The end of the year is always a busy time for us and our clients, but it’s also a great time to reflect on an amazing year for us as a company, and the world-class organisations we work with.
As we set out to do, this year has really been about focussing on technology that drives our clients’ business, and modernising the remarkable foundation for this – Venuemaster. The project is on schedule, and nearing completion, with thousands of hoursinvested from our own teams, and our partners at EPAM. This promises to be a milestone for Ticketmaster Sport, and sets us up to help our teams, venues and governing bodies succeed for years to come.
Not satisfied with one major project, we also set about delivering an incredible new fan experience through the front end, Ticketmaster Pro. We’ve approached this project on several levels – technology, design, user experience and mobility – to give a slick, engaging and easy to use product for sports fans up and down the country. Everyone is very proud of this milestone, which is being used by clients and fans right now. Amongst many other initiatives, we also started to deliver on our commitment to open up the Ticketmaster Sport platforms working with our data feeds solutions to enable a variety of new tools and services for clients.
On the business-side we’ve had a full-on year – onboarding new clients in league wide deals in Welsh Rugby Union and the Rugby Football League, working with current and new clients through the busy football play-off season and supporting other projects such as Tottenham’s temporary move to Wembley Stadium. We also launched our sports business in Poland, expanded our business in Belgium and welcomed Standard Liege and several other clubs to the family, and proudly announced our new partnership with FC Kaiserslautern in Germany. All of this while keeping focus on our core business and the day-to-day onsales and matchdays which our clients are required to deliver year-round.
In the tournaments-world we delivered a record-breaking summer on every level – a sell-out final for the Women’s Cricket World Cup, record ticket sales for the Women’s Rugby World Cup in Ireland, a Guinness World Record for ticket sales at the London 2017 IAAF World Championships and an incredibly successful ICC Champions Trophy. Somewhere in the midst of that we announced our partnership with Rugby World Cup 2019 in Japan and put a team on the ground to launch the ticketing programme there for what will undoubtedly be a unique and exciting World Cup.
We still have a few weeks to go, and we know that for many of our clients the Christmas and New Year period will be busy and challenging – we’re looking forward to helping wherever we can! In the meantime though, we want to say a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to our clients for an amazing 2017 – we’re continually reminded of how lucky we are to be trusted by the biggest and best names in sport, and we appreciate the faith you put in us.
Merry Christmas!
Adam Newsam
