Interview: Creating A Venue Utopia

LiveStyled is a London-based company that uses mobile data science to understand consumer behavior in venues, and then serves personalised content and offers through its white-labelled mobile apps to drive incremental revenue. Pollstar spoke with LiveStyled CEO Adam Goodyer.  

Adam Goodyer
– Adam Goodyer
LiveStyled

The idea of LiveStyled was born in 2013 at a Robbie Williams concert at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium, where Goodyer noticed the huge crowd, most of which had their mobile phones out.

“Most were there four hours before the gig started, taking photos, videos, trying to connect and share on Facebook, Twitter etc. You could just see that if you could get to these people through their device, you could use their data to improve their experience. And if they have a better time they will spend more, even if it’s just one extra drink or a merch piece they were initially undecided about.”

In 2015, Goodyer invested some profits from his previous venture, Concert Live, to set up a technology team that looked into building a platform for mobile use at live events.

Since then, LiveStyled has been working with the Academy Music Group at its O2 venues, Odyssey Trust’s  as well as AEG and its  Berlin and  in Sweden.

LiveStyled isn’t just an app developer. It is technology sitting inside each venue’s own app, working in the background.

“The guts of LiveStyled are the services that sit behind it: the data, the intelligence, the ability to link to other systems via API, and being able to communicate individually with each customer.”

Once a customer grants LiveStyled access to their data, the technology looks to capture them wherever it can along each users live event journey – from purchasing the ticket to reliving the event afterwards.

LiveStyled for example has access to AXS, the first integration with Ticketmaster’s API will take place in the beginning of next year. The O2 Arena London customers, who purchase their ticket either through AXS or other official channels, are prompted to download the O2 app as the most convenient way of holding a ticket.

After this initial “customer capture,” LiveStyled begins building up a data set on each one of them: email, gender, artist and event preferences, dwell time, the items they add to or discard from their shopping baskets.

LiveStyled also tracks individuals’ location in the venue, enabling it to suggest the closest food stalls and toilets as well as the shortest queues. After some time, enough data will have been collected to give venue operators a good picture of what their customers are most likely to do and purchase, enabling them to communicate directly with each customer in an individualized fashion.

Each venue has certain differences.

“If you take food and beverage ordering for example, there are a number of different variations on how food and beverage work on our platform that can be fitted to different venue requirements,” Goodyer explains.

LiveStyled will make sure customers are only presented with purchase options within their reach.

“If you’re showing people a burger that they can’t ever get to [during a short break for example], you’re going to have a lot of disgruntled customers, and your technology environment isn’t helping them. So the technology changes what’s available for purchase based on where you’re sitting.”

Goodyer said, “We take a data science approach to our platform. We analyze purchase frequency, at what time are people making their purchases. And there’s always a pattern, depending on the event type, among other things. You can use that knowledge to drive people to the bar at less busy periods.”

The number of drinks a person buys also varies with the type of event and the person’s demographics.

“If you’re a male in Newcastle between the ages of 24 and 28, your purchase time is likely to be slightly more frequent, so you change the communication there. “We analyze supply and demand, we look at everybody purchasing through our mobile environment and even over-the-counter sales at a particular price, and analyze how price changes affect purchases. After a period of mapping, you’re able to draw an average that shows you at what price a product generates the best margins.”

Changing the timing of presenting customers with offers and adjusting prices, both happening automatically, “can help to drive up revenues immeasurably,” Goodyer said. “The SSE Arena Belfast in particular has seen clear benefits to how customers interact and how they feel about being in the venue. But most importantly, we’ve seen revenues rise.”

The more digital any given venue’s existing infrastructure, the more data points LiveStyled can connect to through an API, which increases the information it gains about each customer.

“Everybody is starting to see the benefit of owning the customer, understanding their complete journey, from ticketing to food and beverage, picking up the data and looking where it can be turned into money straight away.”

Goodyer sees a “utopian world,” where decision making from the customer and the venue is driven by data coming from each.

The venue can automate responses that are personal to each individual customer based on what they are doing.

“Since all of these things are done via data and automation, it frees the people on the ground at venues to do what they’re good at, which is putting on great shows and ensuring people have a great time and are safe,” he said.