"What impacts ticket sales?"

Overview

In an effort to sell tickets, an NBA team ran short-flighted campaigns to promote games throughout the season. In past seasons, the team had run the broadcast campaign near the end of the digital campaign for most of its peak games. But to test if its approach was working, the team reached out to RADaR. 

Challenge

RADaR was asked to find out if running broadcasts near the end of digital campaigns that advertise peak games had a positive impact on ticket sales.

The client asked RADaR to analyze:

• Impact of broadcast on sales
• Overall ticket sales analysis (channel, vendor, campaign)
• Trends/patterns

RADaR took the analysis further to include:

• How does the type of broadcast impact sales?
• What other outside factors could be used to predict customers’ interests/actions?

Solution

• We broke the data into two groups: one with broadcast and one without.
• Under the broadcast group, we compared sales revenue from the initial flight (no broadcast yet) with revenue from the remaining flight (with broadcast).
• Under the group without any broadcast: we compared sales revenue from the initial flight vs. the last three days of flight (i.e. three days before the game).

Results

• The results showed that sales revenue tends to increase when the game day comes closer to the last broadcast run.
• Outside factors, such as the actual performance of the team, had a major impact on ticket sales.
• There is a strong correlation between point difference and sales.
• If there is a hot game (with superstars, for example), ticket sales are still strong, even if the team is not performing well.