Marion Talks Paperless

Michael Marion, venue GM and an active proponent of paperless ticketing, has a lot to say about the new way of moving ducats and how it discourages scalping. And he will say it all, live, next week.

The IAVM’s annual conference, VenueConnect, will take over the Broward County Convention Center in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., July 21-24. The conference will include everything from a fishing tournament to the new Women In Leadership Program to panels, one of which is “Fans First: Ticketing, Scalpers & the Future.”

Marion, the industry vet who runs the Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, Ark., is also president of the Fans First Coalition, which counts Live Nation, Ticketmaster, Front Line Management, Bill Silva Presents, Red Light Management and Jam Productions among its members.

The group aims to stand up for fans on issues “related to improving access to reasonably priced tickets and enhanced protection against fraudulent business practices.”

There is still a stigma about paperless ticketing, and Marion plans to put that to rest for those who attend the 11 a.m. Monday panel.

“We’ve been doing paperless ticketing for the past three and a half years at almost all our shows,” he told Pollstar. “We’ve got Brad Paisley coming up and if you looked on StubHub for him, you’ll see we have some of the smallest numbers of tickets being scalped. We don’t take all the seats in the house, but those prime seats – about 2,000 up to 4,000 tickets depending upon the configuration – we will offer as paperless. Because those are the ones the scalpers want, we have very few scalped in our building.”

Joining him will be Black Keys and Eric Church manager Fielding Logan of Q Prime, Ticketmaster COO Jared Smith and Billy Traurig, VP and general counsel for the PNC Arena in Raleigh, N.C., and the Carolina Hurricanes.

Logan is expected to discuss Church’s efforts into paperless ticketing, and Traurig is expected to address the same topic from a sports angle.

Marion expects the panel to take on at least three topics. First, how some secondary ticketing companies will manufacture websites that appear to be those for the buildings, like one that the North Little Rock venue is contending with – BoxofficeVerizonArena.com. Next, how secondary ticketing companies are introducing legislation that would prohibit paperless and Will Call-only ticketing and how to combat it.

Third, Marion plans to explain how paperless ticketing actually works. He says resistance to the technology is a combination of reluctance to change and misinformation.

“I remember when we all went from tearing tickets to scanning them with bar codes,” he said. “I remember saying, ‘This will never work. We’re going to have problems.’ We’re all resistant to something new. And of course, new things have their hiccups, but now everybody’s got a scanner and nobody cares anymore. Now we have an opportunity to go to paperless which, to me, is just another way of ticket delivery.

“And I think the scalpers will make up stuff like, with paperless the line takes longer. Well, that’s not true. I can tell you from three and a half years of this that, when one person walks up with a credit card, three or four people walk in the door. At worst, it takes the same amount of times; at best, they come in a little faster.

And [paperless opponents] will say, ‘Well, Grandma’s gotta buy a ticket and she has to be there, and what a pain that is,’ and the way the scalpers talk, Grandma’s buying every ticket we’ve ever sold. And the reality is most people buying tickets are buying them for themselves and the people they’re with, and for the few people who do have to show up, they show up, we scan the credit card, and the people come in. The scalpers want to make it sound like a difficult process, and it’s really not.

“I can tell you that, in Little Rock, Ark., paperless is just fine. We sold out Jimmy Buffett in an hour and a half, and we had 5,000 paperless tickets. Obviously, nobody was too upset.”

The panel is scheduled for the Grand Floridian B conference room.