Innovation in Sports Venues – David Jones, AEG

This transcript has been transcribed by Riverside.fm, no edits (please excuse any errors)

Sean (00:01.974)
Very happy to welcome a good mate of mine, David Jones. He's the CIO at AEG Global Technology. David, welcome to the podcast.

David Jones (00:10.547)
Thanks very much, Sean. Thank you. Nice to be here.

Sean (00:12.995)
Well, it's good to catch up again. We normally do catch up in real life at conferences like SEAT as we did in Las Vegas. I always start the podcast asking people how they got their start in sports. What about yourself? How did you get your start in sports?

David Jones (00:27.893)
think my younger self would have found it quite amusing that I'm even in the sports industry and to some extent I'm a bit of a fraud in that regard. So actually I joined AEG nearly 17 years ago and of course AEG is about more than just sports. It's a global company, very active in live entertainment as well as sports, owns venues all over the world, promotes festivals and artists, big artists such as Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.

I guess actually in reality, I probably came more from a music background. So before I worked at AEG, I worked at Virgin Radio for 10 years, which was a national commercial music station, pop music station in the UK. And I kind of got my break there because I was involved in student radio when I was at university. So I always think it's funny when you look back on your career and you think, actually, I mean, mean, how did any of that happen? It was all…

of a series of random chances, just random people you met. When I was at university, we decided we wanted to start a student radio station. We had no funding, so we did that thing you do where we sort of wrote letters to everybody famous we could think of, and that included Richard Branson. And Richard Branson's office turned out to be quite organized, and they forwarded our letter to the then chief executive of Virgin Radio, a guy called David Campbell, who 10 years later was also chief executive at the O2 in London, an AG company. So you can kind of see the…

the things already falling into place for me. And so basically that's how I met the team at Virgin Radio. They invited me down to their offices in London to kind of meet them. And long story short, the guy who was business development director for their sales team discovered that I knew a bit about databases. And this is in the days, it seems crazy now, this is like the late 90s.

Sean (01:54.636)
Wow.

David Jones (02:19.603)
when a radio station could operate without having any IT people whatsoever. They had a contractor who came in like a day a week to fix people's laptops and that was it. They were still using dial -up internet. It's a long, long time ago. And they realized I had some knowledge of databases. They got me into do like a sort of a short -term contract, building some databases for the sales team. And then the finance director there said to me a few months in, would you like a full -time job? We need someone to look after IT for us.

And so at the age of 23, I was head of IT for a national radio station, which was a bit of a random, random chance. And I had an amazing 10 years there. Virgin Company felt quite startup -y in field, quite a young workforce, quite a work hard, play hard workforce. So probably a job I couldn't have done in my 40s. There was quite a lot of drinking after hours, lots of going back to the radio station at two in the morning and drinking heavily.

Sean (03:00.31)
Yeah.

Sean (03:07.575)
Hahaha

David Jones (03:12.309)
But yeah, I learned loads there. I kind of built a technology team from scratch. Literally, I was the only person on day one. And by the time I left, there was 15 of us, I think. I'd taken on running all the broadcast technology as well, which was a bit scary because, again, another area I was a bit of a fraud in, in that I didn't really know much about the audio side of radio, but I had some very good people in the team who did. And yeah, guess, suppose 2007, which was my last year at Virgin,

was the year that AEG opened the O2 arena in London. And I had a tip off that they were kind of looking for a new IT leader from somebody who worked at AEG. And I applied for the job sort of late 2007 and was offered it and joined AEG in 2008. And I guess my, I suppose my first six months at AEG, I guess for a lot of people, your first few months in a new job are kind of quite scary. I've been at Virgin for 10 years, so.

was quite a jump out of my comfort zone. And I found there was quite a lot to do, I guess, in my first few months. The team at the O2 had been without an IT leader for a few months. And the venue had been open just over six months. And it felt like there was a lot to do. was a lot that anyone who's been involved in opening a venue knows that nothing is perfect on day one. There's a lot of things that we just have to get the building open is the mantra.

And then you come into a business and find there's actually probably quite a lot of things that don't quite work out the way people envisage they would two years previously when they were planning the building. So there was quite a lot to do. And I brought together, I guess, a few key people at that point who are still working with me, know, 16, 17 years later, which is amazing, really, that they've put up with me that long. And I was based at the O2, after technology at the O2.

I guess for the first three or four years, AEG had also just subsequent to that opened an arena in Berlin, what's now called the Uber Arena. And so the business was growing in Europe, but it was still fairly decentralized. I think even at that time, the London team and the Berlin team were all reporting directly to people in the head office in Los Angeles. And in 2012,

Sean (05:38.786)
And so I want to pause you there because you're doing a great, you're doing, sorry, you're doing a great job of going through us, but like that early time when you first came to AEG, like that technology piece was still a developing piece because we're talking, you know, 2007, 2008, know, technology wasn't woven into stadiums as much as it was, sorry, what it is now. And it was really just still.

David Jones (05:39.209)
Jay Marciano, who's now, yeah.

David Jones (05:48.318)
Yeah.

Sean (06:05.856)
I guess stadium based sort of technology plans, sort of build the stadium first and then figure out, I guess some of the technology needs after. Is that a fair assumption in that sort of phase of stadiums?

