Digital Seat Media has completed the installation of its fan experience technology service in hundreds of thousands of seats at a number of major venues across North America in time for the new NCAA football season.
The Texas-based company adds metal tags with a QR code to seats which can then be scanned by fans to access a number of features. Rights holders are able to highlight special offers and promote partners, social media campaigns or deals every time visitors click the code, which does not require an app to be downloaded.
The famous Rose Bowl in California as well as venues owned by Virginia Tech and Texas Christian University (TCU) are among the organisations to add the Digital Seat Media codes during the close season.
“If a school wants to send a message just to the students, they’re able to do that now,” said Digital Seat Media chief executive Cameron Fowler.
“We just felt that there’s got to be a way to communicate with an individual fan or the students instead of only on the jumbotron. The seats were the last remaining area that really hadn’t been addressed in live entertainment. There’s never been anything on them because it didn’t make sense to slap a sticker on it whenever that sponsor may be gone a couple of months later.”
Digital Seat Media was founded in 2018 and the following year inked an exclusive, multi-year partnership with Learfield IMG College, the collegiate athletics-focused media and technology company.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, the company has now installed its tags in about 20 stadiums, including ones at SMU, Baylor and Oklahoma State University.
According to BizJournals, Fowler said he expected to see Digital Seat tags installed in a total of 35 venues by the end of 2021, but that is now likely to be closer to 50 and thus more than one million deployed tags.
