Live Nation Taps Facebook’s Atlas to Drive Attendance for Global Concert Tour

Event marketers face a growing challenge as their target audiences are spending more and more time with mobile, and engaging across multiple devices, for example, opening an email on their smartphone, and then switching to desktop to get more info and/or make a purchase.

The challenge stems from the fact that cookies don’t work well on mobile, which limits your ability to target and track mobile and cross-device ad campaigns i.e. marketing to the same person across multiple desktop and mobile devices.

Live Nation addressed this challenge for the promotion of Madonna’s upcoming 2015 “Rebel Heart” concert tour by using Facebook’s Atlas to deploy a “mobile-heavy”, cross device campaign, which included search, social and programmatic/video display channels, according to a blog post by Atlas head of marketing Jennifer Kattula.

Atlas uses “people-based marketing”, moving beyond just using cookies by leveraging Facebook’s proprietary technology and data, which enabled Live Nation to serve ads “to the right audience on the right device at the right time.”

The ability to leverage a “unifying, people-based key” rather than just cookies also enabled Live Nation to “accurately measure the end result to inform future buys as well”.

Consider these two key attribution points from the blog post…

“A post-campaign analysis revealed that by using Atlas, Live Nation was able to tie a whopping 66% increase in purchases back to mobile – a sales attribution that would’ve otherwise slipped through the cracks using cookies alone.”

Live Nation SVP of Digital Media Julia Heiser said that “popular dating app Grindr – a 100%-mobile environment with no non-app components – displayed global broadcast messages and banner ads promoting the tour launch and ultimately finished as one of the campaign’s top-performing channels. If Live Nation had served those ads using a standard third-party platform instead of Atlas, the final analysis would’ve reported zero tickets sold.”

This campaign is a great example of why moving forward you will want to evolve your targeting and tracking capabilities to keep up with your audiences’ changing media habits.

Posted on July 29, 2015