David Jones (06:19.861)
Yeah, I think what's really interesting is, and I've used this fact a few times and it kind of, it's a bit mind boggling, the O2 opened the summer of 2007, which was also when the first iPhone was released. And I think that puts it perfectly in context. You kind of, realize, I mean, now, you know, no one can do anything without a smartphone in their hand 24 seven, but it, it wasn't that way back in 2007. And so things that today seem, you know, wouldn't

dream of opening a stadium or an arena without say great Wi -Fi, great connectivity in the building. No one really thought about that. Wi -Fi was primarily so you could scan tickets at the front door. wasn't about the guest experience. And I think there's also, I mean, I've been through this a few times in my career. I think often people forget how important just the sort of the core infrastructure in a venue is, getting the network right at the beginning.

And actually, to be fair to AEG, they did do a good job of that. So there was a good foundation at the O2, good wired network. But yeah, no one was really thinking about how, I guess, technology of that sort would impact the customer experience. No one had thought about the mobile experience in a venue, the second screen experience in a venue. But in other ways, the venue was quite cutting edge. There a lot of LED in the venue, which

Again, these days doesn't seem unusual, but in 2007 for a non -US venue to have spent as much money as the O2 did on LED screens was quite unusual. It's quite a big deal. So it was cutting edge in some ways, but yeah, as I say, it was very early in the sort of world of people using a mobile device as their sort of second screen at an event.

Sean (07:58.978)
And so you were saying, talk about your early days at AEG and as those stadiums were tackling that new technology wave, that how do we service fans with smartphones and that of that 2008 to 2012 range, was, how do we get Wi -Fi rolled out? How do we get the bandwidth up to cater for people on these new iPhones? that sort of range and that sort of year range

the big projects that were being tackled to say, we've got this technology and this stadium infrastructure, but how do we now service the fans? It was that sort of that first hurdle.

David Jones (08:35.157)
Yes, I think so. if you think about it, so 2012 was when the Olympics took place in London and the O2 was an Olympic venue, gymnastics and basketball took place in the venue. And that was exciting in its own way. And ironically, I think at one point, the Olympics have more technology in the building than we did. they, again, it was kind of interesting because Wi -Fi wasn't yet quite the thing. There was quite a big focus at that time on mobile connectivity.

all the mobile operators came in and spent a lot of money upgrading the DAS infrastructure in all of the Olympic venues in London. But yeah, Wi -Fi wasn't quite there. And the challenge, I think, for us and for many other venue operators was trying to make a good business case for Wi -Fi. It was incredibly expensive to put Wi -Fi in to an arena or stadium. And people would go, well, we're not going to attract more customers if we've got Wi -Fi. So what is the business case? And I spent quite a lot of time, actually, at AEG.

trying to work out why we would spend money on improving the connectivity in the venue, what would be the drivers for that. And actually the business case for Wi -Fi in the end turned out to be the additional marketing data it gave you. Particularly at the O2 where you get a different group of customers almost at every event. It's not like a sports venue where obviously you've got a lot of repeat visitors, you've got a lot of season ticket holders coming in every time. But the O2 is a…

music and entertainment venue primarily. has some support, but music and entertainment venue most of the time. So the average attendee at the O2 goes once or twice a year. That meant that if we put in Wi -Fi with a registration portal, we would gain information about customers at every single event. People always talk about the sort of ghost customers. You know who bought the ticket, but you don't know the one or two people that came with the ticket purchaser. And Wi -Fi was a really valuable source of data on that.

And we sort of put together a business, I mean, I put together a business case. I remember doing it a nice bit of Excel wizardry and kind of showing it to my CFO going, look, here's the business case for, for wifi. I suspect he didn't believe me. What was really great was we got, you we got the approval to put the wifi in. I think we installed it in sort of 2013, 2014. And what was, I think really good for me was actually it paid for itself in like a year or two. We could actually go back and look at.

Sean (10:50.017)
Yeah.

David Jones (10:51.603)
the customer data we acquired and we kind of knew how to measure the value of a customer. We knew that for every ticket purchaser, we'd make a certain amount of money, you know, on F and B and merchandise and all those things. And it paid for itself within a year or two, which then made the, you know, the job of justifying, putting it in elsewhere in our venues easier. And it also, and I think we didn't really appreciate it at the time. We kind of saw it as a means to an end at that point.

But it also then, of course, became the foundation for a whole load of other things. There was a whole load of things we wanted to do in our venues that needed great connectivity. And Wi -Fi was an important part of that. And so therefore, you had mobile apps and mobile F &B ordering and people being able to have their ticket in their mobile phone and so on. All those things flowed from the fact we'd made a business case for Wi -Fi in the first place.

Sean (11:37.882)
And then from a technology and data infrastructure point of view, you had to start to look at what does your system look like to capture all that data, store all that data securely, and then also analyze that data. Because I'm assuming before you had Wi -Fi and you had that fire hose of data coming into your system, you're like, what does that CRM, what does that fan data system look like? Was that a big…

project sort of byproduct of that influx of data.

David Jones (12:11.209)
Yeah, it's interesting because it all happened around the same time. When I joined, we had one person in the team looking after our UK, as it was, customer database. It was running on a platform called Teradata, which was an on -prem Teradata server. Again, that dates everything, doesn't it? It was before people were putting data in the cloud. It required quite specialist skills.

And we were, I mean, as we know now, we're probably scratching the surface of what you could do with that. The insight you could get from that customer data, how you could effectively market to it. And our data and analytics team has grown over time as it has in pretty much every sports or entertainment organization since then. And of course, if you're in a business like ours, where we own both the venue, but we also promote music events ourselves through our venues and through other people's venues.

