recently released. Future expansion will focus on Southern Europe and Latin America, as well as making more inroads into the theatre market. Javier Andrés, founder and CEO, says: “Our experience with theatres, theatre festivals and musicals in Spain and London, when we worked with London Theatre Direct, has been really positive so we want to expand our company in that area. We would also like to maintain the constant growth that we got last year in Portugal, Germany, Italy and the UK.”
OXYNADE Oxynade provides both a primary ticketing offering and a ticketing platform to other companies. The firm’s cloud-based ticketing solution serves the biggest arenas in Belgium, swimming pools, expos, fairs and
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theme parks. Innovation can be seen in the newest version of its platform, focusing on flexibility, user experience, marketing automation and performance. Oxynade has also introduced a marketing automation solution, enabling event organisers to use data relating to customer behaviour. CEO Hans Nissens explains: “With this solution we can deliver huge added-value to our partners by enabling them to sell more tickets, sell higher rated tickets (by up-selling, for example) and know everything about their customers. In this approach, Oxynade is not just a ticket-selling enabler, but a ticket-selling booster.” New features in the works include a waiting room where every interested ticket buyer fills in a form detailing the amount of tickets they want to buy, as well as personal details and credit card information. It enables the organisers to make changes in capacity, seat plan and pricing zones pre-sale. Secondly, social group purchasing allows ticket buyers to send invites to friends and mark seats as reserved for a period of time. Finally, gift vouchers will soon be available to purchase (complete with luxury packaging), applicable for one or multiple events, and limited to specific categories and price ranges.
TICKETSCRIPT Back in 2006, Frans Jonker and Ruben van den Heuvel designed a self-service, white-label-ticketing platform that allows event organisers to sell tickets directly to their audience. E-ticketing wasn’t popular at the time and Jonker and Heuvel’s platform was one of the first to introduce the concept in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. Today the company also operates in the UK and Spain, with around 10,000 accounts signed up to its service. Ticketscript was also one of the first companies to turn Facebook event/fan pages into direct ticket sales channels
Andrew Dreskin Ticketfly
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in late 2009, and in 2010, acquired UK business Trinity Mobile to deliver tickets to mobile phones. Over the last few years, innovation has centered around data, with Ticketscript providing clients with insight into sales trends, reports, performance, traffic, conversion and user data. They are currently working on providing cashless technology for spending onsite. “Event organising is not just about gut feeling or copying what has been done in the past,” says Jonker. “It’s also about using the data you collect to predict the future and to make better decisions, improve events and ticket sales. That is absolutely key in the coming years.”
TICKET FAIRY Ticket Fairy provides marketing, analytics and e-commerce technology to large events like festivals, conferences and conventions. Its purpose is to increase attendance and revenue, and lower financial risk through the use of technology. The goal is to make sure all clients’ events sell-out by offering discounts to attendees for bringing friends; mining customer data online to deliver audience intelligence reports; finding out where online traffic is being driven from so promoters can capitalise on successful referrals; and running ad management. The company was founded in Australia in late 2011 by Ritesh and Jigar Patel so they could grow the audience for the events they were running. It now works with events in the UK, US, New Zealand and parts of mainland Europe, with music counting for 80% of business. Discussing the inspiration behind his company, Jigar says: “Most events companies are currently not leveraging technology as much as they could be, relying on guesswork and outdated marketing techniques – innovation is key to giving them the resources and
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