Atlanta company Experience seeks to be a game changer

Experience’s proprietary technology allows fans, generally through team or league apps downloaded on smartphones, to upgrade seat locations inside venues and add special privileges to game days. Particulars vary from team to team, but fans generally receive the upgrades or perks by paying a fee or redeeming season-ticket-holder loyalty points.

“The traditional ticket was completely passive,” Experience founder and chairman Tripp Rackley said in an interview at his Buckhead offices. “We have converted that into an experience where your seats are dynamic and the memories you have at the event are adaptable.”

Rackley operates in a partnership with Cox Enterprises, which last year announced it would invest $250 million in start-up technology companies, including Experience, founded by him and his team. Rackley is a board member of Cox Enterprises, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A graduate of Roswell High and Georgia Tech, Rackley, 43, is an entrepreneur perhaps best known for founding and later selling companies that pioneered in Internet and mobile banking technology. Rackley said he was drawn to the business of the sports experience because of a passion for live events and a belief that technology could help fix a ticketing mindset that seemed “100 years old.”

“Fundamentally, there’s nothing better than going to a live sporting event if you’re treated the right way,” Rackley said. “That was our No. 1 goal: How do we make everybody feel like a rock star when they go to the events?”

Through seat-upgrade programs, fans are offered the option of moving to a better seat at a lower cost than if they had bought the better ticket initially. (They are moved to unsold seats or unclaimed sold seats — Experience’s algorithms calculate when it’s safe to assume a ticket holder won’t show — or to seats vacated by other upgrades.) Through experiential add-ons, marketed as “Memories” by the Braves and Falcons, teams seek to outdo TV.

“As at-home (viewing) gets better and better and as people, particularly the younger generation, use their smartphones for more things … we want to create unique experiences that can happen at the stadium but can’t happen at home,” said Greg Beadles, the Falcons’ executive vice president in charge of finance and administration.

The Falcons have expanded their “Memories” program to all season-ticket holders. Among many options that can be reserved on the “Atlanta Falcons Mobile App” with loyalty points beginning on Thursdays before home games: access to the field during pregame player introductions, appearances on “fan cam” and the right to select stadium music.

The Braves’ offerings, available through the “At the Ballpark” app, include bobbleheads from team archives, a skip-the-line pass to the Holeman & Finch burger stand or a field pass for batting practice. Bobbleheads have been the most popular choice this season, according to the Braves. One snag with the H&F pass is that it has required getting a paper voucher. Experience officials said the plan is to change that to all mobile.

Braves executive vice president of sales and marketing Derek Schiller said about 40 percent of the team’s season-ticket holders opened the Experience technology this season and, on average, 1,000 to 1,500 ticket holders per game used it to upgrade seats.

There is significant revenue potential for teams. Nationally, on sales of seat upgrades through Experience, fans pay on average 60 percent more than for their original non-premium ticket, according to the company.

Experience’s technology generally is embedded in team or league apps or can be accessed via team URLs on mobile Web browers. The company is paid by teams for transactions completed, Rackley said. “If the team charges a fan, we get a cut of that charge. If they don’t charge the fan, then we get a transaction fee,” he said. “We don’t have any upfront fees to the teams.”

Rackley thinks the business has big potential, although he said he doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to quantify it.

“I always think about it from the innovation level: Is this a feature or is it an industry?” he said. “I believe what we are doing with Experience is an industry, not a feature.”

In addition to individual teams, the company has deals with the NFL, MLB Advanced Media, Ticketmaster and the PGA Tour. Partnerships extend beyond sports to Zoo Atlanta and concert promoter Live Nation.

The Falcons have brought Rackley, Experience president Ben Ackerman and the umbrella company for Rackley’s businesses, Kenzie Lane Innovation, into planning for the new retractable-roof stadium slated to open in 2017. The team’s senior executives meet with the company quarterly to discuss technology.

“We said to them, ‘Why don’t we come up with some really unique fan experiences for the new stadium and use the Georgia Dome as our testing ground, our sandbox?’” Beadles said.

At preseason games last month, the Falcons tested on a small scale a technology being developed by a Rackley start-up called KnowMe. The concept is to use signals from smartphones to identify season-ticket holders as they approach the stadium. When they arrive at the gate, they are identified on a screen, welcomed by name and allowed to enter without producing a ticket of any kind — rock-star treatment.

“I think we’re moving towards that,” Beadles said. “The timeline on it would be hard to say.”

Said Rackley: “Seventy thousand people at a stadium, and we want to figure out how to let them all just walk in. That’s a really hard problem, but we like that.”

The first tests, he said, “went great.”

Sports teams, historically not the fastest to innovate, have been driven to action by the increasingly attractive option of watching from home.

“I would say, yes, there has been a growing acknowledgement that teams need to worry about fans’ game-day experiences,” Rackley said. “The momentum we have built is we have showed up at the right place at the right time.”