And in parts of the world, in Los Angeles and in Berlin, we own sports teams. So you have a whole range of data. You've got data about people who come to the venues, data about people who are supporters of the teams, people who are fans of particular artists. And of course, the exciting thing is about where that data crosses over. And you've got to kind of look at that, both obviously in the context of what you can legally do from a privacy perspective, but you can learn a lot about a customer by, you know, they've bought tickets to more than one event. You can start to build a picture about that customer and…

do some quite clever things about using machine learning to try and predict what other events they might go and see. And I think one of the big learnings for me over the last 10 years or so has been how important the technology team is not just in terms of operational stuff, so keeping the building open and supporting the of day -to -day operations of a venue and a business, but also how important we are in actually helping the business generate more revenue and the use of our customer data is probably the most important.

obvious example of that. There's a whole bunch of projects I can think of the way we've got direct, really obvious ROI from just spending a bit of time going, here's a really innovative use of that data. And some of this stuff is now not terribly innovative, but back in 2012, 2013, was. Identifying, as I said, customers who are more predisposed to purchase tickets to a certain artist or a certain event, and then marketing that event specifically at them. Everyone does that now, but it…

David Jones (14:31.861)
generated six figure sums for us when we first started doing it 10 years ago or whatever it was. yeah, those two things went hand in hand, if you like, the sort of technology in the venue and building a great customer database.

Sean (14:45.27)
So how do you, I mean, you talked to there about, know, technology has now just infrastructure and it's just required, you know, again, like the wifi conversation, wifi is required just the same as, you know, toilet facilities are required in a stadium. It's just the utility, but there's always a lot of work to keep that operations going. How do you make sure that you carve out that time for your team to go, we also want to be, not just be stuck in operations, because there's always,

Projects happening, there's always upgrades happening, there's always things to do to keep the operations going, but you also want to have that revenue focus. They're taking the time to dive into the data and look for solutions and look for improvements. How do you, I guess, help your team, but I guess enable your team to carve out that time?

David Jones (15:37.589)
I suppose I'm lucky in a few ways. mean, the first thing is, you obviously if you, you said obviously I'm CIO for AEG Global Technology. So I've got a reasonably big team now and there are people whose role it is specifically to look after, you know, venue infrastructure, to look after the network and the other infrastructure in a venue. There are people whose roles are quite operational. And actually what we've done at AEG is kind of create a genuinely global team that does that. And so we've got expertise.

particularly on the sort of network infrastructure side, for example, where we're running multiple infrastructure projects at any one time. In the last 12 months, we've done a Wi -Fi upgrade at the O2. We're currently in the middle of a Wi -Fi upgrade at crypto .com arena in Los Angeles, and those projects are almost sort of running as an overlap simultaneous projects. The nice thing, and what we've tried to do is we've got that sort of core central team focusing on infrastructure and operations. And then we've got

a specifically focused, dedicated to focus, dedicated to looking at data and analytics, how we can best use the data. And what's really important, what's really great about that team is they're very, very closely aligned with the business. They spend a lot of time with the business. Our VP of data and analytics, he's often the first person I will personally go to when I want to understand something about the commercial drivers of our business.

all businesses are full of people with loads of anecdotes. They'll go, yeah, the reason this particular sales strategy doesn't work is because of X, Y, and Z. Actually, he's the person I go to to go, explain to me actually how this really works. What sort of tickets are we selling in this particular circumstance? What sells well? What doesn't sell well? Why is this venue different to this venue? And he has that understanding of the data. And then he'll work very closely with the businesses to go, okay, what are your priorities for the next 12 months, the next 24 months?

How can we help you deliver that? So, you know, a really good example would be if we want to, you if there's a focus on maybe a new premium product in a venue, one of the key things there is how you get the pricing for it right. So he might then work with that business to do pricing models and understand the right pricing for that so that we, you know, if you get the pricing right, it means you sell out your premium inventory or whatever the inventory is for most of your events. Whereas if you obviously, if you make it.

David Jones (17:55.433)
too expensive if you don't, if you make it too cheap, then you sell out too quickly. It's that sort of classic sales curve. they'll do a lot of analysis of that type to make sure we're maximizing the benefit of the inventory we've got. And it's that sort of focus. It's that really close focus and really close partnership with the business that really works well in that part of the team. And so I think that's kind of why, and I feel for…

For smaller organizations, often many of the people I meet at conferences like CETA are kind of like single venue, single sports team businesses, and they don't necessarily have that depth. It's a nice situation that we're in at AEG where we've got the scale to be able to build a big data team and a big infrastructure team, and people can become real experts in their field.

Sean (18:39.26)
And is one of the other advantages, I guess, having similar venues in different parts of the world that can take learnings from one another, whether someone's had that concert come through previously and there's some some learnings and around what another stadium did, whether it's a similar size, know, similar demographic profile, you're able to take those learnings from stadium to stadium.

David Jones (19:02.325)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that is one of, it's part of the secret source, if you like, of AEG. You know, as I say, many businesses in our sector may only own one venue and it means on a whole range of things, you're only ever doing things once. You know, you do a venue upgrade of some sort, a technology upgrade and you, you know, you may do it every seven or eight years, 10 years or whatever. And then the people who come to do the next upgrade may be all completely different to the people who did the last one. So all that sort of history and all the lessons have been forgotten. So.

