At the age of 79, Roger Tomlinson enjoys a tranquil life in the coastal town of Llantwit Major in South Wales, where he spends time tending to his garden and exploring his love of cooking. But to say he is “retired” would be somewhat of an understatement.
“I am ‘mostly’ retired, but on a pro-bono basis, I still talk to various arts organizations, large and small,” he says. “When organizations are in a bit of difficulty and need some independent advice, I’m more than willing to help. The awful thing is that it's very often when they are in a very difficult situation, and very often, they don't realize how difficult it is. And then you actually find you're trying to talk to and help people who, in a sense, don't know what they don't know. It's very challenging.”
When Roger is not travelling somewhere to help someone, you are likely to find him at a local or regional venue enjoying the retirement part of his retirement.
“I still go out and attend the arts all the time,” he says. “It’s a poor month if I’ve only gone to see eight things.”
Roger after a visit to Glyndebourne Opera in June 2015.
With his mind as sharp as ever, Roger still vividly recalls being taken to the theater by his Auntie Eva when he was just 13 years old.
“I went to the first night of West Side Story, which had been brought into the U.K. from the States. When I watched the opening scene of this new musical, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was just astonished at that piece of theatre, the energy, the whole thing of how it came together.”
Around the same time, he was actively involved behind the scenes in his school’s drama club.
“For some reason, I became somebody who was doing lighting and sound and bits of stage management and film projection,” he recalls. “When I went to university, that really stood me in good stead because … the film society needed a projectionist; the student theatre groups wanted lighting. That led to organizing gigs, including bringing Eric Clapton and Cream.”
Thus began a career that spanned more than half a century. “I had great times as a student through university and going into working life [at the] age of 23,” he says. “I'm now 79. You can do a hell of a lot in that time.”
Indeed, he has accomplished so much with such passion that he is viewed with legendary status in our industry.
Roger’s first job was in marketing, as U.K. House and Publicity Manager at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent. He stayed there for just two years before being offered a job at the newly opened Leeds Playhouse in 1970. That led to a gig with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon for the 1972 season of The Romans. And then, his past caught up to him in a most fortuitous way.
Roger Tomlinson circa 1970.
"During my time as a student at Aberystwyth University, David Tinker, the Director of Visual Arts, and I developed a design brief for an arts center that included a concert hall, theater, art gallery, studio theater, etc. When I was in Stratford, I got phoned by the university, and they said, ‘Hello Roger, we've built it. Do you want to come and run it?’ It was an amazing opportunity.”
“The Guardian newspaper sent a correspondent who I'd had lots of dealings with in my jobs,” Roger reminisces. “He wrote a piece saying he had just visited post-revolutionary Britain because can you imagine a town of 12,000 people with a university of 2,500 people every year had built a 1,350-seat concert hall, a 350-seat theater with a full fly tower, and a huge art gallery, 120-seat studio theater, etc., with an astonishing view from my office looking out to sea over Cardigan Bay. It was quite interesting to ask visitors if they realized that the fish were not great attendees.”
Photos of Aberystwyth Arts Centre in 1972.
Roger’s role at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, in turn, led to even more opportunities. In 1975, Roger set up and ran Theatr Clwyd in North Wales, one of the largest producing theatres in the United Kingdom.
Roger, left, backstage at Theatr Clwyd with Artistic Director George Roman in 1977.
“When your career just grows fast and organically like that, it is about putting in the extra miles,” Roger says. “It is about, as we used to say at Theatr Clwyd, running on the walls in the sense that the theater had a number of stairwells, and the staff used to joke that we went up and down those stairwells, not on the stairs, but by running on the walls. And it's about making sure you've got a great team around you who are focused on achieving everything that the place possibly could and thinking out of the box, all those expressions, doing things differently. But I used to point out to visitors I could only see sheep on the hills around Mold. I once summed up the artistic policy we had both in Aberystwyth and Theatr Clwyd, which is whatever anybody else is doing, we're going to do the other thing. And that made us. We are very lucky because it worked, and the funders liked it, including both our supportive local authorities, the people who ran the various towns we were in, and also the county in the case of Clwyd, which is behind us to this day.”
Theatr Clwyd, a multi-auditorium producing theatre complex in Mold, North Wales, opened in 1976, pictured here early in the £48 million redevelopment project to be completed in 2025.
He adds, “I [ultimately] decided to move on from Theatr Clwyd because, in a sense, I kind of felt that I couldn't take it any further, and I was already heavily involved in organizing the emerging circuit of new venues in Wales and wanted to do more.”
Roger at INTIX 2016 in Anaheim.
Roger then accepted a position as Drama Director for the Arts Council of Wales. This body funds theaters and companies in Wales, including the Welsh National Opera, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and all the art galleries.
