SeatGeek is reportedly doubling down on its ability to harvest data from customers purchasing tickets on its systems, announcing a partnership with Project Admission. The firm offers clients enhanced ability to “know who each ticket-holder is” through so-called identity-based ticketing.

SportTechie reports on the deal, which will supposedly begin with an integration with the New Orleans Hornets, one of Seatgeek’s Enterprise-level clients where it serves as primary ticketing vendor. Other enterprise clients include the Dallas Cowboys, New Orleans Pelicans, Cleveland Cavaliers, Arizona Cardinals, and Major League Soccer. It is unclear if any of the other clients will be using this service at this time.

The use of mobile-only ticketing systems to acquire massive amounts of consumer data for marketing purposes has accellerated dramatically in recent years. In addition to serving as a scalable solution for restricting consumer rights towards tickets they have purchased at the behest of teams and venue clients, mobile ticketing allows for a robust data-acquisition program, opted into by users who have to accept the terms and conditions of use for the ticketing applications in order to gain access to the venue.

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“We are helping solve the problem of distribution,” Project Admission CEO Stephen Glicken told SportTechie in an interview earlier this year. “There are three main problems. One is the identity piece. We still have a hard time knowing who’s in the room, so at the core of our product is identity-based ticketing, which allows us to kind of track the chain of ownership. The next piece is the downstream revenue. The ability to kind of capture multiple sales of the same ticket. The last bit, which is the real driver of the company, is to help with discovery that helps sell more inventory, incremental revenue, and finding audiences and selling to fans where they are.”

Ticketmaster has been well known for its deployment of such systems, both for the harvesting of customer data to share with partners and power its own marketing, and for the ability to restrict consumer choice in ticket resale. SeatGeek, which is a relative newcomer to the primary marketplace side after beginning as an aggregator of ticket resale options for consumers, is apparently looking to play in that same type of sandbox. It also recently signalled an increased committment to exploring the future of blockchain ticketing – an ecosystem which could theoretically enable primary clients to limit consumer rights entirely on tickets after purchase, or even charge a percentage of any and all secondary ticket sales regardless of platform – with its recent hiring of blochchain vet as its VP of Engineering.

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