 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Oracle Park in San Francisco on the historic McCubby Co. We're excited to be here. They're moving a lot of dirt, I think, downstairs, but we're at a very cool event. It's called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day and we're excited to have our next guest. He's Todd Sims, SVP of Corporate Development from AXIS. Todd, great to see you. Great to be here, thank you. Absolutely, so for people that aren't familiar with AXIS, give us kind of the company overview. Sure, we're a global ticketing company. We were launched out of a global sports and entertainment company called AEG in 2011 and we serve the live entertainment market and ticketing. Excellent, all over the world, all different types of events. AEG is a global company. They run venues worldwide and we serve them as well as third party clients. Okay, great, so we're here at Sports Tech Tokyo. It's a little bit different type of an organization, kind of an incubator, not really an incubator, kind of an early association, but certainly a community. Why are you guys here? What does this organization mean to you? Why is it important? Yeah, it's really important. We launched our ticketing service in Tokyo last year and that's a market that we love. It's a vibrant, large market with super passionate fans, both on the sports side and on the music side. What it really needs is more of an ecosystem. It can't just be a new innovative ticketing platform. It needs all the bells and whistles around it to really innovate the fan experience and that's what these startups are doing. I just love this job, because you think of many industries, if you're not familiar with them, it seems really simple on the outside and like everything once you get under the covers is a lot more going on. So from the outside, look it in, a ticket is a ticket. What's the innovation in tickets? What's different about somebody in Japan buying a ticket to watch a baseball game than somebody buying a ticket to come here tonight? Well, I'll talk a little bit about what we're bringing to Tokyo and what we've brought to our platform of clients here in the States as well as in Europe and that's really a digital ID based ticketing system. So when you walk into the Staples Center at LA Live in Los Angeles, that thing that's getting scanned is not a ticket. It's an identity, it's you and what's being reviewed is whether you have access to that building on that night or not. So what that allows for is full data around the customer base. Every president of every team wants to know two things. They want to know who's in their building and they want to have some control whether it's economic control or otherwise on the secondary market. Our digital ID ticketing system enables both of that and that's kind of the innovation that we're bringing to the Tokyo market. But I would imagine when you say, you know, it's me. You know, the opportunities are way beyond that because now, you know, one of my preferences how often do I come? What kind of beer do I like to drink? I mean, that just opens up a whole kind of CRM world of opportunity for this relationship between the team now and that person with that barcode. Absolutely, and that happens today but what you're missing is every time someone comes in with a paper ticket, you're really not sure who's entering the building. So that eliminates that piece of that and it gets all these teams with analytic departments to really have a full picture of their fan base. So, you know, they may have been investing in some of this and capturing 60, 70% of their who's in the building, now they have 100%. Right, and I would imagine they've been doing this for a long time with kind of their season ticket base and not necessarily knowing they're in the building but they got a lot of data on their season ticket holders. How has that, you know, changed and what can they apply there to the casual fan that maybe bought a ticket on the secondary market and is, you know, coming and sitting in the bleachers? Well, it's huge for up sales and establishing that relationship. A lot of teams, if you've, you know, just buying a single ticket off a secondary market, you're nowhere in that database. Now, because of our ID based system, those people are now prospects for either a mini pack or a season ticket package. Right, just curious how the rise of the secondary market really impacted the teams and how they think about their own ticket base. I think the first one was probably stub hub back in the day. Yeah, for sure. And it all happened kind of outside the purveyor of the leagues and kind of outside the purveyor of the teams. Luckily, they were pretty smart and figured out we need to be a piece of this. So how did that kind of evolution change the way the teams think about their fans? Well, look, I mean, teams like music promoters, they, sometimes they like the brokers getting involved because it takes risk off the table. I think teams are realizing though that a real yield management perspective on their ticket inventory to really revenue manage this appropriately, they have to take a holistic approach on their tickets. And anytime you have a segment of your ticket base where you really don't have control of pricing, distribution, all of that, it really hurts and it has an impact on your unsold primaries. So what teams are looking to do is gain more control and manage this inventory more holistically. To do that, you really need to know all the data. And again, the ID based ticketing system enables secondary sales, but at least you are tracking those sales and you know from one person to the next who sold it and who bought it. Right. I'm curious to get your perspective on the difference between if you are more entertainment focused. So, you know, the Rolling Stones were in town a couple of nights ago and it's really a one shot deal for the Rolling Stones in the Bay Area that night versus the Giants game, right? Where you're hoping that people come back over and over. Do they think of it differently or is it more, you know, Jeff, you like music, you went to the Rolling Stones last night, maybe you'll come and see somebody else tonight. Is that, is that kind of where they, no doubt sports teams are a lot smarter about their fan base. They have loyalty built in, they have got history. You know, there's variability, there's night of game and then there's weather and who's on the mound and all of those factors. But promoters are a lot more in the dark about, you know, is this an artist that, you know, how much credence can they put in the last tour they did, it's two been two years. Is that artist still going to sell appropriately or similarly than they did last time? Again, the secondary market on the music side is maybe a bigger issue because of that variability and those promoters are willing to take risk off the table. But the same thing applies in order for them to really manage and revenue manage that tour, they really need to know who's buying and grab some of that secondary economics out of the system. Right. And that's, again, what our platform enables. And that's what we're really bringing to the Tokyo market, it's really exciting. That's a great market for us. I was going to say just to close, you know, what's special about the Tokyo market either from an opportunity side or kind of a unique way in which they do things or a unique way in which the kind of the fan experiences as you look at that market. Well, it's interesting. I mean, in a culture that is so reliant on such interesting technology, these ticketing technology is actually quite old. And so we're excited to bring that. We've got great partners. Pasrivo is our partner there and they're really selling that through the Yahoo Ticketing Channel. We just signed the B League, which is the professional basketball league. We'll be rolling them out in their fall season coming up soon here. But basically, they are looking for the same things we're looking for. More data and more capturing of the secondary market and we can bring that to them. All right. Well, Todd, thanks for taking a few minutes. Of course. Pull the covers back on ticketing. A lot more going on than people think. Thank you very much. All right. He's Todd, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. The Oracle Park on the shores of McCubby Cove in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.