I think from my perspective, and this applies across our business, it's not just a technology benefit. fact that we've got, know, globally AEG has five large venues, Crypto Vekom Arena in Los Angeles and Dignity Health Sports Park where the LA Galaxy plays. And then in London, the O2, Uber Arena in Berlin and the Barclays Arena in Hamburg. Those five arenas, there's always one of them that's going through some sort of, you know, technology project that can help us with the next one.

As I said, we've done a Wi -Fi upgrade at the O2 this year. We're just doing one at crypto. We're planning one in Berlin for next year. And it's the same team doing that. And if we get the project planning right, then they don't end up with them all happening at the same time, which of course sometimes happens. We try not for that to happen. But that's the focus for me is the knowledge we gain and the expertise we gain, which means actually every subsequent project is done better. We've learned some lessons from the previous one. We can deliver it more quickly.

And actually it's interesting doing these projects in different markets. You sometimes end up working with different vendors and you go, that's an interesting idea. We can apply that trick we've seen in one venue in another that helps us deliver a particular project more quickly or whatever. So yeah, that's definitely true. And I think the same is even more true on the data side. One of the things that's been a real benefit of creating this global technology team at AEG, historically I was doing technology just for Europe. And now I'm also looking after the two big venues in Los Angeles. We can go…

We've got these standard data products which we've built for one of our businesses globally. Actually, we can roll that everywhere because the reality is they're actually quite similar businesses. Obviously, they've got differences. The venues in North America are much more sports focused maybe than the venues in Europe. But F &B sales monitoring and knowing when your customers have arrived in the venue and all those sorts of things, they're fairly similar across all of our businesses. And so you can create analytics and dashboards and reports and so on that can then be repurposed in multiple locations.

David Jones (21:28.213)
And sometimes we get great ideas from one venue that we can transplant to another. A really good example of that is all of our big venues now use the new sort of AI driven security scanners at the entrances, which have completely made a massive difference to the experience our customers have coming into the venues. But what was interesting to me is we sort of, piloted it that in certain venues and then you could look at the stats from it, how quickly people came into the building.

One of the really interesting stats was you then made more money on food and beverage because people, you know what, people aren't in a line for 20 minutes outside waiting to come in. They've got time for a second round. That in itself then helped us demonstrate the value elsewhere in AEG for, okay, this was the uptick we had in F and B sales, which means there's a good business case for us doing this elsewhere. So it's that sort of learning where you can say, we'll take a piece of analysis or data we've done in one place and apply it somewhere else.

Sean (22:23.744)
I mean, having that global view of sports fans, we're always looking at some of the differences how UK fans go to sport and concerts and how it might be different to how they go in LA. I had the conversation with E Ray in Jacksonville talking about his experience at Marvel Stadium when he was working in Australia and now working in Jacksonville. I mean, as an IT person, it's ones and zeros. You're trying to get standard.

standard practice everywhere, but are there some tweaks that you have to do for different fans, whether they be in Europe or the US or in different markets?

David Jones (23:02.425)
I mean, guess the technology is a bit different in each of our venues, but it probably reflects more the content than the fan. If you take somewhere like Crypto .com Arena, we're in the off season at the moment, so the new basketball and ice hockey season starts in the next few weeks. And so that's obviously a great opportunity to do a whole load of maintenance and upgrades in the venue when it's not quite so busy.

We've been investing at crypto .com arena over the last few years. The venue was opened in like 1999. So, you it's a reasonable age now and we've been doing quite a lot of renovation work in it and that includes technology. And so I think a really good example would be, you know, because it's a sports venue, it has lots of broadcast infrastructure and it's got a dedicated broadcast team and it's got a big center hung screen and all of that. And you'd go to say the O2 or the Barclays Arena in Hamburg, doesn't have any of that infrastructure or equipment.

If we have a sports event in those venues, you bring in all of that production technology just for the events, as you would for a concert or whatever. So I think the technology does reflect the type of content quite a lot, but there's a lot that is the same. There's a lot that we do similarly. And actually one of the things we're trying to do is standardize as much as we can. company like AG, obviously we're kind of 25 years old as a business and actually

we've ended up just because big companies do that, doing things slightly differently in different places. And it was definitely an opportunity there to streamline our technology operation, make it easier for us to support by having like the same standards and the same systems and so on in as many places. So I think the content maybe drives the technology. What's also interesting I think is the way event producers use the venue does vary a bit. You the amount that people will maybe sort of, you know, order.

comm circuits and telephone lines and stuff does vary quite a bit by market and by business. But fundamentally, think the fans are, know, sport is obviously different to music, but the fans fundamentally want the same things. They want to get into the venue quickly. They want a nice, comfortable seat. They don't want to have to wait in a line for food or to use the restrooms or whatever. You know, that experience is hopefully the same everywhere.

Sean (25:14.262)
I mean, you touch on it there with the different broadcast requirements of different markets, but also a lot of the stuff we've spoken about is that fan facing, can I get to my seat? Can I get my food and beverage? But the other piece that has evolved in the stadiums is what music artists want in venue? Like what tech and how they want to use LEDs, what screens they want to be able to use, and also all the technology that they now require. And the same for professional teams, whether it's specific cameras,

following the game or what the coaching team needs in the locker room? Has that sort of been another thing that's been upgraded year on year for the last 10, 15 years?

