Pythian helps AEG Presents target the right prospects at the right time
AEG Presents is a company focussed on driving ticket purchases for its global entertainment parent, AEG Worldwide.
But it was getting tougher to compete against rival event companies by putting relevant offers in front of customers.
Why? Simply because the company didn’t have a clean picture of its customers: their activities, their preferences and—most importantly—their likelihood to buy certain kinds of tickets at certain times.
To create any kind of sales surge, AEG Presents needed to engage prospects with relevant and effective marketing offers at the right time. And for that kind of strategic marketing, it needed the right intelligence.
Getting a 360-degree view
Studying past ticket sales can shed light on purchase propensity. But sales data at AEG Presents comes from many different internal and external sources. That includes feeds from ticketing agencies like Ticketmaster and AXS, each with its own unique layer of business logic.
This disparity was making any kind of apples-to-apples sales analysis nigh on impossible. And trying to manually compile sales, marketing and financial data from many different places and formats was wasting valuable hours that should have been spent in marketing analysis.
The company was in good company. Gartner this year found that even though analytics accounted for 9.2% of marketing spend in 2017-18 — the largest share of any category — analyst teams (grown from an average of 2 people a few years ago to 45!) still spend most of their time wrangling, integrating and formatting data. Wow.
Getting the data in one place – cleaned, aggregated and unified
But AEG Presents had a plan: to aggregate, clean and load all of that disparate data into the Microsoft Azure cloud where internal data scientists could access it. The company also needed to make the integrated data available as an export to Lytics, the analytics solution AEG was running to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
The company was staring down a big job. So instead of going it alone, they decided to bring in the big data professionals at Pythian.
AEG Presents’ Director of CRM Alejandro Arevalo was impressed with Pythian’s Enterprise Data Platform (EDP), a cloud-native data platform that powers sophisticated fact-driven marketing operations.
“Pythian brings significant technology know-how and an uncanny ability to understand our data to get us to the results we want,” he said.
How does it work?
EDP ingests clean financial, sales and marketing data into the Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Blob storage environment. It applies a layer of business logic in the platform’s transformation layer to create consistency in the diverse agency feeds. Lytics analysts and data scientists can then access the data to gain insight on more effective marketing.
Data also goes to the data lake so that external applications, SFTP, APIs, vendors and BI tools can explore it. The solution includes scalable ingestion and processing layers using a mix of cloud PaaS offerings and industry-standard open source projects.
Targeting offers
“Pythian is helping us apply data to optimize our user experiences and make our marketing practices more efficient,” said Arevalo.
How exactly?
Analysts can slice ticket sales by territory, by month, by type. They can look at the past ticket purchase activity of individual users—and custom audience groups—in terms of quantity, recency, frequency and intensity. They score users on their likelihood to become more engaged buyers in the future, all in real time since data is continually refreshed. Segmenting smaller slices makes highly personal outreach possible—and more effective.
Arevalo: “These insights help us communicate with customers in a more timely and personalized way. We see our data as a strategic catalyst to make our business initiatives more successful.”
With fully integrated data from multiple sources, AEG Presents now has the customer intelligence it needs for better engagement. And it’s paying off. This AEG Worldwide subsidiary increased last-minute ticket sales significantly with EDP. Enough to make its parent company call Pythian for some marketing EDP of its own!
Read the full story here.
