Marketplaces 2010: Eventful Goes Groupon on Events
Jordan Glazier, CEO of Eventful, mapped out the company’s latest social, mobile and crowd sourcing efforts to the day-three audience here at Marketplaces 2010.
The company currently has 15 million users through online, mobile and partner channels. At this scale, it’s developed a behavioral targeting engine involving e-mail marketing and other personalized outbound promotions.
“We send out 100 million e-mails per month and every one of those hits our database 100 times on the way out the door to modify it to certain users,” said Glazier. “Having learned what our users like and communicating events to them, we’ve gotten very proficient at driving attendance.”
Glazier claims this drives more than 1 million consumers to purchase every month. Considerable traction is also gained from sending out its feed to 2,000 distribution partners. These include digital signage (Wal-Mart); mobile (WHERE, Loopt); and online (Topix, Yahoo).
But perhaps the most interesting direction for Eventful has been flipping things around to put more influence in users’ hands. Somewhat similar to the popular “group buying” led by Groupon (though it pre-dates Groupon), Eventful’s “Demand It” feature lets users amass interest to bring events to their towns.
Users are actually doing this and entertainment properties are using it to gauge demand and plan movie screenings or tour dates accordingly.
“It’s become a communications module for artists to gauge demand and message those who have expressed interest,” he says. “Who better to market a concert to than the people who have demanded it?”
All in all, 120,000 musicians use it, as do a number of event coordinators. Recently this has included promotions for the movie “Paranormal Activity.” KISS also used it to discover 500,000 Eventful users were asking for the band and booked a 50-city tour as a result.
