Ticketing the American Music Awards
Skills Developed:
Cross-functional leadership / client management / program & operations management / process strategy / relationship building / customer service / people management / creative problem solving / agility
Time:
Jul-Nov, 2014-2019 (Annually)
Background
During my career at AEG, I was lucky to work on some of the most acclaimed events in the world at the iconic Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Some of these included The EMMYS, American Music Awards, iHeart Music Awards, BET Awards, The ESPYS, and many others. One of the most intensive of these was the American Music Awards, which took place at the theater every year during my time there.
The AMAs production brings with it a few complexities not found in most some of the other annual awards shows at Microsoft Theater, including:
- The event is half private/half public, and thus includes all of the concerns for both formats; managing custom ticket printing and external barcode imports, seating arrangements for talent and other high-profile guests, public presales and on-sale, public seating allocations, customer management, sales teams involvement, box office staff, and public outreach.
- The event sells several specialized VIP packages, each entailing specific seating allocations, contents, shipments, pick-up instructions, showday logistics, pricing, and customer communication.
- The AMAs are a live-televised event, so everything from will call pick-up to ingress, show start, doors open/close, and show schedule all must follow a strict timeline and do not allow for interruptions or delays.
Producing such a colossal event requires hundreds of people working for several months ahead of time. On the ticketing side, this means working across several verticals with numerous external and internal stakeholders, from promoter clientele to bookers, marketing, operations, production, sales, finance, executives, and of course, consumers. To make this happen, I created a roadmap built around the deadlines inherent to the event.
Milestones / Roadmap
While executing over 90 events per year, this lifecycle becomes almost second nature. And although the AMAs include a large number of unique details, the general milestones are the same. You’ll notice, event ticketing includes two “launches” of sorts; one for the pre-sales/on-sale, and one for the actual event:
- Milestone 1: Research & Development
- Milestone 2: Planning / Prioritization
- Milestone 3: Execution
- Milestone 4: Testing
- Milestone 5: Launch #1 (Pre-sales / On-sale)
- Milestone 6: Monitor / Measure
- Milestone 7: Ticket Prep / Event Day Prep
- Milestone 8: Launch #2 (Event Day)
- Milestone 9: Review / Measure
Using this framework, I built a roadmap around the various deliverables needed for each deadline, which looked something like this:
Milestone 1: Research & Development
The early stages of the AMAs planning always began with discussions with Dick Clark Productions, the producer of the event. Through talks with DCP and our sales executives, details would begin to materialize. As information surfaced, I began by researching information from previous years’ events to compare pricing, seating inventory and capacities between the different price tiers, internal and external seating allocations, VIP package offerings, and changes made through the course of the event. This was an important step, as many times discrepancies and learnings from previous years could easily be overlooked that would aid in configuring the event adequately.
The decisions made during these discussions informed my process for planning what deliverables would be required to put the event on sale.
Milestone 2: Planning & Prioritization
Event planning details invariably do not come in a steady, comprehensive stream that can be processed, logged, and referenced at any time. Instead, the nature of events is that they are constantly changing, with new information coming to light, strategies being adjusted, and various approvals and confirmations taking place. For this reason, it’s crucial to maintain a calculated process for change management and version control. I implemented the following workflow protocol with my team:
The other half of the planning phase relates to configuring the event in our enterprise system. In the ticketing industry, this is commonly referred to as “building the event”. This is where everything that a customer, box office seller, or sales manager sees when purchasing or selling tickets is set up, managed and reported on. As such, I estimate that about 90% of my team’s time outside of meetings and emails was spent working within our enterprise client. For the majority of my career at Microsoft Theater, the enterprise system we used was AXS Ticketing’s backend enterprise system, called Back Office.
The structure and logic of Back Office had a large influence on the process I implemented for building events. For instance, the underlying infrastructure must be built out before creating ticket offerings and purchase links.
Milestone 3: Execution
As event details were confirmed, myself and Manager 1 continued the process of building out the event in Back Office according to the process laid out above. As plans are always changing and going through an approval process, I did not wait for all elements to be confirmed before set up. Rather, this was an ongoing process as details emerged.
When the event build was finished, the final element was a number of purchase links, which would be embedded in the AXS website and our venue’s website for customers to access when tickets went on sale.
Milestone 4: Testing
It was absolutely crucial that details were configured accurately. Small errors, such as a decimal in the wrong place or incorrect verbiage could have a drastic impact on sales or customer experience. For this reason, verification was an important part of the process. Typically, one manager would run point on setting up the event, and the other would be responsible for verifying every element. Rather than wait until the entire build is finished, I implemented verification steps throughout the process, as well as approval protocols. This kept everything current and allowed more time to catch errors and make adjustments.
Milestone 5: Launch #1
(On-sale)
On-sale day is one of the most exhilarating parts of working in ticketing. There are few things as glorious as a successful on-sale, and few as terrifying as a failed one. If I’ve done my job in assembling all details, configuring and testing the event, our marketing team has promoted the date through all relevant channels, and our sales team has activated their clients, then all should be well.
For the first day of every on-sale at Microsoft Theater, I made tickets available via online and phone channels only. This was to avoid a poor customer experience brought on by box office sales and remote sales fighting with one another over inventory.
