In this Sports Geek Throwback episode, Sean Callanan interviews  Drew Bentley from episode 317

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Key Takeaways

In this Sports Geek Throwback, Drew and Sean discusses applying data analytics across ticketing and sponsorship.

  • Different departments interpret analytics differently – from ticketing to digital to sponsorship, requiring tailored approaches
  • Centralised data warehousing is crucial for effective cross-departmental analytics implementation
  • The evolution from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive analytics varies by department
  • Success in ticketing analytics can serve as a blueprint for other areas like corporate partnerships
  • Proactive recommendations based on data analysis help reduce reactive decision-making

This transcript has been lightly edited by AI

Sean: That's the piece i wanted to ask because like a bit like you know i play in the digital space and you hear the term fan engagement and it can be so wide mean so many things to so many people and so an analytic you can say the word analytic to different people to a ticketing person to a digital person to a sponsorship person you know to a sea level executive and they all have different understanding of it because everything can have analytic applied and that

Drew: it's really understanding what are the tools and the technologies and the data that each department is utilizing and generating how do we wrap our arms around that pull that into a centralized place which is obviously our data warehouse and then how do we start to utilize that and provide a little bit more proactive recommendations to them so that their operation or a little bit less reactive and how we like to kind of view our analytic analytical support for the organization is

Drew: in three real phases right there's the first phase which is descriptive data can we accurately tell what happened at our organization with a current set of circumstances the second phase is then using a lot of that descriptive data to follow or predictive models so we can tell you what has happened we can tell you what is likely to occur based on how things are going now third and final phase is prescriptive and that is okay we understand what has happened we can tell you what likely will happen what do we want to happen how do we engineer those outcomes whether it's people whether it's process whether it's technology

Drew: We look at this across multiple departments in the ticketing space we're in that third and final prescriptive phase where we're saying okay if we want to hit x amount of season tickets in the next five years here's what we need from a sales rack perspective from a digital marketing perspective here's all these things we need to have together so that that works but like for say on the corporate partnership side of things we're still in plays we were still in the descriptive state we're still trying to make sure we have all of their information not only do we have their information do we understand what it means

Drew: Because a lot of people on my team have come up through the ticketing ranks and so we understand that world a lot we don't necessarily understand the corporate partnerships world as much right so it's a lot of questions right were very inquisitive group and we sit down for just these meetings with our partnership to just say help us better understand what this means how do you guys usually sell image where we know how tickets are sold we don't know necessarily know as well how partnerships are sold and so we've been through that for a full year now and it's been it's been exciting

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