“That was a fascinating experience, because I was then sitting, looking at and observing how all these different organizations work,” he says. “What made them successful or not? What were the challenges they had?”
He stayed with the Arts Council for six and a half years before deciding to set out on his own.
“I had a lot of experience and a body of knowledge that I could take into a consultancy,” he says. “And the timing was right. Because Margaret Thatcher’s government was cutting funding to the arts, a lot of organizations were struggling and needed help. I thought, right, if I become a consultant, there’s a lot I can do to help.”
In 1988, he founded A.R.T.S., which stood for Administration, Research, Training Services, and featured Roger’s initials in the middle of the acronym by design. The independent research and consultancy practice would complete numerous feasibility studies and economic impact analyses, develop cultural strategies, prepare business plans, develop training, research customer behavior and prepare capital development strategies for the cities of Cardiff and Glasgow and more.
“To my astonishment, despite my fear and trepidation, the consultancy business was immediately successful, and I was a very busy person,” Roger shares.
It turned out that various arts councils in the U.K. were interested in skills development, so A.R.T.S. started running training courses in house management, box office management, production management, overall management and so on. “It was a key thing to try and help people be more successful,” Roger says.
Roger (left) at the INTIX Chair’s Reception in Denver in 2015, with L-R Craig Ricks, Angus Watson and Chloe Watson.
One of Roger’s clients was the Arts Council England, which commissioned him to write a specification for what a ticketing system should be able to do from a marketing point of view. This led to his first book, “Boxing Clever,” in 1993, about database-driven ticketing, marketing and customer relationship management (CRM). The Arts Council, meanwhile, shared the spec he had written with various ticketing companies, one of which was Dataculture. The company was run by Roger’s friend, Jonathan Hyams, who had also been a consultant in the ‘80s. He and Roger shared a passion for audience development and the idea that organizations should collaborate, not compete, on that front. Dataculture had developed a system called Databox, which was rapidly growing. “He got in touch with me and said that he'd got this Arts Council document, and would I like to come and talk him through it all because he wanted to implement all of it,” Roger, who would join the company in 1998 as Director of Business Development, says.
“He made me an offer I couldn't really refuse because of its financial value,” Roger recalls. “I was tired and kind of wanting a change, perhaps, too.”
What Roger did not realize at the time, but quickly found out, was that Dataculture was rapidly growing across Europe, which made it a takeover target. “Tickets.com came along. They were buying up code lines all over the States and in Europe,” Roger says. “I suddenly found myself a year or so in, working for them as Head of Business Development in Europe, which was very enjoyable.”
However, Roger did not stay in this role for long, leaving in 2003 to join ACT Consultant Services as a partner and continue the work he had done at A.R.T.S.
“At the time, it seemed like the ambitions for the development of ticketing, and particularly the very first stages of going digital and introducing online ticket sales and so on, promised huge opportunities to the arts and entertainment industry,” he says. “For example, Databox included one of the first iterations of doing online sales. But it just seemed to me that once one was part of the Tickets.com conglomerate, and it was actually true with what was going on in other sections of the ticketing industry at the time, it became about opportunities to simply maximize revenue and reduce costs, and not about reaching out and developing new audiences. And that was my primary interest and concern.”
In 2010, following his time with ACT Consultant Services, he founded Roger Tomlinson Limited and became a Senior Consultant with Baker Richards. He started working with colleagues and co-authors Tim Roberts and Vicki Allpress Hill on projects in Australia and New Zealand with seminars on database-driven marketing, which led to the publication of a new book, “Full House,” in those countries in 2006, followed in Spanish as “Aforo Completo” in 2011; he became a consultant to Creative New Zealand for over a decade. During this time, Roger continued to be viewed as one of the world’s leading experts on online ticketing technologies, marketing and audience engagement. Indeed, his consulting projects extended across several continents, organizations, software solutions, and every facet of arts and entertainment ticketing that one can imagine.
Roger (right) with Jack Rubin, then CEO & Co-Founder of Tessitura, at INTIX in 2015.
Roger first became a member of BOMI, now INTIX, around the same time he joined Dataculture. However, his involvement as a volunteer began years earlier.
“I first got involved with BOMI as a volunteer working and helping the late Major Brian Leishman, the man who ran The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo and who was determined, along with Patricia Spira, to bring INTIX into Europe (Europe Talks Tickets, ETT). That was in 1991, I'm thinking. But I don't think I joined [as a member] until 1998.”
Roger (right) with Tracy Noll, then INTIX Board Chair, as he receives a plaque commemorating his service to the Board of Directors.
Roger would also continue to give back by serving two full terms on the INTIX board and sharing his expertise as a speaker and on committees. What has INTIX meant to him over the years?
