Wakeman: 10 Quick Takeaways from the FTC Ticketing Workshop

I spent the day at the FTC’s Online Ticket Sales Workshop so you didn’t have to.

I’m going to share a few more pieces detailing specific things and ideas that came out of the day, but I wanted to share 10 things I noticed right away.

1. Eric Budish laid out the foundational principle of the challenge and opportunity in tickets: the way people buy and sell tickets is broken and has been for a long time.
2. Despite the BOTS act, no one really thinks that there has been any enforcement effort put behind the act.
3. Bob Roux admitted something that doesn’t really ever get clearly stated, “the vast majority of shows don’t sell out.”
4. The working statistic for sports tickets on the secondary market is 30% and that seems slightly low.
5. All-in pricing is something that would make a lot of consumer advocates happy because it would be less manipulative to the consumer, but you need the full buy-in of everyone to get that to happen and without some sort of enforcement that is unlikely.
6. David Marcus mentioned that slow ticketing doesn’t exist and it has just come to mean market pricing.
7. Carl Szabo made one of the better points of the event when he mentioned that unless you define a term, you can’t really solve for it when he was talking about speculative ticketing.
8. The UK’s representative, Parul Shah, showed that it is possible to make platforms more responsible.
9. The discussion around the face value of a ticket was amusing because no one really wanted to be the one to admit that in a lot of cases the face value can change on comparable seats multiple times in the lead-up to a show or event.
10. The government and consumer advocates do see some of the transferability issues as nothing more than a data grab of the consumer’s information that is used to spam and send unwanted marketing messages to the buyer.

I’ll touch on a few more things going forward but I wanted to drop these out to you quickly to get my initial thoughts together.

Were you there?

Did you listen in via the stream?

Let me know what you were thinking below.

Previously: Wakeman’s 5 Thoughts leading into the FTC Ticketing Workshop

This post originated on Davidwakeman.com It has been republished here with permission. Wakeman is a branding and strategy expert who often opines about the ticketing world on his website and twitter. If you like this stuff and the stuff he usually posts, he does a Sunday email that talks all about value, connection, and humans. You can get that for free by sending him an email at dave@davewakeman.com