David Jones (25:56.949)
Yeah, a lot of it comes back to the sort of the underlying network. And I think it's giving yourself the capabilities to kind of do whatever you need to do for any particular event in the venue. There's always something new coming along. What I think was really interesting to me is we have intentionally made big investments in the core network in the buildings and also in connectivity into the building. So we have like multiple 10 gig internet circuits into our venues. We had that way before, I guess it was fashionable to do so.

And it's amazing the number of times that sort of gets you out of a hole. You know, have a venue, an event that comes in and actually has much bigger requirements than you might have expected it to have. I mean, when we first started hosting e -gaming events in our venues, that was, I think, of an eye -opener. Those guys have huge bandwidth requirements. And having had that infrastructure in place in the venues meant we could meet their requirements. And frankly, we could make money out of doing so, whereas often, I think, venues found themselves bringing in temporary infrastructure and actually it was costing the money rather than being a revenue source.

I think when you look at of entertainment coming into the venue, so music, artists, and so on, a lot of what they do, they bring in themselves, know, touring production that's taking a show around North America or around Europe or whatever, and huge amounts of trucks all filled with LED. I as consumers of that content, we can see how much that has changed. And one of the things actually we're quite proud of, we recently renewed the

LED ribbon screen that's at the O2 that sort of runs around the inside of the bowl just below the sort tier of suites. And that historically been a Daktronics screen and was relatively standalone and we put in a new LED screen that uses the same sort of software that productions often use, which means we can offer it to productions. I mean, not all of them use it because obviously you need to create dedicated content for it, but we've had productions come in who have effectively synced it up with their

with their sort staging production system and they can do quite cool things in the arena bowl. And it often gets used for things like award ceremonies and stuff where people are creating dedicated content. So that's been quite cool seeing that sort of, if you like, that meshing between permanent infrastructure in the arena with the stuff that's brought in specifically for an event.

Sean (28:12.126)
One of the things that's under your remit is innovation. Innovation is something that's easy to talk about, but harder to execute. What does innovation mean to you and how do you drive innovation at AEG?

David Jones (28:25.641)
Yeah, now it's funny because you're completely right. Innovation means loads of things to different people. And sometimes, you know, someone in the business will come to you and say, we should be more innovative. And almost the first thing I kind of then do is probably slightly annoyingly go, what do you mean by that? What exactly do you mean by that? And the reality is that there's only so much innovation in our market. You know, if you go from one venue to another, they, you know, we're all effectively saying, seeing ideas in one person's venue and going, that's quite cool idea. Well, let's, let's translate that here. So.

I think for me, the innovation in a certain way is about how you organize your technology projects and your investments and how you prioritize them and how you take good ideas that other people have had and say, do we apply those to our venue? sometimes innovation for innovation sake doesn't really help you. There's a risk sometimes people say, let's have this cool new thing without necessarily thinking about what's the return on investment? What's the business case for it?

And I think a lot of the great innovation in our venues is often quite low level operational stuff. How do you make the venue just tick over more efficiently? How do we run it with fewer people, for example, or how do we, as I said before, get people into the venue more quickly? A lot of that stuff doesn't necessarily need technology. so I think it's been, and also actually often you find yourself in an IT role.

having to remind people that technology doesn't solve a process problem. So an innovation is similar actually. Innovation isn't necessarily just saying, well, buy a great piece of technology and it'll solve this problem for us. You have to have thought about how you're gonna use it and the processes that you have around it and so on. So yeah, I mean, that's kind of a long -winded answer, but yeah, I think in our business, it's often about how do we identify the technologies that will really help us drive revenue. And so there's some of us that's using existing technology in an innovative way.

But often it's about using the data that technology creates in an innovative way. So we do a lot of work around measuring the length of queues, the length of lines in our venues and also at our festivals. We'll do analysis of things like, how long are the queues in front of the bars at a festival site? And we'll use that information to help us plan the festival site better. Cause you always get these issues where all of your customers go to one bar and there's a bar like literally a hundred meters away that's much less busy.

David Jones (30:49.543)
And that kind of gives you insight into the sort of like human psychological behavior about how they move around a festival site. And you say, OK, how do we use that data to help us plan the site differently for events next weekend or the event we run next year? Obviously, in a venue, you can't necessarily move bars around. The infrastructure was fixed in a certain way. But it helps you think about signage and about how you direct customers around the venue as well and what products you put where and so on. And for me, that sort of incremental day -to -day innovation, just helping you kind of tick up.

your spend per head, your per caps, the amount of revenue you make out of F &B and merchant and so on. That's the sort of innovation that's really critical in a business like ours because, you know, like any business, we're always looking for growth, but the building's still the same size. It's still got the same number of seats in it. had last week. So you would always be thinking about how you drive growth through innovation.

Sean (31:38.57)
And it's a little bit like you said before with the, you know, the unintended bump or it might've been intended, you know, rolling out the security infrastructure piece and seeing the F and B bump up in, being able to see those results and tell those stories and those outcomes in an innovative way to say, this, this, the innovation from this was, you know, the, the, the result and sort of having your team understanding that, you know, rolling out something in this part of the stadium has this

effect, whether it's, you know, we've heard the one of, you know, the number of menu items on the menu causes decisions and make people go slower and removing one item. It doesn't, it's not the big bright, shiny bit of tech, but it is, I guess, small, that small incremental innovation.

