In-Depth
Gen Z: Russ Stanley
Managing vice president, ticket sales and service, San Francisco Giants
Russ Stanley, now one of the Giants’ longest-tenured employees after three decades with the club, has been a key figure in several prior trendsetting industry moves, including the advent of integrated ticket resales and dynamic pricing.
— As told to Eric Fisher
We’ve been very fortunate over the years to have our [SoMa] neighborhood become such a vibrant, tech-driven area with a lot of young people. But one of our new areas this year at Oracle Park that we’re really excited about is The Waterfront, which will be a social standing-room area underneath our main scoreboard. We took out a back part of the bleachers to make it. It’s going to be a key spot for us for our Ballpark Pass tickets, which we’re selling for $29.99 per month for any home game, and $19.99 per month for Monday to Friday games. You’ll be able to see the field and McCovey Cove from there, and they sold out pretty quickly.
We’ve had a Ballpark Pass for a couple of seasons now and have other standing areas, but we’ve never really had a true home in the facility for those fans until now. This destination is really going to be for them, and not only is this product drawing a young demographic, as we would expect, but it’s all new names coming into the database. These aren’t traditional season-ticket holders dropping down to a Ballpark Pass. It’s all new people coming in that we think we’ll be able to move up the ladder over time.
The main idea, obviously, is to lower barriers to entry and let people watch what they want when they want. We sold these passes in sets of ones and twos, and this will be a place to hang out and meet people. We don’t know yet if we’ll have additional programming at The Waterfront. But we’re talking about some things like maybe wine tastings
