Marketing Measurement in the “Business of Exceptions”: Helping a Global Events Business Measure What Matters

Events businesses have some unique marketing and measurement challenges. Products that are complex and expire, demand that varies significantly by audience and event, inventory that can sell out, and high-pressure marketing timescales. Measurement needs to make sense of myriad overlapping signals and drive dynamic decisions to avoid waste in a highly complex ecosystem.

Traditional marketing mix models struggle with these dynamics. Most are designed for products that have long shelf lives and consistent sales patterns. They’re not set up for nuance and variation. This “business of exceptions” needed a different approach.

Marketing challenges

With thousands of performers and shows in play, no two products are the same. Each individual product is a specific seat, to a specific event, on a specific date, in a specific venue. Which also means the products are perishable – once the event date passes, the product no longer exists.

What’s more, each event attracts a unique audience, with demand that changes depending on location, season, and even the day of the week.

The marketing cycle is short and intense. Teams might have only two weeks to put together a marketing plan for a major event launch.

Plus, demand isn’t driven only by marketing. Some events are so highly anticipated that fans clamor to buy tickets the moment they go on sale. Sometimes even before a single ad is served. For other events, demand needs to be built over time. Timing is heavily nuanced, while being critical to success. There are typically four major phases in an event’s lifecycle:

1. Pre-sale / Announcement: The window following the event announcement, prior to tickets going on sale. This can be as short as one or two weeks. Marketing here is about building anticipation and awareness.
2. On-sale: The period when the majority of tickets are sold – often within days of going on sale. Media has to work hardest here to convert awareness into purchase.
3. Continuity / Upkeep: After the rush, there’s a quieter middle phase, where ticket sales trickle in steadily. The goal here is to maintain visibility and momentum.
4. Closing: The final push as the event date approaches, designed to sell out the last remaining tickets.

Invest too early and you may saturate the market and waste spend. But invest too late, and you may miss the buying window.

The measurement challenge

When a major event is announced, there’s an immediate flurry of activity – paid media, earned media, social buzz from fans, posts from the artists, organizers and venues: thousands of overlapping signals, all happening at once. Isolating which ones actually drove ticket sales is no easy task.

It’s essential to:

1. Establish baseline demand – what ticket sales would look like without marketing. This is deceptively hard to measure when every event is unique, but it’s critical for knowing whether marketing is truly incremental.
2. Analyze audience dynamics – who is buying, when, and what’s driving their behavior varies significantly across different event types. However, generating actionable insights from individual events becomes impractical at scale. Instead, the key is finding where commonalities exist and how patterns shift between different event profiles.
3. Provide timing and pacing guidance – how to allocate budgets differently across the announcement phase, on-sale period, and closing push, incorporating the different objectives that each phase has.
4. Equip teams with scenario planning capabilities – a way to ask “what if” questions and adjust course quickly.

The ultimate goal was to take the guesswork out of planning and customize every event strategy. A one-size-fits-all template wouldn’t make the grade.

Solving for complexity

Our approach needed to capture all those nuances to help the brand pinpoint exactly when to ramp up spend, when to hold back, and how to pace investments so they were aligned with natural demand patterns. The level of complexity meant we needed to build a process that could be both highly customized to the event and nimble enough to work within their tight windows.

The solution was built on three key principles: simplification, alignment to business processes, and forecastability.

• Simplification: We clustered events into meaningful groups to find common patterns across thousands of events. Clusters needed to be based on factors that the teams would know in advance of the event series (such as historic popularity metrics, capacity size of venue, genre, etc.)
• Alignment with business processes: The results delivered fast-start blueprints that marketing teams could immediately implement when planning new event series.
• Forecastability: We built event-level models that could rapidly iterate through different simulated media plans and deliver optimal tactical recommendations. This capability unlocked a real-time marketing decision engine to test scenarios, analyze projected returns, and guide budget allocation decisions for the business.

Key learnings

Several impactful insights came out of the work:

• Baseline demand was solved for successfully, using predictive leading indicators that give the business much more confidence in forecasting.
• Marketing performance was confirmed to vary significantly across event clusters, validating the need for tailored strategies and segmented forecasting approaches.
• It was observed that incrementality peaks in the on-sale phase, leveraging the momentum from tickets going live and strong base demand, giving clear direction on where to concentrate spend for maximum ROI. Post-on sale, incrementality patterns differ by cluster, demanding nuanced tactical approaches.
• Closing phase requires surgical precision – concentrated spend in a compressed window to fill capacity means carefully selecting channels that generate returns without saturating the market. Similar to other “expiry” businesses, such as hotel rooms or airlines, the nearer to the date you get, the more it is about filling the venue than ROI maximization, provided returns remain above breakeven.

By clustering events, solving for baseline demand, and aligning insights to the objectives of each phase, we delivered a scalable framework that transforms how the business approaches event marketing, while accounting for the uniqueness of each event.

Cluster-level blueprints provided clear starting points of best practices and opportunities for new events, while the simulation capability allowed teams to quickly iterate through different scenarios and optimize tactically from on-sale through to close.

There is now a much more structured and data-driven approach to planning. Moving the business from instinctive responses to truly optimizing their marketing activity means it now has the confidence to adjust strategy for each event cluster, and invest where it will truly make a difference. They are now fully able to handle the “business of exceptions”.