My new column is out in The Drum:
My Oasis ticket journey proves marketers are half the world away on attribution
The Promotion Fix columnist Samuel Scott spent a full day getting Oasis tickets. With all that spare time, he theorized how marketers could wrongly chart his customer journey.
The chaotic rollout of Oasis reunion tickets on Ticketmaster made me realize why attribution is meaningless… no one buys anything after seeing one ad for something one time.
On the morning of August 31, huge coffee in hand, I camped at my computer. I closed all tabs in Google Chrome, cleared all caches, and restarted my computer to ensure a smooth operation.
On Ticketmaster UK I opened 17 tabs – one for each of the shows in the UK and Ireland. I refreshed each tab in order every few minutes. Soon, two tabs for the shows in Dublin opened more than an hour early. I clicked to enter the waiting room.
I was in the queue but I didn’t stand a chance.
Over the day, I kept refreshing the other tabs. And poured more coffee. Some queues crashed. But then I got in. The queues for London and Edinburgh were smaller.
Perhaps the Britpop gods smiled down upon me. The queue for the August 9 show in Edinburgh was plummeting by around 500 people a minute. Soon I was in to browse tickets that may or may not be available.
I selected a VIP package with a pre-show party, fan memorabilia, and a priority standing area near the stage because YOLO! (I hate myself for using that acronym.)
The site hung up and would not complete the order. I selected the package again. The selected package was unavailable, so I had to spend even more on a better package. The website hung up again.
I tried again.
And then, success! I almost lost my will to YOLO.
Then I wondered, “What’s the right way to pronounce “Edinburgh”? [Editor’s note: Ehdinbru, not Edenburg].
But the whole time, I was wondering what Ticketmaster would think of this insane process and how it would attribute the sale.
On August 31, I “started” my “customer journey” by going to Oasis’ Twitter, I knew that they would share the official link to buy tickets. From the link, I went to a landing page, and a click on the landing page took me to Ticketmaster UK. Here was the path. Note that the landing page in the middle had several tracking codes from Google, Facebook, and Twitter for attribution purposes.
Now, this attribution tells the route that I took to make a purchase that I had already decided that I would make. It does not tell anything about what caused me to want to make the purchase in the first place.