis. We spent time taking inventory of who we were, what we aspired to be, what we loved about other successful brands. Once we had a solid base, we worked on a new voice and tone, started creative explorations, and formed a loose style guide.
We started with the deconstruction of the legacy Ticketmaster logo down to just the T. The newer condensed version was now more dynamic, serving as the window to live, allowing it to interact with the audience and performers, as well as fitting into tighter spaces. We chose a new typeface “Averta” that was bold, yet simplistic and appealing, with a friendly personality. Our new brand colors were inspired by the colors of live which added to the excitement, emotion, and authenticity of our experience.
And last but not least, we created a brand traits flow chart representing the key pillars in messaging (exciting, trustworthy, expert, and guiding) across our communications. This enabled us to dial the tone up or down at the right points in our products and communications.
This was one of my very favorite projects to work on in my time at Ticketmaster and I’m proud to see how successful it’s been since its launch in late 2018.
A New Design System
Some of the early challenges of the legacy Ticketmaster brand was there was no point of reference for creatives, developers, marketing and sales representatives, or outside agencies to learn about or grab assets for the brand. As you can imagine, this created many inconsistencies across our communications and we set out to change that, by creating a new design system.
Much, if not all of what you see on design.ticketmaster.com was agreed upon and formed in the early stages of the redesign. This is a comprehensive, yet stylish and easy-to-use website that showcases our brand strategy, brand voice, and visual identity. Here, creatives could reference styles, developers could grab snippets of code, and marketing and sales teams could grab assets.
Now that we had a look and feel with some structure, the fun and games could begin.
Website Redesign
The new homepage and category page redesigns seen above were unfortunately put on hold due to the recent pandemic. However, we were able to implement some of the following updates to the platform for the time being.
THE GOALS
1. Improve the user experience and display of content on these pages
2. Implement our flexible system of reusable components across Ticketmaster.com
3. Clean up and simplify the way we classify our content
4. Create original branded sports image assets to cover all partner and non-partner ticketed teams
Other areas of focus included the commerce flow, discovery of Ticketmaster’s franchises through the Ticketmaster Blog, increase in click-through to the discover more events page, articles and other landing pages, SEO, engineering efficiency, editorial and production efficiency, and performance.
THE RESULTS
Phase one of the updated category pages launched in April 2019. While we saw an increase in daily visits and time spent on site, the pandemic forced us to shift to providing more messaging around fan safety, updated concert, and venue guidelines. Stay tuned for more results!
A Complete Email Overhaul
A huge initiative for Ticketmaster starting late 2018 was to increase email GTV, click through and conversion rates by improving the new and existing users experience, running A/B tests on optimized layouts, as well as consolidating legacy email systems onto a single salesforce email marketing platform, that would enable full marketer control. This was a triple win, grow revenue, improve the user experience while saving time, money, and marketing resources.
THE GOALS
Identify, modify and remove legacy, extraneous, outdated, and non-mobile friendly emails
Create a new user journey flow chart identifying specific time/trigger points on where a user is in the lifecycle
Redesign emails to be mobile-first, add personalization and recommendations as well as more helpful content
Create an interchangeable email module library between designers/developers for ease of use/consistency
Advise our developers and marketers in bringing all new email designs onto the new salesforce email platform
Run A/B tests on the redesigned new user emails and weekly newsletters to find the top performer
THE RESULTS
A lot of great learnings and results came out of this project. By doing the research and groundwork upfront, we were able to identify the most relevant emails, update them to be mobile friendly as well as combine and reduce our entire email suite of over 200 emails by half, providing huge savings in design/development hours and email fees! Our weekly newsletter A/B test results yielded a clear winner (as seen in bottom right image above, far right design) providing an increase in open rates from 17% to 30%, click-through rates from 6% to 12%.
Ask me more, I’m a huge fan of email and believe in providing strong fundamentals to grow your user base, generate revenue, and improve the user’s experience.
A New Social Presence
Another massive opportunity at Ticketmaster was growing our social presence. Prior to me starting in 2017, social was underutilized as a growth channel with little to no editorial content and most posts centering around event announcements, using generic artist imagery. As we all know, social is one of the greatest tools to reach and connect with new audiences, as well as grow your brand’s presence. We set out to grow our channels by creating more relevant and timely content as well as introducing new content franchises like Ticketmaster’s “Friday 5” (the five most important stories in live each week) and “Ticketmaster 10” (interviews with industry insiders where fans could get exclusive, behind-the-scenes content about artist and upcoming events).
THE GOALS
Take inventory and study data on posts across our social channels to identify what works/what doesn’t
Build editorial content and content franchises to scale across social channels and as well as Ticketmaster Blog
Create an editorial calendar to plan, build and share strategic posts between creative/marketing
Create easily updatable social templates and style guides for designers/marketers for ease of use/consistency
Run A/B tests on different social post types to find the top-performing creative
THE RESULTS
The editorial calendar, freshly branded content and new content franchises were a smashing success, both internally and externally. With a solid plan and clear view of upcoming social initiatives, along with new design templates, the marketing, and creative teams were able to thrive, saving time and cutting down on production costs.
As for the fans, they spoke with their engagement. We were able to grow our subscriber base on Instagram by 50K, Twitter by 100K, and Facebook by 150K, YOY on average.
Ticketmaster Events
During my time at Ticketmaster, I was lucky to be a part of the planning, branding, and execution of many large-scale events, including our very own Ticketmaster Sports Summit and Super Bowl 2020. I love working on events because of the holistic nature and broad reach of 360° marketing campaigns.
Ticketmaster Sports Summit 2019
Hosted across two major venues in Downtown Los Angles, including the home of LAFC at Banc of California Stadium. The Ticketmaster Sports Summit is the must-attend gathering for sports industries innovators and industry pros. Insiders at all levels of collegiate to pro attended to learn all about Ticketmaster’s new and improved products. At the exhibition, Ticketmaster experts demonstrated the latest products, best practices and provided strategic recommendations to help drive growth for all of our partners, including how to connect with more fans, sell more tickets, and enrich the fan’s experience.
Super Bowl 2020
Hosted in Miami, Ticketmaster threw a ticket giveaway party where, then, Carolina Panthers Tight End, Greg Olsen, surprised some lucky fans with tickets to the big game. The campaign featured a large social element in which fans in Miami had to follow Greg’s Instagram story for clues to figure out where he was heading next to win tickets. We also did a fun Instagram stories survey asking fans how far they were willing to go for Super Bowl tickets. The results were impressive on many levels.
35% would give up drinking for a year to attend the Super Bowl
12% would give up sex for 12 months to see the big game
7% would donate a kidney or leave their partner for tickets