At the moment tickets went on-sale, I usually had at least one or two team members move through the purchase flow as if buying to make sure everything was working smoothly. At the same time, I pulled sales and cart reports every few minutes to see how sales were tracking. If any issues arise or something seems off, I had a runbook for troubleshooting ready to go to track down the source and correct as fast as possible.
For high demand on-sales, it’s important to make sure adequate supply is kept available as much as possible, so inventory adjustments often need to be made within the first few minutes of sales, and may require revisits throughout the day depending on the conversion rate.
Milestone 6: Monitor
Once the event is on sale, then begins the process of consistently making adjustments to according to demand and inventory needs. During this time, our sales team is processing ticket requests with clients, our sponsorship team is facilitating bulk orders, and the box office is selling at the windows and processing internal requests, all while overall logistics planning and marketing continues. I regularly watched sales reports to look for pricing opportunities to explore with our client and sales teams and made seating allocation changes as necessary.
Milestone 7: Event Day Prep
Between the on-sale and event day, there are also a few deliverables that need to be executed in preparation for the show.
Usually around 5-7 weeks out from the show, we received a few custom ticket samples from our ticket printing vendor. At this point, it was my team’s responsibility to check the legal language and seating information, and test scan them before sending an approval to the printing vendor. A couple weeks later, we would receive thousands of custom tickets to be prepared for distribution, which I then had our staff process and triple-check to ensure accuracy.
With 5-6 VIP packages being sold, each offering varying amenities, access and event day instructions, it was important to maintain clear instructions for customers. I partnered with our operations and production teams to plan out exact step-by-step journeys for each VIP type, which we then laid out in instructional letters to be delivered to VIP customers.
VIP PackagesOnce the custom tickets and VIP letters had been verified, we began putting together all the VIP packages. By this time, we had detailed records of every VIP package purchase and its associated delivery method. We used this to package the contents and letters together, triple-check them for accuracy, and arrange them for their respective delivery methods: Standard Mail, Will Call Pickup, and Sales Team Delivery.
Staffing / Event Day LogisticsIn preparation for event day, we scheduled box office staff to help with will call and day-of sales. I worked with our friends at the Staples Center Box Office to arrange for will-call pick-up and sales to take place there, as our box office was blocked by the red carpet.
Milestone 8: Launch #2 (Event)
The benefit of doing so much preparation work before the event day is that things tend to run smoothly and easily when the big day comes. By this time, all outstanding internal requests, sales team purchases, customer inquiries, inventory releases, shipments, and other last-minute items have been addressed. And by ensuring accuracy across deliverables, we’ve mitigated potential day-of-show issues.
During the event, I handled accessible seating requests from our guest services staff and a few other minor relocation issues. I also relayed regular scanning counts to all event managers to keep an eye on how many people were in the building and how many were yet to enter. Other than that, I was able to sit back and watch the magic happen as thousands of guests and talent poured into our venue to watch an incredible show.
After the event, I exported several financial reports from Back Office to analyze for accuracy before sending to our finance team to include in their overall reconciliation. These included:
- Sales audit report detailing sold, complementary, and unsold inventory totals per price tier
- Method of Payment report detailing ticket sales revenue and fee revenue by payment method
- Receivables report detailing internal orders pending payment
- Complimentary ticket report detailing orders for contractual tickets provided free of charge
- Scan count report showing how many guests entered the venue
Milestone 9: Review
In the week after the event, I held a post-mortem with the ticketing team to discuss what worked, didn’t work, what we learned. Many of the protocols I instituted in our process were borne out of these conversations. For instance, at the most recent American Music Awards, we discovered our operations team had been working off an outdated seat removals map with very small differences from the current version. This would have caused several issues with incorrect inventory holds had it not been caught. To mitigate this, I created a shared folder and file naming conventions with our production and operations team to ensure all teams would be kept current in the future.
Thankfully though, my team’s hard work and preparation paid off, and the event was enormously successful every year during my time at Microsoft Theater.
A few important lessons learned:
- Assumptions kill. Always maintain awareness of what is verified and what is assumed, and validate constantly.
- Over-prepare. You’ll thank yourself when the project launches with few or no hiccups.
- Over-communicate. With tons of information flying around, it’s easy for miscommunications to happen. Clarity and constant sharing are key.
- Keep your team aligned on outcomes. As the cliche goes, outcomes over outputs. Maintaining a culture of goal orientation keeps the team motivated and working towards meaningful impact.
- Negotiate scope when necessary. More often than not, deadlines are immovable. If it appears you won’t be able to deliver, find ways of adjusting the approach while still satisfying the underlying requirements.
Summary
The final product is what makes it all worth it. There is simply nothing like seeing months of effort and dedication culminating in one of the most coveted music events in the world with thousands of fans that come to experience the show in person, and millions more at home. This is all made possible by hundreds of people working for months at a time to make it all happen in one night.
The American Music Awards is just one of over 90 events per year taking place at Microsoft Theater, so while it may sound like this is an isolated project, in reality there are many events being worked on simultaneously, each at a different point in this lifecycle. Managing all these projects was a tremendous opportunity in my career to develop important skills and learn new lessons.