April 1, 2016 - With hundreds of ticketing systems out there, event ticketing has become a commodity. That is why ticketing providers will say just about anything to get your business.

Here are five marketing-related selling points that casinos should be wary of:

1. EVENT DISCOVERY: More customers will discover a casino’s events on the ticketing company’s portal page -In theory, this makes sense. But in practice, this is rarely the case. In the old days, when there were only a few online ticketing companies in existence, most events could be found on a small handful of sites. But today, with hundreds of ticketing companies in operation, event listings are highly fragmented as ticketing providers are not willing to list events being sold on competing systems. So customers are far more likely to discover events through event listing consolidators such as Songkick and BandsInTown rather than from a ticketing provider’s website.

2. CUSTOMER DATABASE: The casino will be able to tap into a ticketing company’s customer database – In 20 years of working with casinos, Yapsody has yet to encounter a casino that doesn’t already have an extensive customer database that is far more demographically targeted than that of a ticketing provider. In reality, a casino’s database is probably more valuable to a ticketing provider than a ticketing provider’s database is to a casino. Nevertheless, ticketing providers rarely, if ever, give presenters unfettered access to their customer databases. So this “perk” is generally overrated.

3. EMAIL BLASTS: The ticketing company will send email blasts to its customer base to promote the casino’s events – While a ticketing company may in fact do this, a casino’s events generally end up in an email buried among a long laundry list of competing events. So for example, if a casino’s event were to appear within a list of 30 events, one must question the likelihood that a customer will select the casino’s event over the 29 alternatives. So while inclusion in such email blasts may be perceived to have high value, in actuality, the value is very low.

4. SHARING TOOLS: The ticketing company has great social media tools for customers to share events – First of all, virtually every ticketing system today has social media sharing tools, and casinos should stay away from the few that don’t. That aside, on Yapsody ticketing, we have found that the 40+ age group that casinos predominantly target has a fairly low propensity to use social media sharing tools, which means that the value of such tools is relatively low.

5. FACEBOOK SALES: The ticketing company has an ecommerce store on Facebook – While many ecommerce industry experts believe that Facebook has the potential to become a major ecommerce hub for online retailers, they also agree that Facebook still has a long way to go to achieve this. But what we do know is that Facebook is a great platform for marketing events and then sending people to the ticketing company’s website for the purchase. And customers are no less likely to purchase tickets simply because they may not be able to do it on the Facebook website itself. Ultimately, the ability to sell event tickets on Facebook is a nice sales gimmick, but it has no practical value in the current Facebook environment, which is why very few online retailers actually sell merchandise on Facebook. While there may be a few ticketing companies experimenting with Facebook sales right now, there is no doubt that if and when Facebook proves to be a viable sales outlet, all ticketing companies will be jumping on the bandwagon.

So for those casinos who are considering using an expensive ticketing system, it is important to put providers’ marketing claims in perspective and separate perceived value, or hype, from actual value. Ultimately, if a ticketing company is confident that these factors would materially increase sales, then it should also be willing to guarantee a casino’s sales without hesitation.