Physical Tickets in a Ticketless World

While a few athletic departments were already moving in this direction, COVID-19 shoved hundreds of schools into fully embracing a digital-only ticketing environment. Handling all the ticketing on apps helped give schools better marketing data on consumers that is better aligned with the habits and expectations of younger consumers and, eventually, helped simplify game-day operations. Even mid- and low-major programs moved to adopt ticketless systems over the last few years.

But there are a few problems with the system. One of the thornier ones? Some folks still actually want the ticket.

Katie Wisdom, assistant athletics director of ticket operations at Ole Miss, said the program’s fans had a similar story. The department moved to mobile ticketing after the pandemic and is now “about 85 percent, 90 percent mobile with our students being completely mobile. Their tickets don’t even have barcodes anymore.”

However, not every Ole Miss ticketholder is a 20-year old smartphone native, and Wisdom saw that some fans still wanted a physical ticket experience. Ole Miss offers a “print at home” option, she said, but while that could provide a functional physical ticket, it was not exactly the sort of thing one would want to keep as a memento. It is just black ink on printer paper.

Maybe you are like me. I have a huge box in my office closet full of binder after binder of sports trading cards, the collection I kept from when I was a fifth-grade boy. Wedged in those sleeves, behind mountains of Ki-Jana Carter rookie cards (my original retirement plan, which, sadly, does not look great), are ticket stubs from baseball games I attended with my parents, early concert tickets and even a few stubs from movie tickets.

I did not keep them because I hoped to flip them someday — not sure if there is much of a collector’s market for random Cleveland games from the late 1990s — but because they were memorable to me.

Wisdom told me that Ole Miss has fans just like that, who want to commemorate any game they attend, even if that is hypothetically a baseball game against a Southland opponent. Ole Miss now offers an option to print out a game ticket (for a modest fee) at the game, so if something unexpected happens or if families just want to remember a game for their own reasons, they can do that.

Wisdom also told me that many fans had specifically reached out about wanting a higher-touch physical collectible around major games. The department now creates a physical ticket collectible option for season-ticket packages, as well, complete with glossy art from the school’s marketing department.

There are a few companies that produce this sort of work. Ole Miss worked with a firm called WW&L based in Fort Smith. WW&L has been in business since the 1800s, producing not only physical event tickets but also printing for parking passes, media credentials and more. Another firm, Ticket Time Machine, mostly works in the music industry but also with professional hockey, the Florida Gators and others.

I spoke to folks at both companies, and with a few operators at the school level, and I am not aware of any college program that has suddenly turned commemorative physical tickets into an eight-figure revenue operation or anything. This is not a magic bullet that will solve revenue problems, but if done with intentionality, it can be another tool to drive revenue in multiple ways.

Wisdom told me that while sales have been very strong this year, revenue was modest for the first few years that Ole Miss offered physical ticket printing, but with the success of the Ole Miss football team this season, the school is hopeful about not just the revenue growth potential but the potential to use the tickets to drive other forms of engagement.

If Ole Miss were to hypothetically win a big game on the road, well, the school can still print commemorative tickets for the event, and that offering can go in the fundraising email that the department would otherwise send out to try and capitalize on the momentum. Other schools told me they could see physical ticket printing potentially being used as a fundraiser for a collective or NIL activity (look, these tickets were signed by the guy that caught the touchdown pass!), or as lagniappe to help encourage other donor engagement or activity.

Of course, if the department is struggling to sell tickets at all, selling commemorative mock-ups could be a moot point, but if fans are filling seats, perhaps this is a strategy other schools could consider.

Matt Brown is the author of the Extra Points newsletter, which tackles subjects related to the business side of college sports and is available at extrapointsmb.com. This piece first appeared in the newsletter.