A Techstars Boston alum that dubs itself the "lovechild of Ticketmaster and Palantir" has been acquired by one of its "parents" — if you want to keep running with that metaphor.
TicketWeb, a self-service ticketing platform owned by Ticketmaster, announced on Thursday that it has acquired Strobe Labs. The startup, which was part of the Techstars Boston 2016 cohort, is a marketing platform that "give venues and promoters a simple and powerful way to learn more about their fans and engage them more effectively."
Alex Oberg, co-founder and CEO of Strobe Labs, told BostInno in an email that he couldn't disclose the financial terms of the deal. The startup had raised $250,000 from investors.
"Can’t disclose price but I think everyone (the team, Techstars etc) was happy," he said.
"We think it instantly becomes a leading marketing tool in live music to help clubs connect with their fans."
Strobe's technology will be directly integrated into TicketWeb, which will provide venue clients with the ability to search customer profiles that combine ticketing purchase history and social media activity, build fan lists for direct marketing and email campaigns, and post highly targeted ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and Spotify. When the integration is completed, Strobe's tools will be expanded to all of Ticketmaster and its clients.
“Strobe’s platform completely simplifies the complex process of fan segmentation and ad creation and placement,” Matt Shearer, the head of Ticketmaster's small venues and clubs for North America, said in a statement. “When you combine that with Ticketmaster’s massive reach, we think it instantly becomes a leading marketing tool in live music to help clubs connect with their fans and find incremental audiences.”
In an interview with BostInno from May 2016, Oberg said Strobe has been able to boost a music venue's online pre-sales anywhere from 40-400 percent. “There’s been a lot of talk about big data versus smart data and focusing on the smart data and getting our customers to use it has been one of the challenges that we’ve figured out,” he said.
