You know those two companies you most associate with incompetence, miserable user experiences, and hostility toward their customers? Well, they're going to join forces.
Per a report from Sportico, Fanatics and Ticketmaster have announced a partnership that will allow the former to sell tickets and the latter to sell merch. And they said it wasn't possible to improve on perfection. I know I can't wait to get my affordable tickets to the intended event on the correct date from the Fanatics Ticket Marketplace, "where users on the Fanatics app can now buy resale tickets alongside apparel, merchandise, trading cards and collectibles." Sounds great!
I also can't wait to see how Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin and Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino navigate this new frontier in customer service. As you read this quote via Sportico, think about what it actually means, which is that the experience of buying tickets to go to a baseball game might turn into an adventure you can't possibly imagine:
“When you look at the market position that Ticketmaster has built—we wanted to make sure we had as broad and comprehensive an offering as we could,” Fanatics chief strategy and growth officer Tucker Kain said in an interview. “Plus, having Ticketmaster/Live Nation as a potential partner across a number of things, like distributing our merchandise [through them], there’s an opportunity to start here a build a bigger partnership over time.”
These days, it's important that as many of my potential experiences as possible be clumsily crammed into a single location, like a 7-in-1 gel douche but for misprinted jerseys. If we're lucky, maybe this is just the start of a true conglomerate. Is the TSA available for a collaboration? I'd love to have Kevin Hart promote "FanCheck" to me before I board a Boeing jet. Get an odds boost on your next Bank of America parlay if you correctly guess whether or not it's a "laptops out" day!
