The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry.
Name: Greg Foster
Company: Experience
Position: Chief Executive Officer
Greg Foster has spent his entire career as an entrepreneur or an investor and advisor to early stage businesses and high growth companies. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Experience, a mobile app company that helps deliver unique experiences for fans. Foster’s areas of expertise include technology, digital media and marketing automation. Most recently, he was the Founder and CEO of BrightWhistle, the first marketing automation platform built exclusively for the healthcare industry. The company raised nearly $7 million in capital and was acquired by Influence Health in 2015.
Foster also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Chrysalis Ventures and as a Partner at Noro-Moseley Partners, focused on early stage digital media investing. He was responsible for Corporate Development at Turner Broadcasting after selling his first start-up, Southern Direct, to TBS in 2005.
Prior to Turner, he was a member of the management teams for both iXL and Silverpop, two Atlanta-based startups. IBM acquired Silverpop in 2015. He holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology along with an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
1) What utilization of Experience’s technology in sports has recently blown you away and why?
An NBA franchise on the west coast recently received a foot of snow. They are current partners and used our technology that allows season ticket holders to return their tickets for future value and also gives the team the ability to re-sell those tickets. Due to the weather, hundreds of tickets were returned. However, with our Experience Pass technology, the team was able to re-sell those same tickets, on the same day, and within a few hours. Hundreds of fans were able to get last-minute tickets in order to see a high profile opponent coming to town. What’s more, over half of these fans paid to upgrade their seat once in venue. All in, the home team brought in significant revenue they would have never seen without our products. That is not “incremental” but rather “fundamental” to how a team can turn a potential disaster into a huge success.
2) If you had to invest in one technology that would alter the sports landscape, what would it be and why?
The convergence of at-home viewing and ticket purchasing has to emerge, whether through the 10-foot experience (think IPTV) or one or two foot experiences — people will drop what they are doing on their laptop or mobile device and answer a call to action to get down to the arena or stadium.
3) If money were no object, what technology would you build or buy to help you do your job better?
I would build an all-encompassing index service for live events that is populated on a real-time basis and could serve up the necessary ancillary requirements to get me to the event.
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4) As a sports fan, what sports-related service, app, product, etc., could you not live without and why?
I always want to see the vantage point from my seat in-venue and be able to upgrade accordingly. This has become table stakes in the space Experience occupies, and I personally could not live without it.
5) If you had to project 10 years into the future, how will most fans purchase tickets to their favorite sports and entertainment events?
It has taken more than 10 years for a critical mass of airline customers to adopt mobile devices as a means to check in to a flight (and I would estimate that number is still somewhere less than 1/3 of consumers). The mobile phone will hit a tipping point (50 percent or more) in 10 years and will be the default means by which fans enter live sports and music events.
6) Give us your bold prediction about a form of technology that will be integral to purchasing tickets to sporting events over the next 12 months and why?
I believe the major ticketing companies will drive important innovation in the use of location-based services to enable teams and venues to build a deeper understanding of consumers and fans.