Good to see Bill Schlough of the Giants recognized as InformationWeek’s Chief of the Year. I had blogged about him and the Park when he kindly hosted us in 2007.
Some of his innovations from the article
- Knowing that season ticket holders don't normally attend every game, the Giants created a secondary online ticket market, called Double Play Ticket Window, in 2000, before StubHub existed. Working with a now-defunct SAP-Intel joint venture called Pandesic, the Giants invented a way to activate and deactivate the bar codes on tickets, making exchanges simple and safe. After Pandesic went bust in 2000, the Giants built the platform again in partnership with Tickets.com, which was subsequently acquired by MLB Advanced Media, which now licenses the technology to StubHub. While the Giants still make a small profit from Double Play, Schlough considers it a fan service rather than a business venture.
- When the Giants opened AT&T (formerly Pacific Bell) Park in 2000, mobile was in its relative infancy and modern social networking didn't exist. As early as 2004, Schlough sculpted a wireless experience for fans, even if only a handful of them were on the network. But on opening day of 2008, several months after the advent of the iPhone, the ballpark's network was saturated.
- Online fan voting (for the All-Star Game) is theoretically limited to 25 times per person, and the biggest baseball markets have always had the advantage. In 2012, MLB allowed mobile balloting for the first time. "What other park in the world has the infrastructure to be able to tell our fans to pull out their mobile devices and vote right now," Schlough says. And that's what the Giants did, starting with a big series with the Los Angeles Dodgers a week before the voting period closed.
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