Turning Venues into Revenue

COVID-19 shut venues down for months. When live events started coming back, ticketing platforms, venues, and sports teams needed a fast way to rebuild fan trust. PayPal already had the tools to do it: cashless checkout, QR code concessions, Venmo bill splitting, Pay in 4, PayPal Credit, and StoreCash.

What the ticketing and entertainment industry hadn't seen yet was all of it working together as one fan journey, from the moment a ticket is bought to the moment a fan leaves the venue.

BOL's job: connect those features into one story about the future of ticketing, then build a creative system that could tell it across every channel a buyer in this industry would look.

A Rebuilding Industry

PayPal needed to convince a skeptical, fragmented buyer that omnichannel payments could rebuild the fan experience. Three obstacles stood in the way.

• Omnichannel is a hard concept to sell when it's abstract. Buyers couldn't picture what it actually meant across parking, concessions, merchandise, and re-entry, so the pitch wasn't landing.
• Trust was in short supply. Coming out of COVID, venue and ticketing leaders wanted proof before they'd take a meeting.
• The message had to survive six different channels. LinkedIn, Facebook, native ads, InMail, email, and a landing page each needed their own version of the story without losing the throughline that tied them together.

Hypertargeted Messaging Built Around One Fan's Journey

Step 1: Build the narrative

BOL anchored the campaign in Ashley, a young millennial fan moving through a live event: buying tickets, splitting costs with friends, paying by QR code, ordering from her seat. That journey became the spine of the TOFU infographic, styled like a stadium seating chart, giving "omnichannel" a face and a reason to care.

Step 2: Create a variety of content

Not every buyer responds to the same type of content, so BOL built a mix. Three core messages ran across LinkedIn, Facebook, native ads, and InMail, including a Canada version, each with its own channel-specific variants. "The future of ticketing" opened the funnel, using Fandango and the Phoenix Suns as instant proof. The Fandango spotlight went deeper mid-funnel, running as both video and written content so BOL could see which format actually drove more traffic. And a bottom-funnel ad asked directly for the meeting: "Get fans back in the stands."

Step 3: Test and optimize

Ads did the work of generating those hand-raisers. The landing page converted them into contacts, combining the TOFU infographic, the Fandango video, product pillars, and a short form under "Give the crowd a night to remember." From there, emails nurtured those contacts through PayPal's sales cycle. BOL also built A/B tests into the ad copy itself, from naming clients to pitting "Watch video" against "Read case study."

Ticketing and entertainment organizations didn't need another vendor telling them payments matter — they needed to see exactly how a connected payment experience plays out from home to seat to concession stand. With this campaign, PayPal now has:

Need your B2B efforts to accelerate pipeline across verticals, channels, and funnel stages? Let's build it together.