Why Smarter Segmentation Sells More Seats - with Lukas Mikkel Hansen, Co-founder of Playmakers

With the FIFA World Cup heading to North America next summer, we're diving into a transatlantic comparison in this episode of Don't Forget your Tickets. Today, we'll discuss ticketing strategies, hand-engagement, and the digital divide between the two continents with Lucas Mikkel Hansen of Playmakers. What can European fans expect from the US market, and what lessons can each side learn from each other? Let's hear what Lucas has to say. Welcome to another episode of Don't Forget your Tickets, the podcast that shines a light on the people shaping the ticketing, commercial, and storytelling landscape in sports. In our industry, we often celebrate seasoned veterans and established leaders, but it's just as important to recognize the next generation of innovators, the ambitious young minds who are challenging the status quo. Today, we are shining light on one of those bright talents. August is Lucas Mikkel Hansen, co-founder of Playmakers, a company helping sports club on both sides of the Atlantic to get the most out of their fan data. While his career is still in his early stages, his ambitions and impact are already making waves. Now based in the US, Lucas has a unique vantage point on the differences between European and American sports culture. And this is exactly what we will be discussing today, so welcome, Lucas, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you, Karl. Thanks a lot. What an intro. A huge pleasure to be on the podcast. I'm a big fan of the concept and I've listened to many of the episodes myself. Isn't that normally how you should be introduced to Lucas? I'm just saying, that should be your elevator pitch. Yeah, it's great. Very good. So tell us a little bit about your background, Lucas. I mean, how did you end up in the sports industry, and how did you end up in Playmakers? Yeah, the story, basically. Sure. Yeah, it's just that my name is Lucas Hansen, most Danish name out there, I guess. I just turned 27. I'm born and raised in Copenhagen, where I did my bachelor's and the master's as well at Copenhagen Business School. I did my bachelor's thesis back then about the upcoming World Cup in Qatar and wrote about bad publicity that the tournament faced and whether that's referred onto the sponsors of the tournament. So it's quite an interesting area and my academic introduction to the sports industry. Then I did my master's thesis a couple years later about fan data and the sort of adoption of the fan-facing digital tools in the commercial departments of football clubs. And there I got to interview a long list, very interesting people in the sports scene. And then I moved from a self-consolving, quite corporate job into sports for the first time. I started by joining a Copenhagen-based sports tech startup, which is called Fluff Sports, and they had developed a platform for sponsorship tracking that we sold to clubs and sponsors. And I got to be involved with many areas of the commercial side of that business and ended up leading most of the sales of the sponsors side in the Nordic countries. Yeah. And then by the end of 2024, I scaled down my hours and took on a freelancing consulting role. Then I worked a couple of different clients. One of them was PlayMegas. That was just been founded by then. And then soon after that, I realized that this company had huge potential. And then this September, I scaled it to North America and moved to New York with PlayMegas. And then to try and put, I guess, somewhat simple what we do is that we helped sports organizations utilize all the fan data that they had. And then also communicate better to the fans. So we realized that most sports clubs, apart from maybe the leading clubs of the biggest leagues, they all have the same challenge. They have plenty of cool tech and tools, but they just don't have enough manpower to use them to the fullest. The same goes with all the data that is stuck across multiple systems. And they don't have the time to do the integrations, actually put the data to use. That just means that they don't really segment their communications. That means a lot of clubs send out maybe one or two emails saying, hey, we have a game on Friday or Saturday, please swing by. That's regardless. If you've been a seasoned ticket holder for years, if it's your first game, if you're a student, family, you'd just get that one or two generic messages. And there's just all down to a lack of resources and a marketing department which has so much stuff going on all the time. Very good. No, I agree. I mean, time is precious for these clubs, right? Exactly. But what sports are you working towards? I'm going to ask you a little bit about the move to the New York afterwards. And obviously the American market versus there. But before we go into that, can you explain a little bit more on the core of what you're doing? Yeah. I think that what we're coming in is that we integrate all the data sources that clubs have. We make sure that the data that you as a club can get from your fan shop, your ticketing system, your fan app, your M and so on can be actually used. And oftentimes, actually, we don't bring in new tools for the clubs. We just make sure that they use most of what they already had. And that's where it really makes a difference to the clubs is that we do it on a continuous basis, that we do all the emails that they send out to those newly defined segments. I mean that fans will get relevant messages and offers from the club. That means that families will be communicated oftentimes to a bit earlier than the student would because students often decide on buying tickets closer to game day later in the process. And recent ticket buyers are getting pushed tickets in the emails, which season ticket holders want, because they already have a ticket. So many clubs they send out to season ticket holders. Hey, remember to buy a ticket for the next game, even though all data shows that they already have a ticket. But I just give us a low high in your fruits here, Lucas, right, for our listeners, right? The listeners of this podcast