The NBA has signed a two-year extension of its ticketing partnership with Ticketmaster, a shorter-term deal that provides the league more time to assess the fast-changing industry.
The deal, beginning immediately and in development for several months, covers much of the same ground as a five-year accord signed in 2012. Ticketmaster will power the league’s official resale marketplace, NBATickets.com, and serve as the official ticketing provider for the NBA, WNBA and NBA G League. Ticketmaster will also provide the NBA with an expanded array of analytics around ticket usage patterns and fan sentiment.
The pact stands in contrast to that prior, longer-term agreement, as well as a separate, five-year deal Ticketmaster signed last fall with the NFL that will bring in a new open distribution model to football ticketing.
Amy Brooks, NBA chief innovation officer and president of the league’s team marketing and business operations division, said the most logical option for the NBA as its Ticketmaster deal neared expiration was to continue to work with a trusted partner while it continues to monitor industry trends.
“We have our eye on this landscape, which is radically changing, and at the current stage it made a lot of sense to keep working with Ticketmaster and continuing to innovate for our fans. That’s what’s most important,” she said. “We think there is a lot we can do together to more deeply personalize the ticketing experience for our fans.”
Ticketmaster will implement its Presence identity-based system among some of the 24 NBA teams it services.
The last several years have seen sweeping changes throughout sports ticketing, including the arrival of many new entities to challenge established incumbents, a rapid rise in mobile ticketing, new open distribution models that allow access to tickets across many different websites and apps, and far deeper ties to analytics.
Feeding into those emerging trends, Ticketmaster will deploy during the new contract term its new Presence identity-based digital ticketing system among some of the 24 NBA teams it services. The Presence technology, in its early operation at other sports and concert venues, has produced sizable gains in fan identification and mobile ticket utilization.
“Our team business is more complex than other sports leagues, and what we see this deal doing at the league level is enhancing the 24 deals that Ticketmaster has with our teams,” Brooks said. “It allows them to innovate and we do expect many, if not all, of our Ticketmaster teams to implement Presence in the near future.”
The six teams that do not have Ticketmaster deals are the Cleveland Cavaliers, Denver Nuggets, Houston Rockets, Minnesota Timberwolves and Los Angeles Clippers, which are partnered instead with AXS, and the Philadelphia 76ers, which are aligned with StubHub. Those clubs, however, will remain fully part of the NBATickets.com portal.
Financial terms for the NBA-Ticketmaster extension were not disclosed, but company officials similarly said deeper learnings from analytics will be a crucial component.
“This is a big opportunity to dig even deeper and be an even greater resource to the league and individual teams, particularly as fan identity [in ticketing] becomes much more important,” said Greg Economou, Ticketmaster chief commercial officer and head of sports. “The goal is to provide better products, better insights, and better connectivity to the fans.”
The new contract is also intended to further boost the WNBA and G League. Both entities will gain additional marketing support, and will likely serve as a testing ground for ticket technology and distribution experiments, similar to other trials of on- and off-court technology the NBA has conducted in the past.
