As traditional season-ticket model evolves, how to 'build a bridge to a better way'

Will the traditional season ticket package become a relic of a bygone era?

Chris Giles has been at the forefront of creating a new paradigm for teams, both in his previous role as chief operating officer for the Oakland Athletics and his current position as co-founder and CEO of FanRally, the Bay Area-based subscription membership platform.

He has pioneered a new approach: offering subscription memberships tailored to younger fans who reject the static season ticket bundle. Memberships give younger fans the flexibility and exclusive in-venue experiences they covet. In its simplest form, the FanRally platform replaces tickets with reservations; members pay a monthly subscription fee in lieu of paying for tickets.

In 2019, Giles launched A’s Access, a membership-based program that entailed general admission access to games as well as reserved-seat plans. Then in 2020, after he left the A’s, Giles founded FanRally, which offers professional and college teams a variety of models that provide fans more flexibility and enable teams to retain control of unused inventory. FanRally works with teams in MLB, the NBA and NHL as well as colleges such as South Carolina, Stanford, Villanova and Pittsburgh. 

On3 caught up with Giles to discuss where the traditional season-ticket model is headed, the four different models – free memberships, flex vouchers, flex banks and subscription passes – FanRally offers clients (each with several variations); and why schools need to adjust their thinking to appeal to the unique habits of the modern fan base.

While Giles doesn’t believe the season ticket bundle is on the verge of extinction, he contends the effort schools invest in “signing up new season-ticket members will be dead in five years.”

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

Q: How has FanRally grown over the last three years?

Giles: In 2020, it was just me and an idea. And then the pandemic hit, which was kind of like one of these like, ‘Holy shit’ type of moments. Like, what does this mean? All of that stuff. But in hindsight, it did a couple of things. One, it freed up a bunch of executives to give us great feedback on our product. So I hired a CTO and a co-founder a couple of months after we started. And we launched our first product in October of 2020. It was just a little tool that helped teams run subscriptions. They were very similar to A’s Access. When we launched A’s Access, we signed up 10,000 new members.

We knew that there was a huge appetite for basically more of a theme-park type of membership model. ‘I’m going to pay a monthly or an annual fee. And I’m going to go whenever I want to go.’ 

But when we were at the A’s, the key insight was we were doing those on transferable tickets. And so as soon as you provide unlimited or gym membership-type access to tickets, and there is an active resale market, you just open up the floodgates for arbitrage.

That was kind of the biggest insight from the A’s. For everything that worked, we had so many resale challenges, we ended up severely cannibalizing our single-game tickets when we launched A’s Access. And so we built our entire platform on non-transferable reservations. We literally just took a book out of travel. It works the exact same way. You book a hotel room, you give them your information, and they reserve you a piece of inventory when you check in. When you check in they say, ‘Oh, this is Eric. Here’s your inventory.’ It works the exact same way. It’s not anymore complex than that. 

Q: Why are so many pro and college teams still clinging to the traditional season-ticket model and not moving to evolve?

Giles: It is classic innovator’s dilemma. So you’ve got this existing base, and it’s so much easier to renew someone with a product they’ve already agreed to buy than to tell them, ‘That product is no longer available. And you have to pick another one.’ You create a whole bunch of churn by changing the model. We also have very different consumer preferences between boomers who want that same seat experience. They’ve held the seats for X number of years. They have a community of people around them. Versus a 25-year-old, [for whom] the whole idea of repeating the same experience twice is unattractive. The whole idea of you, as the team or university, dictating my schedule in the product is also tough. They make decisions more last minute. They want more flexible access to seats. And so we have a transition. I actually think the way this is going to work is season tickets are already declining. That 50 to 70-year-old is not always going to be a season-ticket holder. We’re going to get this natural shift. And so what we figured out is, it’s not about getting teams to cancel the old way and do it the new way. It is about helping them build a bridge to a better way. 

So our membership platform, we now support every approach to membership that you can think of. So if you want to run passes, you can run them on FanRally. If you want to run a book of vouchers, digital vouchers that you can redeem for seats. If want to run a bank model, the most popular thing now is like these banks. So it’s like you put in $100,000 with the University of South Carolina, you can get a suite for football, you can get 50-yard-line seats, you can get 30 seats for your company up higher. You can spend that allotment however you want.

