Zeus - Rule over the resale

Ethereum Address: 0xda96FBBe3aFecC4eB202048Da9809CFf7C362EBE

zeus

Purpose

Zeus gives succesful artists and event organizers god-like insights and control over the mass resale market. By tracking the status of the resale using the blockchain, and learning from past events, Zeus gives the event organizer a crystal-clear view of the resale markets. Event organizers can set short term and long term goals (eg. eliminate or maintain the size of the resale market) and Zeus will recommend actions on resale fees and ticket prices, or take control of the pricing altogether. Secondly, Zeus allows artists to directly connect with their event-day audience with targeting features that only blockchain makes possible. Zeus aims to be an artist's dream.

Problem

Taylor Swift is a perfect example of how artists are struggling with understanding and controlling resale markets:

Fact 1. Taylor Swift recently alienated many of her fans by asking them to buy her merchandise in order to “boost” their chances of acquiring tickets for her concerts. Many of her loyal fans feel scammed and outraged at this very moment: Taylor Swift criticised for new ticket sale scheme after trying to stop touts Her intention was to avoid touts by ensuring that her most loyal fans got to buy tickets. Conclusion 1. Taylor Swift needs a solution like Aventus to be able to prevent touts. She should also know to ask her fans about this kind of decision beforehand.

Fact 2. Taylor Swift has attempted to ask her fans about her decisions before with unexpected results: Internet Pranksters Win a Taylor Swift Concert for School for the Deaf Conclusion 2. Taylor Swift doesn’t really know who the people attending her events are. Anyone can follow her on social media and vote on her polls and platforms like Ticketmaster clearly offer her no way since many tickets are bought by resellers and the platform itself does not allow it. This is not only Taylor Swift’s problem, artists and event organizers in general have a disconnection with their final audience at event-day, due to the layers in between. This makes difficult gathering their opinion and targeting advertising to the fans which are most likely to purchase their tickets.

Famous artists and event organizers want control over the resale market, to allow their fans to purchase tickets at reasonable prices. Some want to eliminate the resale, but others could benefit from a restricted resale market, since, as acknowledged by Aventus in the whitepaper, resale markets are in many cases not bad and sometimes even desirable. Resellers give the event organizer some guarantee of sustaining an income, by taking part of the losses when events are not successfully sold. If the audience already takes the resale as a fact of life, the event organizer may have no strong incentive to eliminate it.

Solution

Zeus is an advanced analytics DApp for event organizers and succesful artists, which uses key strengths of the Aventus Ecosystem to give them insights and control over the resale markets, as well as a direct link to fans attending their events, as opposed to the people buying the tickets (which may be resellers).

First, the Zeus DApp gives event organizers a crystal clear view of the state of the resale market of a particular event by inspecting the blockchain and calculating the size of the resale market both from data on the event itself and the evolution of the resale on previous events. Through a simple interface it allows the organizer to set goals regarding the resale on a particular event, or over a series of events for regular event organizers like football clubs and let a dynamic pricing algorithm take charge. That is, Zeus extends the idea of dynamic pricing to also setting resale fees, which, under the Aventus ecosystem, are as important as the original ticket price and completely under control of the event organizer.

Furthermore, Zeus enables artists to know exactly who the attendees to their events are by creating a trace throughout the whole resale process. Eliminating touts by using ID verification for the most expensive tickets means that the event organizer can be sure about who is entering the venue at event day. Through a social media application (eg. Facebook App) running on the artist's Facebook page, Zeus is able to link specific social media profiles to ticket purchasers, enabling the artist to know exactly which of his followers have purchased tickets, creating whole new ways in which the artist can engage with his followers, create new revenue streams, and optimize advertising.

The objective of Zeus is to make the Aventus Ecosystem even more attractive to its biggest potential clients by solving the problems they are struggling with right now.

Use cases

A. Taylor Swift wants to slowly eliminate the resale market throughout one year. Her team sets up a goal in Zeus and it will execute a plan for slowly increasing resale fees throughout the season until Zeus analytics tools show that the resale market is virtually eliminated (ie. the blockchain shows no tickets being resold for profit). Her team can track the status of the resale throughout, and make manual changes to resale fees if desired. This is equivalent to dynamic pricing, only it is the resale fee controlled by the algorithm to reach the goal.

B. A football club sold all of the tickets for a match. However, they learn through Zeus that the tickets were sold to resellers and the resale for this match is unexpectedly low, because Zeus shows many unsold tickets in the secondary auctioning market, and many tickets in hands of potential resellers. Through Zeus the organizer can get to know the situation and is then able to reduce the resale fees to lower the resale prices and encourage attendance, while also increasing the organizer’s own profit (through resale fees) and saving the event.

C. An NFL team wants to implement dynamic pricing during next season. They only need to set a goal, which may be maximizing revenue or a compromise between revenue and attendance. A dynamic pricing algorithm running on the Zeus backend takes care of setting both ticket pricing and resale fees to meet the goal. Note that dynamic pricing is being increasingly implemented and has shown to bring substantial revenue increasing versus fixed pricing [7].

