Bringing Fans Together at the Ziggo Dome

On the 17th & 19th December, Antoon, the Netherland’s most listened to artist on Spotify in 2022, gave sold-out performances to crowds of excited fans at the Ziggo Dome venue in Amsterdam.

Following the success of a number of hit singles in 2022 and the award for best national artist in the QMusic top 40, Antoon was able to bring thousands of fans together for the two massive shows in December.

With high demand from Antoon’s young audience demographic, the choice was made to use OPEN ticketing partner, GUTS Tickets as our honest ticketing infrastructure provided the event organizers with all the necessary tools to control secondary market revenue, protect fans against scalping, and facilitate easy entry for attendees with complete real-time ticketing statistics.

Let’s take a look at how GUTS helped the event organisers keep €85,000 in secondary revenue out of the hands of scalpers.

Retaining Secondary Market Ticket Revenue for the Ziggo Dome Events

When looking at ticket sales for these two sold-out Ziggo Dome events, secondary market ticket activity formed a combined 12.5% of tickets resold.

Thanks to the built-in secondary market, all of the secondary sale turnover from these secondary sales was kept out of the hands of scalpers and marketplaces and crucially fully retained by the event organizers.

According to a study conducted in 2018, scalping activity for a popular event of this kind would typically involve a 49% markup of primary sale price. When combined with the percentage of tickets re-sold for these events, our infrastructure was able to keep roughly €85K of profit out of the hands of scalpers.

How does GUTS allow for the control of the secondary market?

Our infrastructure utilizes a number of techniques to eliminate scalping and put secondary market activity back in the rightful hands of event organizers.

This works through a number of important anti-scalping mechanisms:

• Every ticket’s QR code is locked until a short time before the event’s doors open

• Every QR code rotates periodically to make screenshots redundant

• Every ticket is tied to a mobile phone number to ensure legitimacy of the ticket buyer

• Every ticket cannot be exported out of the White-Label environment and only re-sold within the application

By applying these techniques together, we’re able to guarantee the eradication of ticket scalping and drive secondary sales directly through the secondary ticket market built into the mobile ticketing app and web shop.

Putting Control Back in the Hands of Event Organizers

Our infrastructure is designed with event organizers, creators, and attendees in mind. After all, it’s this fan relationship that fills stadiums and creates memorable experiences remembered for years to come.

In today's world of increasing fan connection, the ability to engage with attendees and understand who they truly are is becoming increasingly important, and the secondary ticket market represents a significant portion of this event activity.

Without retaining control over this market, event organizers lose insight into their audience, miss out on a vast wealth of secondary market ticket revenue, and have no control over attendee data. It’s the equivalent of 15% of attendee activity disappearing into the ether.

In the case of the Ziggo Dome shows, this led to thousands more data points of fans who purchased tickets, either from the primary or secondary market.

By being able to retain control over secondary ticket markets, you unlock:

• Secondary market ticket revenue

• Secondary market attendee data

• The ability to connect with all fans, no matter primary or secondary market ticket buyers

Facilitating a Frictionless Attendee Experience

Naturally, whilst the control of revenue and data is critical, it’s also equally as imperative to have a user-friendly ticketing experience that both attendees can navigate and event organizers can use to get all ticket holders through the door.

The scanning application that we've built can be loaded on any mobile phone and set up with ticket scanners at multiple doors. Each scanner can have their own scanning profile to ensure attendees enter the venue at the right places.

By using our scanning system, the event organizers effortlessly checked in all tickets at the doors at a rate of 230 ticket scans a minute. This efficiency is in part achieved by the ability for multi-ticket purchasers to form groups within the mobile ticketing app.

Ticket holders can invite their friends to form a group which then ties multiple tickets purchased to a single QR code, increasing scanning efficiency. As ticket purchasers for the Ziggo Dome events bought on average 3 tickets, that’s a 3x reduction in QR codes needed to scan at the doors and one of the reasons why our system can scan in attendees so effortlessly at the Ziggo Dome.

When combined with real-time analytics, the event organizers could see exactly which attendees checked in to the event, no matter if their ticket was purchased on the primary or secondary market.

Seeing how the event organizers for Antoon's Ziggo Dome events interacted and succeeded with the GUTS system is a testament to the importance for event organizers to have full control over their ticketing, and we’re delighted at the results of these high-octane events.