Ticket Summit 2008, the secondary ticket industry’s largest trade show and conference, wrapped over the weekend with attendees, panelists and exhibitors praising their time at the event, held for the third consecutive year at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas.
Once again, attendance exceeded that of the previous year, with just over 450 brokers and ticket industry executives strolling the exhibit floor and listening to 14 discussion panels on the state of the market, and its prospects for the future.
“I thought it was fantastic,” Curtis Broome, president of EventMobile.net, told TicketNews. Broome was a first-time attendee of the show, and his company delivers information and services on events, venues and tickets to mobile phones. “From talking to people at the conference, Ticket Summit is growing and seemed greater in scope and execution than I anticipated. I came away very impressed.”
The event’s growth each year has led TicketNetwork, which hosts the conference, to announce that it is launching a second Ticket Summit in New York City in 2009. The inaugural New York show will be held at the Waldorf-Astoria January 6-8, and the fourth annual show in Las Vegas will be held again at the Venetian July 15-17.
At any given time during the two-day event, a couple of hundred attendees were milling around the exhibit floor, and a couple of hundred were in panel discussions and training workshops.
Mark Higuera, senior account manager for the New Jersey Nets, said the event was a huge success for his team. This year, Ticket Summit attracted more sports teams and venues to the event, in an effort to open up additional networking opportunities for brokers.
Higuera said he sold 24 Nets season ticket orders to brokers and other attendees from around the country, and developed at least 60 other leads, considerably more than he “would have gotten had I been sitting in my office.”
“I went out there to network and to find out how brokers were viewing the Nets,” he said. “I was able to tell our story, and I learned a lot, whether it was about stadium PSLs or luxury suite marketing ideas.”
Julie Blaustein agreed. She is the director of business development for JamBase, one of the largest Web-based information resources for concert listings and data, and this was her first Ticket Summit.
“For JamBase, this was a terrific opportunity to meet the main players in the secondary ticket market,” she said, adding that partly as a result of the connections the company made at the show, JamBase will be adding additional ticket vendors to its Web site.
