COVER STORY: How technology is elevating experiences at live events

Going to a football game or a concert has been enhanced by the implementation of technologies like AI and automation.

From buying tickets to sitting and experiencing a show and even getting a beer in between quarters, digital tools have elevated the way people consume live entertainment. 

Rob Pickering, CIO at the AFL said technology when done well can be a transformative way to deliver a customer experience – in this case a live sporting match.

“I see certainly that technology done well drives more people to attend a stadium have a better experience while they're at a stadium, that's our goal, that's our focus,” he said.

“Our goal at the AFL and Marvel Stadium is to make Marvel the most technologically advanced stadium in the Southern Hemisphere but not for technology's sake, for the sake of delivering a better customer and fan experience when you're in the stadium.”

While implementing digital technology into a physical experience, Pickering explained the importance of ensuring that the melding of the two worlds is frictionless.  

“Where sometimes technologists get it wrong, and certainly I've been guilty of this in the past as well, is there is often friction in that gap between the digital and the physical,” he said.

“When there are things that happen between a physical environment and a digital environment, that can sometimes feel quite frictional and create more friction in that experience than the whole end to end would have.”

He said as a technologist he focuses on creating an experience that cuts across the physical and digital making them as “seamless as possible”.

“If you put in place a digital experience, it makes a physical experience harder or less frictionless, you’ve lost. You’ve got to think about it in terms of value flow and how a customer experiences something and make sure the digital technology aspects are additive to that value flow,” he said.

“Don't add an extra level of friction to all that makes it harder from an end-to-end perspective, not from the technology lens.”

Smarter stadiums

In May this year, Marvel Stadium installed AWS Just Walk Out technology, where patrons can scan their card when entering a concession stand, grab the food and drink they want and leave without ever approaching a cash register.

Pickering at the AFL, which owns Marvel Stadium, explained that they wanted to install technology that would get fans back to their seat promptly.

“We wanted to put in place technology that allowed our fans to simply walk up, grab their stuff and walk back and be back to their seat in under a minute, which is achievable,” he said.

“We see quite a lot of today with the Just Walk Out investment that means you don't miss any of the game or the event that you're there to do and you get a great fan experience.”

Pickering said the competition isn’t other sporting codes but people watching the game at home.

“Our competition is people choosing to stay home instead of coming to the stadium to watch a game. That’s because the toilet lines are shorter, the beers are cheaper because they're in your fridge and it is a pretty quick commute to and from your lounge,” he explained.  

“Because we are competing with ourself in a lot of respects, our ability to make a really frictionless experience at the stadium is one of the reasons why people will choose to come to the stadium versus staying at home.”

He said it is important for people to come to the stadium.

“One of the great things about AFL is it brings people together in a place to celebrate your team. It's very tribal on that front,” Pickering said.

“We want to support that and the way we do that through technology is technologies like Just Walk Out, which just improves the fan experience when you're at the stadium.”

Louise Stigwood, director of enterprise, AWS ANZ said, "The past decade’s disruptive innovations have changed how we discover and consume media and now this transformation is transpiring in the offline world too.

"In the time it takes for a goal break, a fan can walk through the store, grab – and pay for – a pie and drink, and get back to their seat without missing any of the action. What makes this possible is computer vision, generative AI, and sophisticated machine learning algorithms."

Seamless ticketing

Event ticketing platform Humanitix wants to provide a seamless experience for its customers when buying and accessing tickets for an event.

Ryan O'Connell, CTO at Humanitix said for people buying a ticket, their checkout is “quick and easy”.

“There's no need to create an account and we've done huge events and not crashed,” he said.

“People get the tickets they're looking for, and they can pay and don't get stories of people missing out because the whole platform went down.”

O’Connell said, if the technology works properly, it's going to positively impact the customer's experience.

“If you get the tech right, that's the experience they're going to have. They probably can't quite work out why it's a pleasant experience, but they just like it,” he said.

When they send a ticket to a patron, it’s a digital copy, not a PDF.

“If you look for it, you get a link to like a digital ticket that you can open up and add to your wallet quite nicely. But the link to the digital ticket, we've made it like one of the fastest things to load on our platform,” O’Connell explained.

Humanitix has also developed machine learning capabilities to help them detect patterns for fraud. O’Connell explained how the technology works.

“Not only will we leverage the fraud capabilities of our partner gateways, which are using machine learning to work out what credit card may be fraud. We are feeding all our events into a model and the ones that are fraud are marked as fraud,” he said.

“When someone's creating an event, we pass the information about the events being created this model that tells us how likely it is to be fraud.”

Based on that, O’Connell said the platform can intervene in different manners.

“It could be a light touch, they only have to do an extra capture to publish their event, or we say they might need to be verified by an actual Humanitix staff member to publish their event.”

O’Connell explained how they’ve also embedded automation into their payment processes.

“We're automating how we pay people as well and that goes into more flags because after the event's run, we can take all the gateways for fraud detection,” he said.

“We can take patterns like how quickly were all orders processed, how quickly was event created, how quickly do they need payout, and then determine how safe it is to pay them out.”

Based on that, O’Connell said Humanitix will take different actions on how they pay people out, from a live verification if the event is legitimate to a full investigation if an event is suspicious.

“Otherwise, we're going to go and pull all the data, work out where the money going, and then maybe wait three months before the chargebacks can expire before we can pay them out.”

Intuitive booking

Live entertainment platform Surreal streamlines the management of booking entertainment.

Jeremiah Siemianow, CEO at Surreal explained how the platform uses the data they’ve collected to help artists book gigs where there is a higher chance for them to sell out the venue.

“[We’ve been able to] create this data set that otherwise previously didn't exist or wasn't easy to access, especially live,” he said.

“Where we can start to basically analyse and see the hotspots of where certain types of entertainment, be it genres or types of music that are being played more or booked more in a certain part of the city, for example.”

This platform allows for Siemianow and his team to understand consumer patterns.  

“If we're using the bookings themselves at the venues as a proxy for what the public or what consumers are into, and then the increase of those types of booking being a proxy as well,” he said.

“Then we're able to see now what the trends are for people in different cities and different parts of different cities.”

Siemianow said the data could help those artists who are underrepresented.

“There are different funding avenues out there where people are trying to help with either certain genres or certain rural areas, even around certain types of art that are potentially underrepresented We can start to provide some data, that's potentially going to help that,” he said.

“There's lots of extensions around that, that would fit later on, but it's the transparency of the data we have now that's been developed, that could become useful for people to help the industry.”

Siemianow said the automation Surreal uses has been a game changer for the entertainment industry.

“Once they've had a taste of tech, that's useful to them and provides either an immense saving or an immense change in their revenue and time, then it's very hard for them to go back to a more analogue world where you don't have access, you don't have centralisation and you don't have the automation that exists in the platform,” he ended.