“Fairly obviously, you meet professional colleagues, but actually quite often it is meeting professional colleagues from a different context, perhaps from a different country, perhaps from a different culture, people who work in sports, museums, visitor attractions and the like, as well as arts and culture. I think that is one of the things that I most got out of BOMI, particularly its efforts in bringing conferences to Europe. It was phenomenal. It made a huge difference to us.”
Roger speaking on a panel at the 35th Annual INTIX Conference & Exhibition in Chicago in 2014.
He continues, “One of the things that we used to talk about with the board was the importance of bringing together those people from around the world and finding that we shared a lot of values and a huge amount of knowledge. We also needed to share that knowledge to grow our industry and improve how it worked. I suppose I would say one of the things that was really enjoyable about that process was that, in an odd kind of way, the whole networking part of BOMI and INTIX and helping staff get on the ladder was very important.”
In 2009, Roger won the Patricia G. Spira Lifetime Achievement Award from INTIX. Understanding that it is important to be recognized and to recognize one’s peers, when he was invited to chair the INTIX Awards Committee, he persuaded his colleagues to institute what is today the True Tickets Young Ticketing Professional of the Year Award, which was first handed out in 2012. “It seemed to me very important to recognize that there were people rising up in the profession, and we needed to give them recognition on their way,” he says.
Roger also offered some advice to those still building their careers.
“I repeatedly say to people that we're not in the business of delivering transactions. We are in the business of delivering engagement, and it's so important that we treat people as individuals and take a holistic approach, which is that the ticketing is, yes, at the center of it, but it's the passport to a much bigger and more important experience in people's lives.”
After leaving Tickets.com, Roger credits his involvement with INTIX for his seamless return to consultancy.
“It was ridiculously seamless that I was able to leave Tickets.com and had a full diary within a few weeks,” he recalls. “I had started to get invitations to speak and work abroad, and there were people who I'd sometimes met through INTIX conferences who then wanted me to work with them. That meant I was able to do things like an amazing project called Project Audience, which was commissioned by the Mellon Foundation in the U.S. … That was basically about helping small to medium-sized organizations in the States and how we could get them to have better tools to make it easier for them to run their organizations with limited resources and be more effective. That was a fascinating project that involved working with people across the States and having discussions about it. If it had one good effect, it seemed to stimulate some of the smaller ticketing companies in the U.S. to wake up to the very specific needs of some of the small- to medium-sized organizations who … just because they are in a small town and a long way from a big center, doesn't mean that the organization doesn't want sophisticated tools for CRM and engagement.”
Roger has seen tremendous positive changes in the ticketing industry over the years, including the development of tools that can drive public engagement, marketing, audience development, fundraising, loyalty, sophisticated membership schemes and more. On the flip side, he says that technology has unfortunately reduced the ability of organizations to talk and relate to people genuinely.
“Online ticketing has potentially completely changed what ticketing is and how it works,” he notes. “In my view, the major, major loss we've had is that we have taken out that intimate, one-to-one dialogue with people who want to ask us questions, who want to understand more about the shows … I don’t want to sound negative, but it is worrying to hear of the number of organizations where, in an odd kind of way, communication has been depersonalized. Yet all the sophistication of direct marketing tools should mean that we are able to talk to people and communicate with them in a much more individualistic way, and not talk to them all together as one; I wonder what AI might enable.”
Roger, right, with ticketing colleagues Robert Bennett (left) and Brian Richeson (center).
In closing, Roger hammered home the importance of relationship building by referencing an artist who wasn’t even born when he started in the industry.
“We recently had Taylor Swift in Cardiff … Loads of people were in the Principality Stadium watching her. The way she has worked with her fans and the loyalty she stimulates, and for people who'd flown in from the States to see that concert. They're in a community. They're in a tribe around her. It’s great stuff.”
And with that, this legend of ticketing was drawn back into his current surroundings, his lovely garden where one could hear birds singing in the background as Roger put his reminiscing behind him.
“What you probably can’t hear is the bumblebee that’s buzzing away in the flowers just a short distance from me,” he adds. “I’m very lucky. I only live a mile or so from the sea, I have a garden filled with birds and pollinators, and I’m growing things to eat, of course. I grow all my own herbs, broad beans, peas, French beans, lettuce, leeks and carrots. There's nothing nicer than growing and harvesting a carrot and then cooking it.”
Except, one might dare add, a lifetime of memories of an illustrious career that has left an indelible mark on the arts and culture, entertainment and ticketing industries.
As Roger continues to share his expertise and enjoy his well-deserved retirement, the legacy he has built will undoubtedly inspire future generations. His contributions will be remembered for their impact on the industry and the heartfelt dedication he brought to every endeavor.
In the end, Roger Tomlinson’s career is a powerful reminder that a life dedicated to the arts is not just about making a living but about making a difference. And as he enjoys the fruits (and vegetables) of his labor in his garden, one can’t help but feel that much like his beloved carrots, his legacy will continue to grow and thrive for many years to come.
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