are really great ticketing managers, very often, right? So let's make them a little bit better. So one thing I heard is that between the games, I guess it's depending on if you win or lose. So how many emails should a fan really get before they buy a ticket? Do you have any date on that or how many should the ticket manager send out to nudge to get a ticket for the next game? I think it's tough to put one number to it. But the general idea is that if you send out relevant communication, then you can get away with sending so much more. If you get a couple of emails as a fans throughout the season, that it's just strictly straight up not for you, nothing that you've asked for, then you can get away with sending less communication. So I think a lot of teams could get away with sending more as long as it's somewhat relevant for the fan. The amount of emails that I've gotten that pushes some sort of children closing or something that is just straight up not at all relevant for me, because I don't have children. It's crazy. Well, I guess we know in data that sometimes they have so much data that they know you're having kids before you even know yourself, but I guess that's not the case with the football clubs, I suppose. But maybe we'll get there one day. All right. So you're talking about clubs. Are we talking football? Are we talking handball? Hockey? What are we talking about with us? Yeah, the concept that we've developed is useful in all sports that has fans and a place to play, basically. Old-speak tennis sports. But I think we have our niche in the football space that's where we started a year ago back in Denmark. And then we worked with a couple handball teams because that's a huge sport in Denmark. We have the handball league as well. So for now, it's mainly football and handball, but we're very keen on trying it out in different sports as the concept wouldn't change much. Where do you see most innovation? What sports? Because I hear that the hockey clubs, for example, are super innovative. But what do you hear? What do you hear about your experience with that? Yeah. That's a good question. I think in Denmark, at least, hockey clubs are quite far behind and I'm not that into hockey. So I wouldn't be able to tell. I think that generally a lot of newer, born clubs, so younger clubs are very good. They don't have all the ways that things usually are done as a bias towards not innovating. So I think they have a huge advantage. And what about markets then? I guess you moved to the US, Lucas. Can you tell us a little bit of why you did the marketing Europe? It should be big enough, right? But you decided to go for definitely a bigger market. So why did you do that? And what's the core differences between the two markets? I guess the move was motivated by the goal of us to explore whether the problems, which found to be the same across so many European teams, also a person in the US, which, you say, is just everything is bigger and they just do sports on another level. It's just not always in a better way, it's just a different way. And I guess we wanted to get a better understanding of the commercial engine running in clubs of different leagues in different parts of the world, which includes the US. I did a quite fun experiment and I did some data gathering and I've signed up to receive communications from more than 800 clubs, I think from all over the world, where I just signed up to receive communications and newsletters. And we have a database now of thousands and thousands of emails. And I tell you the amount of emails that just been set up in a way that I really doubt if they convert anything at all. I think it's just a case of small tweaks like in your communications, include a link or fans to buy tickets, shorten the email a bit, no one wants to read through 10 pages of everything at once. And that's very true in the US as well. That's what we set out to help clubs do and they're going to scale to the US as well. Do you see anyone doing it particularly well, anyone we should follow that provides a good example? There's one club over here in a league that's similar to the NLS, but not the NLS, that's called the USL out of Sicily, and they play out of Portland a bit more from where I am in New York. And what they're doing is really great. I think that people should have a look at it also from just a purely branding perspective. They are doing some quite cool stuff. They call the Portland hearts behind. The American clubs tend to have funny names, but yeah, they're doing things very cool stuff. So Lucas, you mentioned that clubs on both of the continents, they have plenty of tech, but very often lack of time and also people to use it in an efficient way. Can you tell us a little bit about that and also what was the aha moment that led to play makers? Great question. I think I can actually almost answer that in what's the aha moment. And we're talking rather big top of the league clubs in Europe and the US were a marketing team of maybe one to five people. They are basically wearing enough hats to do the jobs of 10 people. And then on game day, they are being pulled into the stadium. And I guess that includes sometimes tickling people as well. They're getting pulled into the stadium to help hang up signage. They need to take photos. They need to sit in the box office. And then suddenly management wants them to build a new strategy for revenue generation. They want them to implement the latest AI or a fan engagement tool and so on. There's all while they're working across maybe 20 different platforms with no clear and easy distribution of whose response or what. And in many cases, we look through the setup and then we find with a lot of clubs a few easy integrations so that they don't need to buy a huge CDP or big sales force setup that the management otherwise would want them to know. I think it's interesting. Obviously there's huge potential when the club buys a new tech platform. They have huge ambitions, right? But very often they buy it and wants that celebration of buying it is over and they start using it. The thing stopped, right? Exactly. I wanted to discuss as