And our software allows teams to fully customize any of those programs. We’ve got about 25 different rule sets on the platform. So the team says, ‘Hey, what seats do they have access to? How often can they book seats? How many seats can they hold at a time, and how far in advance do you want to book the seats? Is this run on vouchers? Or is this run on passes?’ All those things, it’s like an operating system. You just go in and say, ‘I want mine to work like this.’ And then we deliver all of that on non-transferable reservations. And so the flexibility you’re providing your new, modern members, which by the way, they require that flexibility to buy anything, is no longer cannibalizing your ability to sell future single-game seats.

Q: So you’re not just offering a subscription pass anymore? There are many, many variations, right?

Giles: What we do now is we built an all-in-one platform. So our whole approach is every fan, anyway they want to consume your product, you can build it on our platform. So we have four basic approaches that teams use.

One is a free membership. This is, ‘Hey, I want to give students or employees of one of my corporate partner corporations access to highly discounted seats without them just immediately flipping them and selling them for a profit.’ So we’ve created these free memberships so teams can set them up. The [Milwaukee] Brewers use our free memberships to run their current student discount program.

We do flex vouchers, which are classic vouchers that leverage technology to make them much better, much safer for teams, so you have some idea of where the vouchers are going to be redeemed for. They can’t just buy a book of 20 vouchers and use all 20 vouchers for your best conference home game and really cannibalize a lot of revenue. We can set different rules of how the vouchers can be stacked together for which events.

That flex banks model that I told you about where – the [Tampa Bay] Rays actually run their memberships on this now. It’s literally put in a dollar amount, and depending on the dollar amount, you get an increasingly higher discount rate. And you also get access to better and better seats. But you can use that flexible bank however you want.

And then, lastly, is kind of where we started, and really what we pioneered initially to start the company, which is subscription passes. In every other instance besides FanRally, the only thing you can do is general admission subscription passes.

What we’ve built at FanRally is a subscription pass that works like DVD Netflix, so you can buy like a two-DVD plan. And what that means is you just have two checked out at a time. So we do the same thing with seats, you can subscribe to the University of South Carolina’s football plan. And you could pick any game you want to reserve, but you can only hold two reservations at a time. So if that Clemson rivalry game is at the end of the season, and you want to spend one of your reservation slots to book it in the beginning, get the best seats you can, that is your choice. So all of this flexibility provides significant opportunities for personalization, as well, because you’re actually allowing the member to gamify their set of privileges to optimize it for what they value most.

Q: Let’s drill down a little deeper. Why are these flexible plans particularly appealing for the younger demographics? Why does this align with their habits and behaviors?

Giles: There are two things that a traditional season ticket doesn’t offer that are the most important two factors in their [younger fans’] decision-making process. And we’ve done a ton of survey work and focus group work on this front, and it comes down to two macro themes.

The first one is flexibility. I don’t want you to dictate to me my schedule, and then I’ve got this burden to go resell them. And when I do get to resell them, I’m getting my ass kicked by, you know, brokers who do this professionally. So that flexibility element is one.

The second one is exclusivity. So until FanRally, every single seat in every single building was open to anyone who wanted to buy them. And so you could never get anything special, right? I can go and buy these seats. I can get a season ticket. And you can get the ones next to me because the guy next to me listed them on StubHub. So there’s really nothing exclusive that I’m getting other than I’m guaranteed this seat every time at this price point. 

And so as soon as you go to a model where your member privileges are booking you the seats … For instance, we run a membership program for a club at Madison Square Garden for the [New York] Knicks. And the only way you get access to this club is to be a member. Your membership has guest privileges. So you get a certain number of guests that you can bring throughout the season. You can also buy more guest [passes]. But the only people in that club, because we’re not fulfilling those seats with transferable tickets, are the actual members. So I’m in there. I feel special. I feel like I’m getting access to something because I committed. You’ve got all of these situations, like, the A’s just launched this summer pass, and all of the season-ticket holders are like, ‘What the heck? I paid this for my seats, and now you’re giving them away for this.’ So this direct reservation model allows teams to avoid that altogether and truly offer something exclusive that can’t be purchased by someone who does not have a relationship with the team via the secondary market.