David Jones (32:24.297)
Yeah, and I think also I would say that one of the things that sometimes isn't remembered is that if you focus innovation on guest experience, often that leads to a revenue bump nonetheless. I that example I gave earlier about, you know, reducing the length of lines coming into the venue then helps you make more revenue off of &B, which is kind of obvious when you think about it, but isn't necessarily the first thing you think about when you're saying we should put better technology in for scanning our customers as they enter the venue. And so I think

One of the things we're, like many other venue and sports teams owners, we're really focused on guest experience as well. Because if you make the guest experience really great, then a whole bunch of other things flow from that, including revenue. A classic example is people will often come into the venue earlier if the guest experience is really good. And if they come into the venue earlier, they're inevitably going to spend more money. And particularly for a sporting venue,

where you've got a lot of repeat fans and they may be used to what's around the venue. You always hear this story, people who run soccer stadiums going, our big sort of drivers are trying to get people into the venue early rather than more drinking in pubs around the corner. That's just as true of an arena. You want to make the experience great in an arena so people come early and they stay longer. And you think about it in everything about how you design the bars.

how you design the concourses, how you design the premium spaces. You want to make it a place that people want to come early and spend longer in, and then they'll spend more money. So that guest experience piece is a really key part of it.

Sean (33:53.89)
And so for you, being CEO, you want to have that 30 ,000 foot view of what is happening and just to get some idea of the scale, have over 200 ,000 events annually and 100 million fans going through AEG venues. How do you keep on top of what's happening through all the AEG businesses, not just the venues?

David Jones (34:24.181)
I guess the important thing is to spend as much time as you can with the people who are running those businesses. And I'm being really thoughtful and methodical about that and actually setting aside time to do that, regular, know, catch -ups with people and actually being quite intentional about having informal catch -ups with people. One of the things I've learned more recently sometimes is that the power of a meeting without an agenda often, you know, my…

A lot of my sort of meetings are very structured and we go in and say, here are all the projects we're working on. Let's go through the list and see how we're doing on them. And if you turn up in a meeting and say, actually, I haven't got an agenda today. I just want to talk about some of the things that are on your mind and what are the sort of longer term things you're thinking about and trying to carve out some time for that. It's quite hard to do because we all sort of default into the data to operational stuff, but carving out that time, you know, we talked about innovation.

Innovation doesn't just come from the technology team, it comes from everybody in the business. And if you can spend some time understanding what people's pain points are, what they are thinking about trying to change and improve, you can then think about how technology might align with that. And that only happens if you spend time with people. And I've got this global role at AEG now, which means I'm looking after venues in Europe and in the US. And I still am based in London, so I'm there most of the time. But for me,

Being physically present is important. We've all got used to a world where we can do things on Zoom or Teams or whatever, but I think it matters so much also being actually physically in the same room as people. If you're trying to have a conversation, a creative conversation, it's quite hard to do on a screen. Screens are great, again, for those sorts of meetings where you've got an agenda and you're working through stuff, but if you're trying to be creative, it's much better done in person. So I do travel quite a lot and that's intentional because I think it's important I spend time, as much time as I can talking to the senior people who run.

are music and sports and venue businesses.

Sean (36:19.146)
And I mean, you mentioned earlier that you came to the world of sports late. You'd been in the world of radio with Virgin and you're now working in the world of sports. wasn't something that you intended when you were a younger man. Do you have any advice for people who work in the technology space that want to break into the world of sports or sports business professionals that want to…

specializing in the technology space in sports.

David Jones (36:53.593)
Ooh, I guess, I mean, it's interesting. People always think it's a hard industry to break into. As an exec hiring people, know, sometimes the opposite feels true. It's like, you know, you're trying to find great talent and you're out interviewing and sometimes it can take quite a long time to find the right people. I think if you're really talented and dedicated and committed and enthusiastic about what you do, and you could interview well, I guess, then actually

you know, it's not as hard as you might think to get into sports and entertainment. And I think, I mean, the other thing that I think is also common in lot of people I've seen be really successful in my industry is they all started at the bottom and they worked their way up. And I think, I mean, like one that gives you credibility with your colleagues in the venue, if you kind of understand how the venue works right at the operational level, if you've been involved in supporting an event on an event night or whatever, I think that really helps you. And it also gives you an understanding of actually how the business works and ticks over.

So, you you can't necessarily, you won't necessarily always go in at a senior position or straight in at the top. But if you've worked your, you know, I see a lot of my colleagues who are really successful in this industry, they have worked their way up from the bottom and even outside of technology, they started off in a relatively junior role and have just demonstrated that talent and commitment and professionalism. I think it's also an industry where you can't be afraid of working hard. You know, it's often the hours aren't, you know, amazingly social.

There's a lot of evening work, a lot of weekend work, and you've to be prepared for that. And I see quite a few people come into the industry that are almost surprised by that. So I think if you're committed and dedicated and you come into it with your eyes open, I think you can go far quite quickly.

Sean (38:32.544)
I mean, there's lots of similarities in the IT, you know, now that sport requires IT infrastructure and a lot of the standard base IT that is required from a big corporate. But I think that, you know, that stadium and event day, you know, that manic time that, you know, when a big concert comes to town and, you know, it's, four o ‘clock on a Friday afternoon and you need to make sure that network's working because a big concert's happening in three hours and something's not working that fire, fire attitude and being able to understand that pressure.

which, know, and that adrenaline that you can get working in that environment. But that's the bit that's very much unique. mean, you know, rolling out teams or an office implementation is pretty similar, but it's that stadium piece. And I guess that interaction with the sports fan that does make the sports technology space a little bit different.

