If you haven’t heard, one of the largest music festivals happened recently, Coachella, which has officially kicked off the festival and concert season. From events as significant as Coachella and Bonnaroo to smaller venues with single acts, brands in the entertainment industry find themselves in one of the most competitive marketplaces. We’re here to explain how you, as a brand, can use digital print technology to create custom event tickets that stand out in an oversaturated market.
To gather a little bit of research, I asked various team members in our office the following questions:
· What was the last event for which you purchased tickets?
· With whom did you go?
· What did it mean to you?
Answers varied from Fleetwood Mac with a best friend and KISS’s End of the Road tour with a father to the Masters with a coworker and the symphony with a fiancé. However, in each of these responses, the consistent reaction was that it was an experience they cherished and would remember for years to come.
Sporting matches, concerts, movies, and other ticketed events are things people attend with someone important to them. Over time, after people have developed enough positive experiences, these events can become a tradition or ritual that fans invest hard-earned money to attend. This kind of passion gives venues and artists the unique opportunity to leverage a fan’s dedication and turn it into a brand. This type of branding can be accomplished by not only marketing to the customer but also taking steps to keep them (and their money) secure.
When creating a brand, you want every touchpoint with the customer to consistently reflect the values that are most important to the brand. Is your brand about the latest in technology? Do you want people to see you as the best-in-class? Whatever image you’re portraying, the first encounter a fan has with seeing someone they idolize in person is the ticket.
To a fan, their ticket is an identifier. It validates all the time they’ve listened to the artist’s music on repeat and the money spent on merchandise. So while the marketing of an event has taken place months (even years) before this moment, the second a fan has your ticket in their hands, branding begins.
The difference between marketing and branding is what you’re telling the customer vs. what they think and feel when they hear your name. Imagine the Rolling Stones or Taylor Swift—they both have brands that are excellent examples of building a legacy. It’s more than just marketing.
Below are just a couple of examples pulled from a hashtag (#tickets) with millions of posts. Each one of the photos was posted by a fan anticipating the event—inadvertently increasing both brand awareness and value. However, except for a couple font choices and colors, they look relatively similar.
So how, in such a crowded marketplace, do you stand out?
Through the use of variable raised foil and varnish technology, DMS Color can take your ticket printing to the next level—helping fans garner even more excitement for the upcoming event. Now, when people are scrolling through social media, watching unboxing videos, or holding your event ticket for the first time, they can both see and feel the attention-to-detail your brand puts forth. As the number of impressions, comments, views, and likes increase, they aggregate to drive sales.
With emotions running high, people often hold on to event tickets—keeping your brand legacy alive for years to come. Just look at the examples below. In both instances, a fan has kept ticket memorabilia and posted it to share with the world. With the post on the left, U2 is gaining visibility off a ticket over 26 years after it was printed.
Custom event tickets are more than making your brand look amazing. You can also stand out by protecting fans from losing millions of dollars to ticket fraud.
In an article from CNBC, 12% of people who have purchased an online concert ticket has fallen victim to a scam. Moreover, in a world of print-at-home PDFs and digital downloads, scams can be even easier to execute—making ticket printing more crucial than ever.
Using digital print technology, you can create custom event tickets with raised holographic foil that is also a security measure for verifying counterfeit tickets. Look at the photo below. As one of the few state-of-the-art MGI Jet Varnish printers in North America, the ability to produce a fake is significantly reduced. And, to help educate your fans, you can show them how to identify scams—keeping them and your reputation safe.
The first thing you notice is the marketing component that will turn your fans into advocates. With deluxe raised varnish and foil, this ticket looks nothing like the ones above. Now picture that in the hands of an excited fan. You can only imagine the positive things they will say as they help build hype around your event.
Now let’s talk about practicality. Traditionally, to foil a printed piece, a die would have to be created for each variation—making it an impractical use for ticket printing. However, what sets us apart is our use of variable printing with foil. Our team of experts can place in different bar codes, seat numbers, rows, or even names without the use of any dies—opening doors and saving our clients thousands of dollars.
If you’re someone that wants to upgrade their custom event tickets, contact us today to get started.