well, Lucas is obviously the fan journey. If you look at the fan journey in Europe versus the fan journey in the US, very often it starts with buying a ticket. And in Europe, you go into the club's web page, you buy a ticket there. But in the US, it's a much different market with multiple suppliers and there's a huge resale culture. What do you see the pros and cons of these two models? Yeah, that's very true. And I think for me personally, it's been very confusing to buy tickets to games over here because yes, as you'll say, in many European countries, we are used to just buy tickets directly from the club. And yeah, that's how it is in Scandinavia as well. And in the US, the tickets for one game, it seems like they're often spread out across more official ticketing sellers that would be having the tickets in SeaGeek, Ticketmaster, maybe stop hub and their own website and in the app. So there's plenty of opportunities and I haven't really wrapped my head around how to best go about it. So I can't see if it might be a very simple task to American fans, but I just find it a bit overwhelming. And on the good side, I have got my hands and some quite cheap resale figures though. And that part I really like. In many European countries, we have a lot of legislation on this whole resale thing. It's a better big of a question and that's of course good and bad to it, but I think from my club's perspective, if a club is somewhat at max capacity for a game, then resale options are just great. When there's no more tickets to the soul, new revenue is subtly possible via a resale. But from a fan perspective, I think it's mainly beneficial if you can't attend a game so you can recover some of the cost or if you're lucky to get cheaper tickets due to low demand. But I think from a personal and maybe professional perspective, I do appreciate a smooth customer journey for everything really. I think in Europe and at least in Denmark, I always know how to search for tickets because I just stay away from every provider that is outside of the club's one official provider. And the rest of the smoothness of that fan journey, I think it depends on many areas outside of just the ticketing system purely is if the club offers any easy way of doing single sign-up or easy access to logging into the ticket side. If you as a fan have to download an app before being able to even get the tickets, if you can use them directly from your Apple wallet and so on, then there's the whole call calling box office set up. I think I'm sure that we'll get back to that because that's quite fun. That is interesting. We'll touch on that afterwards. But one thing is of course the fan journey when you're heading to the stadium and buying et cetera, but there are so many commercial opportunities inside the stadium as well during the game. Do you have some examples from the US on what you've seen when it comes to creating revenue opportunities based on the experience? Yeah, that's a lot. I might be biased as I've worked in marketing and sponsorships and I tend to see and analyze commercials everywhere. My girlfriend even makes one of me for turning the volume of TV when there are commercial breaks on. She just says that she doesn't realize them anymore and will I do. But yeah, I think that in American sports, it's a matter of everything is sponsored by someone. I'd love to see a big breakdown of how much sponsorship inventory or the big teams that they have. It's completely crazy. A lot of them are generally good and somewhat relevant, some of them are just too much and not fit for the contest. I went to a New York Nix game a couple weeks ago and that was quite a funny example because every time there was a dunk in the game, that led to a big dunking donut graphic popping up on the screens all over the arena. And I'm not even sure you can get donuts in Madison Square Garden, but I think that the American consumer or fan is just more used to seeing all this sponsoring by a type of commercials. And in many European countries at least, I don't think that you'd see a donut shop sponsored a sports team or sports event. But then again, it might be changing and see that we have a French league that is called league one McDonald's. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? But yeah, dunking donuts and dunks makes sense. It does. At least by the name. Yeah. An easy sell, I would say. An easy sell. So we discussed tall calling. Lucas. I always said, "Cold calling would never die." But that's maybe in a different role. But when it comes to ticket sales, maybe it will. Can you explain a little bit around that on what you've seen? Yes. It's a very funny thing to have seen from the two sides of the world basically. Definitely there are things to learn from both ways of doing it. And I think that the optimal solution for clubs is at least in America and somewhere in between the two outliers and that's at least what we aim for to playmakers with the American clubs that we work with. And the thing is that when I moved here, I was really surprised how much emphasis by the American teams are put on the box office in the clubs. And that means that the ticketing department can be quite large and they focus a lot of the ticket sales on this co-calling and just straight up calling fans to get them to buy ticket. And I've never seen that in Europe and here it's just a stable part of the process. The club, they hire people to do it, they do it and the fans are used to it. I think it would be a quite fun experiment to implement that in the European club. It would take some time getting used to for fans to be co-calling by the club. Maybe they're club, maybe not a club. And also it would need to think quite tough to work around in terms of all the European consent rules. So basically what you're saying is that if they haven't bought a ticket for the next game, they will get a call from someone in the club asking, "You're not coming, why aren't you coming? Do you need help to buy a ticket?" Yeah. Right. We've seen it in season ticket renewals, especially in the UK, where it's renewals season and all hands on deck and all hands on the phones in