D. Taylor Swift connects with her concert attendees through Zeus Suppose Taylor Swift is selling her tickets directly through Aventus and decides to keep part of her resale market, but wants to connect with the people attending her concerts, rather than those buying the tickets (which may be resellers). She can do it know thanks to the way Zeus tracks tickets on the blockchain. What she has to do is:

Taylor Swift sells her tickets through a website/app with social media authentication, running on Aventus + Zeus (or her own website). When someone purchases a ticket, his/her social media ID is registered in Aventus, as part of the attached identity. She offers a small discount or bonus for fans who sign up using social media to encourage them to do it.
Taylor Swift enables the resale for her events to occur through websites/apps with social media authentication, running on Aventus + Zeus. In this way most tickets are tied to a social media profile, which is registered using Zeus. When a ticket changes hands the new identity is assigned to the ticket.
On event day, the final owner of a ticket is assumed to have assisted to the event if no identity verification was performed (and the ticket was registered at the entrance). For expensive tickets which require identity verification this can be checked precisely.
When Taylor Swift wants to know what her most loyal fans think, she simply creates a poll on her website, which also uses Facebook authentication. However, because she now has the social media IDs of concert-goers, using Zeus, her team can now filter out the results of fans which have not attended her concerts, and connect with their event-day audience.
Zeus Analytics enables Taylor Swift to engage with the fans attending her concerts in all sorts of ways like, for example, giving out merchandise, discounts or tickets to loyal attendees who have assisted to many of her concerts, encouraging other supporters to attend in a positive way. This is regardless of whether they had to buy their tickets in the resale market. Zeus creates a link between artist and loyal attendee.

Zeus enables tying tickets to particular social media identities, leveraging the power of social media advertising for famous artists/organizers. It is up to the organizer/artist to decide whether he/she uses social media or some other kind of authentication (eg. email) to tie a ticket to an identity.

How it works

Zeus consists of:

A backend connected to the blockchain through the Aventus Protocol, and tracking necessary information about the status of the ticket sale and the resale of the artist's events: supply and demand on both the primary and secondary ticket auctioning systems. The backend also implements dynamic pricing algorithms, and is in charge of keeping tickets associated with a social media identity when possible.
A frontend consisting of an easy-to-use web application where the artist's team is able to get deep insights regarding the status of the resale, set fees and prices or configure an algorithm to control fees and ticket prices automatically. This can be an extension of a more basic interface aimed at organizers of smaller events.

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Metrics gathered

Zeus Analytics calculates metrics relevant for the event organizer, for example:

Approximate number of tickets in hands of attendees.
Current profit margins, supply and demand in the resale market.
Trends in these metrics.

It is impossible to separate resellers from end attendees if resellers use separate identities to purchase every ticket, or small batches of tickets. However, once an event is over, the complete history of the resale is present in the Ethereum blockchain for analysis. This is very valuable information that is not available otherwise. For periodic events, Zeus uses this information to estimate the behavior in future events, by predicting the number of resellers engaging in this practice through a Machine Learning algorithm. By learning from the blockchain the way the resale has progressed for past events, the algorithm has an ever-growing training set at its disposal.

Dynamic Fees

The Aventus ecosystem opens the door for a new kind of dynamic pricing, namely controlling both resale fees and ticket prices to achieve a goal. Since resale fees are collected by the artist/organizer and serve the purpose of preventing touts, it is possible that dynamic resale fees will be much more accepted than dynamic prices are in the primary market.

Zeus allows the organizer to set a goal, which may be a weighted sum of different metrics like:

Event attendance
Revenue generated

The weights of each metric are set (through an easy-to-use interface) according to the organizer's goals, which may not necessarily be revenue alone.

The details of the Machine Learning algorithm are out of the scope of the proposal, but it should take care of devising a strategy that minimizes this objective function through a feedback loop that measures the effects of its actions on prices and fees on the supply and demand for the event, and makes decisions based on it. Dynamic pricing is already a well-researched subject [5].

Monetisation, and how Zeus helps the Aventus Ecosystem

Since acquiring big customers is enough benefit in itself for Aventus, Zeus is not proposed as a paid service but as part of the Aventus value proposition for successful artists who organize their own events, and large event organizers (eg. football teams) which could benefit from connecting with their attendees. That is, Zeus will not be monetized directly but it will boost the Aventus Ecosystem in the best possible way: creating an offer hard to resist for artists and organizers, bringing them into the ecosystem and enabling them to benefit from decentralization.

The only exception to this is dynamic pricing and fee adjustment algorithms, which are monetized by collecting a percentage of the revenue generated by the algorithm. This is also because it is the most technologically challenging part of the DApp. Developing these innovative algorithms (in the ticket space) would also give the platform an intelectual property advantage, which can grow to be crucial in a space as competitive as blockchain applications.

Customers and Acquisition Strategy

Target customers are:

Taylor Swift and other artists who are successful enough to organize their own events and want to reclaim control over the sale and resale.
Sports teams with a strong social media presence, and/or willing to implement dynamic pricing strategies, or simply control theur resale markets.
Any other organizer of regular mass events that is struggling with resale markets and connecting with his/her fans.

References

[1] "Aventus Whitepaper" https://aventus.io/doc/whitepaper.pdf [2] "Taylor Swift criticised for new ticket sale scheme after trying to stop touts" http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41094852/taylor-swift-criticised-for-new-ticket-sale-scheme-after-trying-to-stop-touts [3] "Ed Sheeran ups fight against ticket touts with strict rules for 2018 gigs" http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/40443039/ed-sheeran-ups-fight-against-ticket-touts-with-strict-rules-for-2018-gigs [4] "How Dynamic Pricing Uses Machine Learning to Increase Revenue" https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/machine-learning/ [5] "Dynamic Pricing Models" http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9781849960168-c1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-963345-p173942313 [6] How it works: the music industry http://thegatewayonline.com/commercial-awareness/business-analysis/how-it-works-the-music-industry [7] "Dynamic ticket pricing makes successful debut in NFL" http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2015/10/26/Leagues-and-Governing-Bodies/NFL-dynamic.aspx

Aventus-Network-Services / aventus-dapp-proposals