Usheru helping entertainment clients see the big picture with data-driven marketing

Irish company Usheru has gone from marketing blockbuster movies in the Nordics to helping some of the World’s biggest venues to harness the power of data, reaching new customers and converting them into visitors.

Based in Dublin, Usheru is an innovation-driven company focusing on the film, music, sports and entertainment industries that offers technological solutions for marketing and analytics, as well as tools to support and enhance direct to consumer relationships for our partners. 

“Our first partner was Universal Pictures, and we built a website for them, where we integrated cinema point of sales and allowed them sell tickets directly to consumers,” CEO and co-founder Oliver Fegan recalls. 

“Then we went from building one-off releases to building a platform and being a partner of all their releases, including via streaming services. That led us on to partnering with national film bodies with what is basically a global solution, and from there we have moved into working with venues.”

The palette of customers has broadened considerably since Oliver founded the company just over a decade ago together with Catherine Downes and Andrés Macias. 

Since the launch of its Content Discovery Platform in 2020, company staffing has grown by more than 200 percent and Usheru is now active in 33 countries around the world, including in the Nordics, working with national film institutions, film studios, distributors, and live entertainment clients such as sport stadiums, arenas and other venues.

At the heart of everything Usheru does is data about the end customer, which is collected and analysed in minute detail and then used to create compelling propositions for them, whether that be tickets for the latest Hollywood smash or an evening of NHL ice hockey with parking taken care of too. 

“We were working with national film bodies like the Swedish Film Institute and the Danish Film Institute and then someone who worked in the live entertainment space building arena websites reached out to us and asked us if we’d like to have a conversation with them – since then we have built 10 or 12 stadium and arena websites for big arena properties in North America,” Oliver explains. 

Oliver and his team are well aware that their development story is more or less the exact opposite of other enterprises who tend to build up a strong base in their home market before testing their wings abroad, but Usheru’s success shows that there’s more than one way to build a business. 

“We totally went backwards in the way we did this – we should probably have started in Ireland and then gone overseas, but the opportunity for this one started in the US, and now we're trying to bring it back to Europe,” Oliver says, chuckling at the idea. 

At a time when sports and entertainment venues are competing for customers with everything from social media to streaming services, Usheru’s move into the arena space is an intriguing one. 

“Basically we build an arena website for them, and then we integrate all their major services – obviously Ticketmaster is the key one from a ticketing perspective, but they would have CRM systems, and parking services is obviously huge in the US, so all their major services we integrate and we measure what the conversion rate is,” Oliver says. 

“If there's things like parking that's related to the events, we then allow people to find either the premium hospitality experiences or the parking services, and we measure how many people go to buy these things and what the conversion rate is.”

Visitors tend to come from across the board with varying budgets and expectations, and Usheru’s platform allows providers to see and analyse the data about their site visits and then re-target customers with specific communications to convert them into sales. 

“You might be doing campaigns from Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, all pointed to one location, and our job basically is to show them what the conversion rate is for each campaign, and then allow them to stop doing wasteful marketing and instead spend more on impactful marketing. If they're doing newsletter or any sort of activations, we can show them, on a granular level, what's delivering,” Oliver says. 

It’s a business model that has proved to be very effective, both for Usheru and their ever-growing client base. 

“It's all about basically filling that arena – when you've got 20,000 seats and lots of premium hospitality spaces, you just need to make sure that you're reaching these people as efficiently as possible. On both the film and the arena sides of our business, the marketing teams can be quite small – it could be one or two people wearing 500 different hats – and they might have dozens of different campaigns at any one time. Our job is always to centralize everything and bring it all to one location,” Oliver says.

Usheru has received assistance from Enterprise Ireland to help break into markets such as Scandinavia, where they have previously enjoyed great success with film industry partners. 

“I just love the Scandinavian markets, there's a real directness which makes them really easy to do business with,” Oliver says. 

“We managed to get some funding and became a HPSU, a high-potential start-up, and when we went for venture capital funding in 2019, Enterprise Ireland came in at that point, and any help opening doors or getting local market knowledge is really beneficial,” he adds.

“Enterprise Ireland has both the local knowledge and the ability to ask questions of customers that we might not be able to get straight answers to ourselves, such as around what they spend on various things. That can be very valuable when we are approaching new markets.”

Having gained enormous experience working with NHL arenas in North America, targeting ice hockey venues in Scandinavia is an obvious next move. 

“Ice hockey is a massive sport in the Nordic region and we already work with some really good properties in the U.S. in that regard, but there’s also a lot of indoor arenas because of the kind the climate, so that’s how the sports world looks there,” Oliver says, spotting yet another opportunity to bring data to bear.