Leadership / 03.13.24
Ticketing Legends: Angus Watson Has Crossed Oceans for Love, Life and Live Event Ticketing
Christine Payne
When one thinks of the Oxford Playhouse, names such as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, John Gielgud, Judy Dench, Rowan Atkinson and Dudley Moore likely come to mind. These are just some of the celebrated performers who have graced the stage of the venue, which opened as a repertory theater in 1938. It was within this esteemed English theatrical milieu that Angus Watson found himself in 1973.
Angus opens INTIX 2014.
“Fresh out of college, I was an intern at the Oxford Playhouse for a period of about three months,” he says.
At the time, Angus had no reason to believe that this short stint in the ticket office would mark the beginning of a career that would span almost half a century. During this time, he would make a name for himself — not on the marquee, but as a star performer behind the scenes.
“[The internship] led to an interview at English National Opera (ENO), initially as marketing assistant and then head of marketing after a year. From there, I went to the Barbican as head of marketing [and was also directly responsible for the ticket office], which would have been in 1979. I went from there to Space Time Systems, [which had] the BOCS ticketing product, as product director ... That would have been 1988. Then, in 1993, I moved to the United States and did a very brief stint at a company called Ticket Connections in Louisville, Kentucky. Then, almost 30 years ago, I started at Ravinia.”
That brief resume does not even begin to cover the breadth of his achievements, including the significant role Angus played in marketing at the Barbican, one of London’s premier venues for the performing arts, including theatre, dance, music and film.
Angus at INTIX 2014 with Roger Tomlinson (left), Craig Ricks (second from left) and wife Chloe (right).
“When I came in, in 1979, I think there were about 10 of us on board total, just department heads and immediate assistants. It was the final stage of a multi-year, post-war redevelopment on a site that had been very heavily bombed [in the second world war]. We had about two or two-and-a-half years to build the whole thing up to when it opened in 1982.”
And what an opening night it was!
“An opening night with the Queen and having to stage-manage something like three hours of live television was pretty exciting,” Angus recalls. “I am not quite sure I remember how, but the responsibility for the organization of the opening night fell on my plate, so literally the royal protocol, the liaison with the BBC and then on the night itself, one step away from my boss who was escorting the Queen, making sure that we kept on schedule because we were up against having to get into the concert hall by 7:03. Otherwise, they would not make the live news at 9:00. That was exciting.”
He says, “The opening was a Thursday, and then we opened to the public for the first time the following day. Then, that weekend, we were inundated by crowds of people. I remember standing in the entrance looking down the street and seeing this trail of brand-new carpet fluff that had been carried out of the building on people's feet, blowing around in the breeze.”
Barbican Opening night (March 3, 1982) with Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Peter Gadsden, the Lord Mayor of the City of London.
Angus has other vivid memories from his time at the Barbican, including hearing John Williams conduct the Indiana Jones theme in an open-air concert on the roof before the films had been released in the U.K.
For Angus and his colleagues, the Barbican presented a chance to excel beginning from a clean slate.
“It was a very rare opportunity … to take ideas that you might have had elsewhere and were unable to pursue and put them into operation. For example, it gave me the opportunity to make the box office part of the marketing team, which generally wasn't considered at that time in most places. To combine what had previously been planned as two separate ticket offices, one for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the other for the concert hall with the London Symphony, into one operation was logistically complicated. The Royal Shakespeare Company already had a box office team in place who would be moving with them, but we managed to make that work. And then putting the first in-house computerized system installed in London into operation.”
Angus is proud of his Scottish heritage.
At that point, the Box Office Computer System (BOCS) had only been installed in two other venues in the U.K., in Glasgow and Manchester. Angus recalls how challenging it was to add it to a theater that had not been built with such a system in mind.
“To start with, the building was not wired for something like that,” he says. “Then, learning how to deal with a brand-new piece of software, which, as always, comes with its challenges and problems. But at the other end of the scale of then being able to process ticket sales from any point in the building, and there were multiple places in the building, different venue ticket offices, simultaneously, which was exciting and something that would have been extremely hard to do with any kind of hard ticket system.”