David Jones (39:23.465)
Yeah, I agree. mean, it's it's show business. Basically, the show must go on. And it's interesting, actually, there's a few of my team who kind of have come from a broadcast background as well. Obviously, I came from Virgin Radio. I brought a few people with me along the way over the years. And actually, broadcast does have a lot in common because, you know, if you've gone off air, you can't mess about, you have to get back on air. You got to focus on that. And then the same way, if there's some problem with technology and it's, you know,

5 .45 when the venue doors are opening at 6, you've got to get that problem fixed as well. having that of sense of urgency and also not crumbling under that pressure, not all people can kind of work in that environment. So people feel unnecessarily stressful. You're going to be able to thrive in that sort of environment, being able to get things fixed quickly. And also, guess, being good at troubleshooting things in a methodical way quickly. That's not a skill that everyone has. And it's really essential if you're working in technology in a sports or entertainment business.

Sean (40:18.082)
Most definitely. Yeah, you're always looking for someone that can solve the problem not not handle the problem to someone else It's definitely a case very much in in sport. There's always new technology on the horizon at the moment we're going through this wave of AI and if is there any particular technology that's you know, right in your Windshield right now that you're looking to tackle or that is something that you want to Do the do things with other next

Couple of years.

David Jones (40:50.355)
Yeah, I think actually the opportunities that AI presents, I mean, without kind of, it feels like everyone is on that AI bandwagon, but there's a reason for it. And I think for me, there's kind of two or three aspects to it from my role. One of those is around governance and guard rails. You know, and everyone's very, it's interesting. That's been almost the initial focus on AI. We have to tell people they can't use it. We have to make sure they're definitely not using it, so they're not doing bad things with it. And it's interesting, a lot of the focus has been on sort of data leakage. You know, people…

entering stuff into chat, GPT, and then it potentially being presented back to other people. But actually for me, there's also a piece around ethics, which maybe we haven't, you know, thought about enough yet. There are all sorts of things we can do with AI, but one of the questions you have to ask, as particularly as a big company, is should we be doing them? Do these things have unintended consequences on the human beings that they're impacting? So I think that's important. But that aside, I think there are some incredible opportunities for us with AI, I think particularly around our data.

and using AI to help us understand more about our customers and be more efficient in our marketing and to create a better experience for our customers. I think there's some really interesting things we can do for that. I think also AI can help us surface data to people in our business more effectively. At the moment, the of classic is, I need to know, what do we sell? How much bid did we sell last night? well, okay. Somebody in the data team will go and run a report and provide you with a spreadsheet with that information. Ideally, you just want to be able to answer that.

question by asking the computer, how much beer did we sell last night? And it comes back and tells you that. all of that is possible now using AI. So it kind of means you get much greater value out of the data you have, both because you can use it better for marketing, but you can get at the analytics much more quickly as well. So I think that's going be really interesting. And I think there's probably a whole bunch of AI use cases we just have no idea are coming. I think even at the moment, you see, I think if I were in Hollywood, I would be pretty frightened because AI is coming after those jobs pretty quickly.

I suppose the reassuring thing for me is I'm in a physical entertainment business. People want to go and watch a sports match and they want to go come and watch Taylor Swift live in a stadium tour. So that feels less disruptible by AI, but you should sort of be complacent about these things. Who knows what amazing innovative uses of AI are around the corner.

Sean (43:06.604)
You sort of spoke about that initial case of, don't use it. We need to find it. So how do you phase approach or start to step into that space? Is it little test pilot projects in different places and reporting back? there a process that you run through when you're saying, here's some new tech. How do we want to use it? How do you sort of get that to a point where it's like, yeah, we want to roll it out everywhere?

David Jones (43:34.389)
Yeah, I think the thing for me is there are lots of clever, innovative people in the business. So it's not the technology's team's job to say, no, you can't use this or yes, you must use this. mean, AI tools are also not necessarily that cheap. You one of the things we've looked at is, you know, who gets a copilot license, for example, we're a Microsoft 365 business and copilot's $30 a person a month. So if we bought it for every single employee we have, that's quite a big number. But equally, there are people in our business who will benefit from that technology.

So that's been one of the interesting things as well is actually, working out how do you evangelize it? How do you make people aware of the benefits of it without just kind of like rolling it out to everybody on day one? And yeah, so there have been a number of our businesses are doing pilots, but in parts of our business, we're kind of already using it. And I think what's interesting is there's been a real focus on AI because generative AI came along and kind of has wowed us all with its clever abilities, but there's been loads of, and it often depends on how you define AI.

one man's AI is another man's machine learning. But we're already using forms of AI in terms of how we analyze our data regression analysis and stuff where you kind of say, okay, these customers are all very similar. You know, the tech I was talking about earlier that scans people as they come into the venue for security purposes, that's basically another purpose of other use of AI. So it's already out there. I think the generative AI sort of will be really interesting in how it helps us with data. And so there has been about, okay, I guess two things finding ways to do pilots.

Also providing like if you like officially sanctioned tools to our business so that people don't then feel the need to go off and use stuff that's just on the internet where we might not be able to govern the data that goes into it. So yeah, those are the two things I think are key for us.