some clubs. But that's also changing, right? So it's moving in the other way. Do you think it'll change in the US as well? It is changing and a lot of teams and clubs they are wanting to implement more of what we think as the European standard. That's also some of the things that we really want to aim for in helping American clubs that we work with to land on a hybrid solution between the two. We don't want them to do either or if they need to do both. And what we want to help them do is, if we can help them generate some warmer leads when we speak purely marketing, some warmer leads for the ticket department to call while we improve the whole box office setup that they're doing, that will just make them more efficient and make them able to communicate better to fans in different ways in a segmented way. And that's when we can scale the ticket sales altogether. And then if we do the whole digital segmenting email campaigning around that, that's on a separate track and we can sell tickets and merch while doing the other thing, then we can just all together improve the relevance and gather more data and better understand the fans. Great. So I'm tapping a little bit ahead here, looking at the divide between the tech and the data. So in the US, leagues often dictate which tickling or tech systems clubs must use. And we've seen the same in some countries in Europe as well where the league is going out on Thunder, etc. But how does that impact the club's ability to innovate? Will they still go out and look for new tools? Or are they more forced to use the tools that the league orders them to use? Yeah. Another very interesting question. And it was actually one of the main topics of my master's thesis that I did. Our leagues can help, but sometimes, as you mentioned, also limit the clubs. And we work with a club, a new football club over here in the US who needed to build or at least find the entire tech stack from scratch. And we joined so many calls with the leagues, the leagues that they're playing, to understand the possibilities. And for ticket existence, specifically, we really wanted them to go with a more innovative solution that there may be two or three that the league had agreements with. And in order to do that, we actually had to first pay a fee to the league to not join in on the common league-wide system. But then we also had to say goodbye to the heavily discounted systems and buy another one outside of the league for full price. And so we weighed the pros and cons and then we ended up choosing something outside of the league standard, which is now that we're working in it. It's exactly what we want them. We can do a lot of cool integrations and it's just working. But in my opinion, most leagues around the world is very helpful to clubs by acting as a more of an advisor and have the experience as to what work with other clubs in that specific league. But also one of the main things that they do is that they allow clubs to sit together and have a common platform to talk about, they allow for sharing ways of working. In the US, I find it to be more mandating than purely advising, which tools the clubs need to use. I think that just all comes down to this whole franchise idea and the franchise setup. The league, they can buy systems for the entire league and then almost force the clubs into it, which it will lower the cost for the clubs, but it also limits ways of standing out or doing things differently. And yeah, I guess that's why there are both pros and cons about each way of doing it. So before we wrap up, Luke, with the key takeaways, I just have one question that you have to take from the hip pair. And that is, what are the three key mistakes you see from a club when it comes to using tech for understanding fan data and creating more revenue, sound more tickets? I'll need to think about that. Can you promise us that you will follow your LinkedIn, right? And you post a link saying these are the three mistakes that's most common, all right? Okay. That's a deal. Yeah. That is a deal. I do post a lot already. I will post it up three. Yeah. That's a deal. Very, very good. But then, which is a tradition, as this is the closing thoughts, right? So to wrap up this conversation today, Luke, what are the key lessons, again, three? You've learned from operating both in European and American sports market, right? Different markets, different set up, etc., which we discussed, that you would share with any commercial or marketing professional in the industry or ticketing manager for that sake. Okay. That I can definitely do straight away as well. I think, first of all, as with so many other industries, data is key. And people need to try and master the data, otherwise they won't have a competitive edge. Secondly, as cliche as it sounds, I think a good network is just such a valuable asset in the sports industry, regardless of your position. And focusing on it in a more honest and real way can get you very far by showing proper and sincere interest in other people's work while also sharing out of what you do yourself. That's key. It doesn't have to be purely speaking to your ICP customer, but it can be talked to anyone in the industry. You'll never know what you'll get out of that. And then the last one is just that sport and working in sport. That's awesome. It's awesome no matter where you work with it and how you work with it, there's so many opportunities and possibilities. That's great. And everyone should be in this industry. That's what I'm saying. It's a fantastic industry to be in, at least once in their lives, I'd highly recommend it. You have been listening to Don't Forget Your Tickets, where today's guest was Lukas Mikkel Hansen, countrymanager for North America at the start-up playmakers. Follow me on LinkedIn and you'll get those low hanging fruits as well. We hope this conversation brought insight and inspiration to those navigating in the commercial side of football, especially in Ireland, the UK and other international markets. As always, thank you to Ticket Co for powering this podcast. My name is Kalerik Moeberg and until next time have a wonderful day. [Music]