Nevertheless, it would become the way of the future for the industry and, for a while, for Angus personally. In 1988, he went to work for Space Time Systems, the company that built and sold the BOCS software.
“BOCS started life as a box office computer system,” he says. “But it didn't have any marketing backup in the sense of storing names and addresses, purchase histories, interests, and things of that sort. CRM was all really new. They brought me on board, in part to provide the marketing experience and input into the creation of that product. Working with the software development team and watching that product evolve was very exciting and very challenging. At the same time, [I was] still having to get out and market the product pretty much worldwide. My territory, so to speak, based in London was the U.S., the Far East and Australia.”
Along the way, Angus happened to sell a BOCS system to Ravinia, the renowned outdoor music venue located just outside of Chicago. When founding INTIX (BOMI) member Ernie Santi was getting ready to retire and Ravinia needed a Director of Ticketing, they recruited the one person who knew that system inside and out. Angus spent the next two and a half decades with the not-for-profit festival, during which time he had one of the biggest on-sale first days, rolling out sales to donor members based on their giving level, among other achievements. He also proudly recalls introducing real-time online ticketing as his greatest career accomplishment.
Handover to Angus from Ernie Santi (right).
Angus flying 13,000 feet over the Rockies after visiting with Ernie Santi in Montana.
“We went live online in 1998,” he says. “We started with just a trickle of business, and then it gradually increased. We were still on a shared, hosted service for our website at that time.”
Angus continues, “Somewhere around 2001, I figured that the resource of email addresses that we had accumulated over those first two or three years had to have some value. Some computer geeks who I was working with figured out a way of taking those email addresses and creating an outbound email system, which we announced our on-sale to, and we took down the entire hosted service the next day. The demand for our tickets was such that our website crashed and took everybody else's website with it.”
Handover from Angus to Jennifer Butler on his retirement.
It was a stark reminder of the still fragile internet and its boundless potential.
“It took us about 15 years to get it right,” he admits. “We discovered over the course of that process that there was a demand for tickets out there that we really hadn't anticipated and had never really tapped into. We wanted to believe, and I think now, incorrectly, that if somebody was frustrated trying to get a ticket initially, like on the first day, they were going to come back and try again later. So, it was a case of having to get it right on the first day or risk losing part of that audience.”
Angus adds, “When I say it took us 15 years, it took us 15 years to get the technology right, to get the server capacity right, to get the communications right, and ultimately to get the ticketing software right, and we ended up changing everything in the course of the process over that period of time. Finally, two years before I left, we got it right for the first time and just blew the lid off. We sold 120,000 tickets that first day online, something over $5 million, which at that time was 20% to 25% of our total revenue budget for the entire season.”
Angus and his wife Chloe at Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
In reflecting on his long career in ticketing, Angus takes pride in his many accomplishments. But what he enjoyed most were the people with whom he worked, especially those at Ravinia. In addition to the year-round staff, which started as a team of two and later became three, Angus recalls all the seasonal helpers who made significant contributions.
“The staff are mostly current or recent college students, many of them from local schools like Northwestern, which has a fabulous music program. Many of them were students out of that music program. I have three former staff members who are now full-time professional opera singers, which is quite exciting.”
Blues Brothers night at Ravinia.
He continues, “It is a seasonal operation. They start to arrive [at Ravinia] in May. The season typically runs from June until September, so it fits their summer break perfectly. They are fabulous kids — very hardworking, very knowledgeable, very dedicated. Many of them worked at Ravinia for multiple years and then introduced their friends who worked there in future years. I am still in touch with several of them.”