Sean (45:14.636)
Terrific. Well, Dave, really do appreciate you coming on the podcast. It's been a long time us locking this in. I want to get to the Sports Geek Closing Five. Do you remember the first sports event you ever attended?

David Jones (45:28.413)
I was thinking back on this earlier, so my dad was a massive rugby fan, Welshman, you would never guess with a surname like Jones. So actually he took me to my first sports event, which was going to see London Welsh play at home in Old Deer Park, which is kind of near Richmond in West London. And he sort of instilled in me a love of rugby, although I think he'd be horrified now to realize that I'm an England supporter. So that didn't necessarily work out how he wanted it to.

Sean (45:54.05)
Terrific. We've talked a lot about the upgrades in the technology experience, but the food experience at sports events has also gone forward leaps and bounds. Do you have a go -to food or a favorite food memory at a sports event?

David Jones (46:10.041)
I guess, staying on the rugby theme, I've been lucky enough to be invited a few times to go and see England play at home at Twickenham, like in corporate hospitality. you know, an England game in February in London, it's pretty cold. So actually, I'm always quite a big fan of when the catering goes down there, we're going to do a few pies or stew or something like that. That's always nicer than a burger or some chicken tenders or whatever. I'd much rather an ice pie.

Sean (46:35.97)
Absolutely, Managing a team, a global team, means you do get up in the morning and being inundated. What's the first app you open in the morning?

David Jones (46:48.917)
Do you know what, I try not to make it be my email app because, mean, you're right, there is one of the downsides of having a global team is whenever you wake up, there's already 400 emails in your inbox. And one of those 400 will be somebody going, this is really urgent. This is on fire. You need to deal with it. So it's not great for your mental health, emailing the first app you open. Probably it's Twitter. I kind of refuse to call it X. And despite all the terrible things that Elon Musk is doing to Twitter, it's still probably the first app I open. I've tried threads, I've tried Mastodon. There just isn't the content there yet. yeah, Twitter is my sort of go -to first app of the day, I would say.

Sean (47:23.97)
Yes, not that that's actually not sometimes good or bad for your mental health either, but it is somewhere you can check in with the within the news of the day

David Jones (47:30.43)
No, that's true.

Yeah, find out what Trump's been up to overnight. Not necessarily always the greatest thing to look at.

Sean (47:39.682)
Is there someone that you follow, maybe someone on X or it might be a colleague that the podcast listeners should give a follow on why?

David Jones (47:50.041)
see, I struggle with this one because I don't get an awful lot of tech or sports information off Twitter. Actually, I'm more of a current affairs type person. So I guess my primary use of it is to keep up to date with the news. I'd say my two favorite accounts is a UK journalist called Lewis Goodall, who's a complete sort of anorak about everything electoral. And I find him fascinating to follow. I'm not sure if that will necessarily resonate with your sports geek podcast listeners.

The other one I like is Larry the Cat. So Larry is the 10 Downing Street cat. He has his own official Twitter account. Always interested to see what he says. So yeah, definitely recommend those two.

Sean (48:28.098)
True, we'll give them a follow. Lastly, and I always let people answer this from a personal point of view, and I don't know if there is one for AAEG business, but what social media platform is your MVP?

David Jones (48:45.705)
Yeah, I thinking about this. You know, it's funny, despite it's sort of like the negative associations with it just being full of boomers these days. I think probably out of all the social media platforms, Facebook is probably still the one that's the most valuable to us as a business in terms of its ability to sell tickets to things. So yeah, it's interesting. Twitter and Instagram may be cooler, maybe more relevant, maybe younger or whatever. But I think Facebook still has that volume, which is probably why it's such a successful business still.

Sean (49:14.538)
It still has a volume and it still has that the, has the most compelling and advertising product in the, in the ability to, you know, hit your customer between the eyes with the offer straight away. Yes. Some of those ads might end up on Instagram, but that's where it's well and truly ahead of, you know, X it's advertising product. I'll just say it's trash and TikTok is one that is, is, is growing, but the fact that, you know, it's where Metta makes its money and

If you want to get cheats in the seats, that's the platform you need to leverage.

David Jones (49:47.027)
Yeah, and I think especially, I I see it obviously this is a sports focus podcast, but I see it in our promoting business, our music promoting business, they have really heavy users of Facebook for exactly that reason.

Sean (49:57.962)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, David, thank very much for coming on the podcast. Hopefully, we'll both be in the same part of the world sometime future, whether I'm in London or we cross paths in the US. If someone's listening to this podcast and want to reach out, what is the best way for them to connect with you?

David Jones (50:16.661)
You can find me on Twitter or X as it's now known and I am very proud to say that I have to handle David Jones because I was very early on the platform. So I'm such an early adopter, but yes, you can find me on X at David Jones.

Sean (50:29.982)
Terrific. I'm also one of those people who grabbed their full name on X. We are some of the early adopters. Now, admittedly, David, there would have been more competition for David Jones than there would have been Sean Callanan. So congratulations.

David Jones (50:44.147)
Yeah, a friend of mine introduced me to Twitter and so I'm ever so grateful for that because I wouldn't have got that name otherwise.

Sean (50:52.118)
Not a problem. David, thank you very much for coming to the podcast and we'll catch up soon.

David Jones (50:57.119)
Catch up soon, nice to speak to you, Sean.