Q: One of the key elements is that the passes can’t be resold, right? Teams know exactly who is entering their venue and also what their consumer habits are, which is valuable data to possess. And they can then target them with much more personalized messaging.

Giles: And to clarify, there’s nothing resellable on our platform. And depending on which model the team is using, they’re either transferable or non-transferable. So in a past model, for instance, where you get the ability to go to any Brewers game you want to, it doesn’t make sense for that to be transferable. Because then it would be like if you could give your gym card to your buddy and be like, ‘Just go use my membership.’ So any of those all-you-can-eat type of models, they’re non-transferable. But if you buy a $10,000 bank, you can give those seats to whoever you want. If you buy 10 vouchers, you can give those seats to whomever you want. But it all happens within a closed ecosystem.

So we’re not only acquiring information and getting better at personalizing for the actual member. But whenever you transfer it, we’re bringing another member into the ecosystem. And we’re even starting to have some success up-selling those invited guests. Would you like to add on seats? You’ve been invited with, you know, one seat to sit with them, and because we use dynamic seat reservations, we can quickly move that group over here to accommodate the fact that there are now 10 instead of six members on the reservation.

Q: And the data teams then acquire on fans’ habits holds enormous value, right?

Giles: Having worked for a few teams … I think teams currently capture, call it 25 to 30% of the data of the actual attendees. Because if I sell you an 81-game season strip, and you give half of them to your neighbor, I already don’t know who your neighbor is, and then each of you are selling the games that you can’t go to.

And then one of the key insights from this whole process was, a resale marketplace called me when I was at the A’s and asked me if I wanted to buy my own customer data from them. And it was kind of like, ‘Holy shit, like this random company who started and all they do is connect buyers and sellers of my product has better data on who’s attending my games than I do.’ And so I think there’s obviously marketing benefits and all of that kind of rationale, which is, it helps you grow your business.

But I actually think in today’s day and age, our kids are growing up with highly personalized experiences. They’re in these freakin’ video games where everything’s virtual. When you go onto your Amazon [account], it knows that you have a cat and it’s marketing your cat food. We can’t personalize anything in sports right now. 

We might be able to, like, send you a coupon and those sorts of things. But, at the end of the day, if you start tying identity to admission, it opens up a whole other world. You know who’s in your ballpark. Now we know who purchased the ticket from us initially.

That’s it. And then we can kind of triangulate – did they also log into the WiFi while they were in the building? So now we know Eric did come because he bought the ticket and he logged into the WiFi. So teams are trying to triangulate that data through other data points, as opposed to just saying, ‘Hey, we have a new model.’ I think current buyers of season tickets will require that their season tickets remain resellable. I think taking that away almost feels like you’re harming the consumer. But I do think what teams will end up doing is offering flexibility with those season tickets on direct reservation.

So if you want to start with those 81 and sell any of them you want, you can. But you can’t turn in the three Tuesday night dogs [unappealing games], two seats each, for two great seats to the [New York] Yankees, and then flip those and resell them. That’s what happens today. When teams offer flexibility, you’re actually offering resale flexibility as opposed to true fan flexibility. And so that’s really the difference in teams making the jump from offering flexibility on traditional tickets versus direct reservations.

Q: When you talk with pro and college teams about your product, do you find pro teams generally more forward-thinking? How would you characterize the difference in sophistication between pro and college teams?

Giles: I don’t think we can put them all in one bucket. I think there are some college teams that are really pushing the envelope. There are professional teams that are completely stuck in the mud, too. But I do think there are some core dynamics that are fundamentally different across the two.

The first of which is multiple venues, multiple sports. The Gamecock GO Pass that we run for South Carolina is a subscription pass where you can go to any event you want. And so there’s different shopping experiences, different availability, some events are GA some aren’t. There’s a lot of complexity in the college model. 

Whereas in the pro model, I don’t know if you remember a couple of years ago, the [Golden State] Warriors offered a subscription pass that was just access to their concourse, and there was a lot of buzz about it. But that’s actually super easy to do because you’re not dealing with real inventory, you just basically create a faux event on your ticketing system. And you sell that event, and then you issue them basically like a GA season ticket. And they call it a pass.