Angus also remains in touch with the many friends he made over the years through his involvement with BOMI, which he joined in 1984, and later INTIX. Indeed, as Board Chair, he was the leader who oversaw the organization’s Board restructuring, governance changes and board term limits. Previously, the board had 25 or 26 members, and there was no three-year succession of Chair-Elect, Chair and Past Chair. In 1999, Angus was named Outstanding Ticketing Professional, and in 2012, he was the recipient of the Patricia G. Spira Lifetime Achievement Award.
Angus has many fond memories of his involvement with INTIX.
“The two conferences in Chicago (2008 and 2014) which I chaired were highlights,” he says. “Working with Pat Spira (BOMI/INTIX Founder) and the other board members to reorganize the board into something more manageable, more transparent, more effective, and to see that legacy maintained [also stands out in my mind]. We had a wonderful meeting — I think it was in New York, which was the last conference I attended in person. All the former board chairs who were in attendance, which was the majority, and visually around the table to see the people who had benefited from that reorganization, who now simply took it for granted that this was just the way it had always been. That was very special for me. That is permanent, beneficial change, and I would take just a little bit of credit. I think it is one of the reasons why INTIX has gone from strength to strength, and although I was unable to be there, I was so excited to hear Maureen's reports about the attendance in Las Vegas [this year] and how successful that event was.”
Angus and Chloe (left) with Patricia Spira (center) at INTIX 2016.
Among all of his memories, Angus has one very special one — meeting Chloe, one of our organization’s very first members, at the 1984 conference in Los Angeles. The two would later marry.
Angus and Chloe at Lambeau Field.
Today, Angus and Chloe are retired and enjoy spending time with their beloved Burmese cats — Apollo, Freia and Emma. In his younger days, Angus belonged to an organization called Pilots N Paws. As an active general aviation pilot, he would fly animals typically coming out of shelters in the south, where they would be at risk for euthanasia, to local shelters in the Chicago area. Angus has since given up flying himself after logging landings in at least 36 states and Canada’s Greater Toronto Area, where he flew to pick up four of his and Chloe’s cats. Now, the couple prefers travelling at a slower pace.
Apollo (13) with his niece Freia (11).
Emma (14).
Angus with Abby and her eight week-old puppies, who he helped fly across the country to a new home.
“We have always liked to travel, and we have been to many places over the years,” he says. “In more recent years, we have discovered cruising, especially with Viking Cruises, starting with European river cruises almost 20 years ago. More recently, they rolled out an ocean fleet and we have taken half a dozen trips to various places.”
Angus and Chloe at Sacred Valley in Peru.
Given his (and his wife’s) long history in ticketing, Angus had more to share, especially with those considering getting into the industry for the first time. This part of the interview led to a poignant story to which many in the ticketing industry will likely relate.
“My family never really understood what I did,” he says. “They were engineers, doctors, nurses, what I would describe as very traditional professions. When I went into the not-for-profit arts business, they really did not get it … Right at the end of my dad’s life, he died young sadly, I had just gotten the job at the Barbican. I hadn't even started yet. A very close friend of his worked for the Bank of England and was very familiar with the development and the art center as it was going to be. I think he clued my dad into the fact that this was a pretty good job that I had just landed.”
Angus continues, “That aside, later in my mum's life, she started volunteering at a beautiful house near where she lived, which had a big open-air garden where they did summer concerts and plays. She volunteered in the ticket office, and some years later, she was over here visiting with us. We went to a performance at Ravinia, then came home and sat around the dining room table talking about the evening's event. The conversation moved into ticketing, and for the first time, she understood from her own experience what it was I did. Chloe said it was one of the funniest things she's ever heard because we were comparing notes on credit card chargebacks and unruly customers and people who were just rude on the phone. That was very special.”
Attendees on the lawn at Ravinia.
While Angus’ family may not have always understood exactly what he did in his professional life, many others certainly do. From his humble beginning as an intern at the Oxford Playhouse to pivotal roles at prestigious organizations like the Barbican and Ravinia, he has left an indelible mark on the industry. And when one thinks of ticketing legends in the future, the name Angus Watson will surely be among the first to come to mind.
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Tags: Leadership , Ticketing Legends