Courtesy Digital Seat Media
While Cameron Fowler, Matt Sullivan, and their team set out to build Digital Seat Media four years ago, they kept hearing a familiar refrain.
“We were told many times that we can't build a tech company in Fort Worth, Texas, and we just said, ‘We’ll see.’”
If the data is any indication — and it is — Cameron and his brainchild, Digital Seat Media, have proven the disagreeably pessimistic, negative Nancy naysayers wrong. Since launching in 2018, the company has increased its integrations by 250% and brands utilizing the platform by more than 400% year over.
Today, they are a market leader in fan engagement technology.
“We had offers and funds from other states that said if you move here, we will give you enough money,” says Fowler, the CEO of the company. “We are happy to be here in Fort Worth.”
The Fort Worth-based startup has made good on making it easy for sports or concert fans, and venue-goers in general to enjoy their event through an interactive, real-time fan engagement technology platform.
Everything is but less than three clicks away on the platform, making it easier for fans to skip lines at games and spend more time in their seats. Metal tags installed on venue armrests allow guests the convenience of in-seat dining and live game stats, and to view upcoming events.
Fowler, who was raised in Fort Worth, drew from his own experiences of waiting in line for a hot dog at a TCU game to conceive of the idea.
Fowler identified an opening in the market for a QR-based platform to connect fans with artists, bands, and sports teams.
Fowler began cultivating the concept in 2013, but there wasn’t a market for QR codes. Few knew what they were or how to use them (writer sheepishly raising a hand here), and their widespread use as a conveyor of information and/or convenience hadn’t yet been adopted as habit by society.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a driving factor in changing all that as touchless technology became a preference to avoid spreading microbes with bad intentions.
Today, more than one million tags have been installed in more than 40 venues, including the Vivint Arena, home of the Utah Jazz, and the Paycom Center, home of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
This year, Digital Seat Media also teamed with Imagine Dragons, the multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning pop rock band for its Mercury World Tour. Throughout the first leg of the tour spanning 17 shows in the U.S., Digital Seat Media offered VIP ticket holders a “VIP card,” which provided perks, including real-time updates leading up to their concert date and during the event. These included mobile push notifications for parking, event entry, location, merchandise pickup, seating location, and early entry times.
In May, the company announced that it had agreed to continue on with the Mercury Tour through all Canadian and European stops over the next four months, totaling 40 dates.
“We say that we exist for the same reason Amazon exists,” says Fowler, who before Digital Seat Media was a technology consultant for Intel Corporation, General Motors, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and “other Fortune 500 corporations.” That is, “because we capitalize on the fact that humans are lazy. We want instant gratification. Amazon is so big because they were the first company to have instant gratification, pressing a button and having it the next day. That's why Digital Seat exists.”
“When we worked together at Washington State University, there was 100,000 fan engagement in four days. It is just a big amount of fans engaging with these sponsors, and they're doing it willingly because it works out great for sponsors and fans because they're getting something in return.”
The company says it soon hopes to have a school-based platform similar to Digital Seat, in which students can offer engagement to prevent suicide, a mass shooting, or even assist in the simple mishap of a lost backpack on campus. Digital Seat Media says it also sees a day soon when NFTs will play a more prominent role in the platform.
