Millennials want experiences, not things, Eventbrite’s Marino Fresch

By @SimonCocking

Irish Tech News caught up with Marino Fresch @mfresch

Eventbrite’s country manager and Head of Marketing Marketing for both Ireland  and the UK. Evenbrite finds themselves in an interesting place as more and more people seek more quality experiences, and potentially less acquisitive life styles.

Free Tickets To Holi Festival! – Eventbrite Blog http://t.co/D56j9LNK76 via @EventbriteIE

— Marino Fresch (@mfresch) May 15, 2015

Marino was positive about the scope for Eventbrite to continue to grow and offer ticketing and events to a wider range of both the Dublin community, and other cities and the rest of Ireland. In the tech area, Eventbrite has become a heavily used option over the last 3 or 4 years. However music, food and other areas all offer new opportunities for potential event organisers to use their service.

Millennials don’t want to buy things, they want experiences 

It was an interesting interview because in many ways Eventbrite are in the business of offering people an alternative to ‘shopping as a leisure activity’. Naturally they’d still like to you buy tickets for events through their site, but at the same time they remain committed to hosting free events as well. Fresch was also keen to point out that the free events offered by Eventbrite are not of a different ‘freemium’ level of quality, but have all the same quality as paid for events. 60% of all events hosted by Eventbrite are free ones.

Eventbrite are a global marketplace for live experiences to help people to find and create events. The platform is self-service and has helped event organisers of all kinds sell more tickets through robust technology and promotional tools, totalling around €2.8 billion in gross ticket sales since founded in San Francisco in 2006. More than 200 million tickets have been processed on the platform, and in 2014 alone, Eventbrite processed €900 million in gross ticket sales for attendees in more than 180 countries.

More mud, more zombies

Eventbrite is a strong position to be able to detect emerging trends slightly ahead of the curve. You may have become aware of the increasing trend for muddier, more zombified running events. Naturally if you are the one issuing the tickets, you will quickly know what’s hot and what’s not. As a company receiving large amounts of very interesting data about human behaviour, this puts them in a great place to give realtime feedback to event organisers.

FOMO drives behaviour too

Among the younger ‘millenial’ young emerging adults, Eventbrite’s research suggests that the desire for experiences over material goods is even greater than in previous generations. Sometimes this may even be driven by FOMO (fear of missing out) possibly more than being 100% interested in the event itself. However the ability to document and ‘proof’ their attendance there, through their own particular social media of choice, does often give enhanced social standing. ‘I was so, like, there you know! You saw my selfie for goodness sake…’

The inspiration of the long distance running man

For fun, though perhaps taking it to greater levels than many of us would, Marino, when time permits, is an ultra distance runner. Covering distances of 50, 100 and even 145 miles. While this is about 143 more miles than many of us would like to run, Marino compared it to running Eventbrite successfully. The vital importance of taking care of the little things before they escalate into much larger issues.

Good mobile options for users

Mobile solutions for both event organizers (the free app turns your smartphone into a ticketscanner and an iPad into a box office) and attendees (free attendee app stores your digital tickets and allows anyone on the go to find and buy tickets for events).

https://twitter.com/EventbriteIE/status/596313003420753920

Eventbrite going well in Ireland

The Dublin office opened early last year, with a significant impact on business. Currently there are over 2000 events of all kinds on the platform, roughly half in Dublin, with several million Euros of tickets processed since setting up in the Digital Hub last year. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the year brings, but it is likely that we may continue to find that an increasing number of the events tickets are issued by Eventbrite.