It’s fundamentally different than the way we structure it, which is, in the Gamecock Go Pass example, every member, depending on which tier they subscribe to, gets a set of privileges. Some of them get access to every single event for free. And their football seats are really good. And it’s a more expensive tier, versus a less expensive tier, where you might get all the Olympic sports for free and then your admission into men’s and women’s basketball and football, those reservations are at like half of face value. So there’s still a tremendous benefit to being a member for those higher-demand events. But you’re not just giving them away. And so that’s another element that can be configured on our platform. So teams get to make the rules on how everything works.

Q: Is the season-ticket model dying? Where will we be in five years?

Giles: I think that the effort put into signing up new season-ticket members will be dead in five years. There will absolutely be legacy season ticket holders because teams don’t want to rip things out of people’s hands. And so it’s like, ‘Hey, we’ve gotten this legacy group. They are in this classic model.’

But all of their marketing, all of their sales efforts are all going to be focused on more modern approaches to memberships because they’re not only better for the fan, they’re easier to manage. Right now, if you want to exchange your tickets, you’ve got to call a service rep. There are just a lot of benefits to, not just a different approach, but the other thing we offer is a fully automated platform. So we’ll do the subscription billing for you. We’ll do all of the filtering for who has access to what seats on what time windows for what events. The optionality we are providing fans also creates complexity, which requires good software.

Q: What feedback have you gotten so far from college clients?

Giles: So on average, we end up growing the volume that we do for our college customers by about 350% year over year. And so when we’re on our third go-around, we’re simultaneously expanding our capabilities, which helps to, but we find that, you know, they’ll launch in this instance, like, South Carolina launched a football pass in year one. That’s like a trial. And they are like, ‘That worked great. We’d like to expand it to men’s basketball and women’s basketball.’ And then we got a call from them right before baseball season, ‘Hey, we run this voucher program on a ticketing system.

We get tons of complaints that it’s a weird process, and we have to email them a bunch of like coupon codes.’ … It just doesn’t feel like a membership, where on our application it’s two clicks to find your seats. And then you just click ‘reserve.’

We keep track of everything in front of you, you can see how many vouchers you have left. And so we find that as teams get more and more educated on the breadth of things we can handle for them, they start calling us more and more. ‘Hey, can you do our holiday packs?’ And so our goal is just to be able to say yes to a lot of that … So just looking at the revenue that colleges did on our platform in our first year versus our second year … so it’s not because we grew the number of teams, it’s actually each team on average was 350% more than they were the prior year.

Q: What’s the most common question teams – pro or college – ask you?

Giles:  It is really about understanding the difference between a direct reservation and a ticket, and how does that work? Until FanRally, we didn’t even ask ourselves, ‘Should we sell tickets?’ It was, you are the VP of tickets. Try to sell as many tickets as you can. And so now we’re coming to them and saying, ‘Hey, there’s actually a better way to monetize your seats that gives you full control of your inventory. You don’t have a bunch of dead inventory and no-shows because they bought it six months ago and now their schedule is changing. And then we’ve also realized that just like a gym, fans subscribe, and then they come some of the time. And so the yield we’re able to produce … In other words, what is the average seat going for in a FanRally membership versus a traditional season ticket [package] is actually better for the team as well, because that no-show rate flows back into available inventory because they haven’t made the reservation or they’ve returned it, versus the traditional model, which that no-show rate is just an empty seat that you can do nothing with.

Q: What model is most in demand now?

Giles: From a college standpoint, what we get called the most about is helping teams develop premium bank products, so you can invest in an entire season a certain dollar amount, and you can use it for football, basketball, whatever you want. That’s certainly our highest-demand product. But we’re doing a lot of all-events passes, sport-specific passes, and even student tickets. It’s the perfect demographic for our platform. And then we can help them and say, ‘Hey, give all of your students for free if that’s your policy, or for some highly reduced price, access to reserve free seats for every event.’ And then you’re only fulfilling those seats where the member, or the student in this case, actually goes in and reserves.