Pogoseat: The New Era of Seats for Fans
Ever wish you could upgrade your seats to see Stephen Curry or Kobe Bryant make history yet again? See some seats courtside or in the first row that have yet to be taken? Do you hate the obnoxious people behind you that keep yelling in your ear for the opposing team? Want to impressive a date with great seat? A Silicon Beach based company, Pogoseat allows fans to upgrade seats and purchase unique VIP upgrades before and during sporting events and concerts.
The Los Angeles mobile-upgrade company recently raised $2.3 million in seed funding from a variety of strong investors and signed a deal on September 3, 2015 with AEG, the top worldwide arena company with famous locations such as The O2 in London, StubHub Center in Carson, CA, STAPLES Center in Los Angeles and Best Buy Theater in New York. The AEG deal will enable fans to purchase upgrades and one-of-a-kind experiences such as behind-the-scenes meet-and-greet opportunities (i.e. mascot visit or running on the field), autographed merchandise, or contest entry within the AXS.com ticketing platform at select AEG affiliated locations.
Pogoseat’s enterprise solution provides sports teams and venues with an instant revenue boost and a way to keep fans satisfied and engaged. In addition, the chance to know more about your fans and their preferences via detailed analytics enables teams to make smarter choices about consumers. The white-label solution is integrated with back-end ticketing systems – preserving teams’ and concert venues’ brand yet creating a turnkey solution within an exiting app to automate the upgrade process.
The increasing use of beacons has been transforming the way we shop and the way companies advertise to consumers. Pogoseat is now utilizing sports team’s existing beacon technology to send messages to consumers in the upper decks about upgrade opportunities. The company is winning in the recent age and wave of digital disruption to engage sports fans with increased customer satisfaction and engagement. The mixture of technology, analytics, marketing and entertainment come to a perfect head within Pogoseat.
The mobile upgrade field has historically been dominated by several start-ups, such as Experience who signed a preferred partnership with Ticketmaster back in late 2013. However, Pogoseat is known to have deeper integrations and differs primarily with seat returns and credit back for your original seat rather than a flat cost. Since the company is integrated in a team’s app, Pogoseat can automatically detect what seats a team still has available to a game. Only open tickets are available such as those that were previously reserved for players’ friends and families or corporations that were never picked up or assigned by a designated deadline. Alternatively, when a season ticketholder can no longer attend a game, he or she can inform the team to sell their tickets which will then get entered into the Pogoseat open inventory pool. The integrated platform enables the sports team/concert venue to earn additional revenue, season ticketholders to make back some of his or her money, and fans to upgrade to prime seats. It is a win-win solution for all.
Pogoseat currently has the following teams signed up in addition to the previously mentioned AEG locations: Utah Jazz, San Francisco Giants, Anaheim Ducks, and the Arena Football League. Next time you find yourself attending one of these games, make sure to check out their app’s and see if there is an prime upgrade for you to get an up close and personal view of your favorite team.
This is great! It’s interesting to see how, sports in particular, are leveraging digital innovations to create and capture more value. I would be curious to see if this specific application really takes off though. Everyone loves upgrades, but why wouldn’t someone who can’t make a game sell their ticket on a place like stubhub? Presumably they can get at least face-value (and often more), while I would guess selling through this platform would be less lucrative. That said, this idea of teams engaging fans real-time at the event presents a huge opportunity. If pogoseat can master the technology I think there are other applications, in sports or otherwise, for this type of service. Airlines already do this with upgrades. I wonder if there are any learnings from that industry that can be applied here.
Really interesting stuff! Looking forward to reading your next blog post.
This is a phenomenal idea – perfect example of a company using digital technology to capture value…in this case leveraging the ticket aftermarket not only brings in additional revenue streams for sports teams but also allows greater control over their fan experience. I agree with Drew’s point that most season ticketholders would probably find alternate ways to sell their tickets – so perhaps this will mostly provide direct value to the stadiums / teams with unused seats. The pricing model for this service will also be pretty interesting – I’m curious if there will be a set formula for pricing these upgrades (i.e., one fixed discount to the face value of the new seat) or to what extent there will be dynamic pricing based on key factors (i.e. time remaining in game / popularity of matchup). Certainly a very cool concept and one that I’ll definitely be looking out for!