Breaking new audience and ticketing records for cricket’s showpiece

Challenge

As major sporting festivals that take over a host city or country for weeks or months, international sports events are a perfect vehicle to take a sport to a new audience. However, with the cost of hosting a major event significant, a host governing body or event promotor’s event strategy needs to balance an event attracting a new audience with producing strong commercial income.  

Insight

The ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 (CWC19) had an ambition to deliver ‘the greatest ever celebration’ for the sport – using international cricket’s showpiece as a vehicle to support cricket’s ambitions to grow the game. However, with eventday revenue underpinning the cost of hosting the event, achieving this ambition would require a ticketing strategy that both attract from fans from outside cricket’s ‘traditional’ fanbase and deliver a strong return from ticket sales. 

Solution

The ICC and host partner ECB had a vast amount of data around cricket fans in the UK, including from the hosting of the ICC Champions Trophy and ICC Women’s World Cup in 2017. By overlaying this with new, relevant demographic and attitudinal data from the target UK audience, the ICC could create a data-driven ticket pricing, on-sale and marketing strategy that would make CWC19 the most diverse cricket tournament of all-time – while also maximising ticketing revenue.  

Action

To understand CWC19 demand and forecast fan behaviour, Two Circles used its data analytics technology to produce a demographic, behavioural and attitudinal customer analysis of all historic transactional data held by ICC from global tournaments held in the UK and relevant historic international and county cricket played in the UK. This was overlayed with Two Circles’ proprietary ticketing and UK leisure industry benchmarks to identify the audience CWC19 could reach to grow outside a ‘traditional’ cricket bubble. 

This insight was used to create audience segments that informed ticket-price tiers, and a two-ballot strategy that would drive demand from the Cricket Family, in addition to demand – and data capture – from growth audiences. 

Segmentation analysis informed all creative assets, timings and audience (split by demographics, attitudes and interest) for targeted marketing communications and media-buying decisions, while data analytics technology gave insight into the success of messaging, platforms used, and audience segments targeted – enabling real-time marketing optimisation.  

The resulting ticket on-sale campaign helped CWC19 become the most diverse cricket tournament of all-time, with record numbers of attendees either new to cricket, aged under-16, female, or from the UK’s South Asian community. And this was done without negatively impacting ticketing revenue – CWC19 breaking the ticketing revenue record for a cricket tournament 10 months out from tournament start.