Dodgers Enter Ticket Deal With ETM Entertainment

The Los Angeles Dodgers have ended the team’s 14-year relationship with Ticketmaster, opting to sign a deal with an upstart Orange County company that will sell the team’s tickets through electronic kiosks in Southern California grocery stores.

The multiyear contract with the Dodgers is a boon for ETM Entertainment Network Inc., a small, Costa Mesa-based company best known for handling Pearl Jam concert ticket sales in 1995, and the USC football and basketball home games this year and last.

“For them to work with us, we consider it a major seal of approval,” said Peter Schniedermeier, senior vice president at ETM.

The deal does not include the 22,000 or so season tickets the Dodgers sell through their own sales force. Nor does it include box-office ticket sales on game day or advance telephone ticket sales, which are also handled by Dodger employees.

Dodger executives acknowledged that sales through ETM’s kiosks are expected to be a small fraction of total sales and that they would be elated if the numbers approached the volume handled by Ticketmaster in recent years--about 100,000 tickets per season.

But Debra Kay Duncan, director of ticket operations for the Dodgers, said the team hopes that making tickets available in grocery stores will spur impulse buys and boost sales among families.

The Dodgers selected ETM because “they’re heading in the direction of the future of ticket sales,” Duncan said. “We’ve always felt that this is where ticket sales should be today.”

The company’s kiosks allow consumers to view diagrams of Dodger Stadium, seeing where their seats are located before making a purchase. The consumer can then buy the tickets by inserting a credit card into a slot in the kiosk, company executives said. Each ticket purchase will include a surcharge of about $1.50.

The Dodgers’ switch to ETM could be a risky one. Attempts at kiosk sales by other teams, including the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins, have either been disappointments or failures, industry experts said.

And even though ETM executives said they have plans to have as many as 100 kiosks in Hughes, Pavilions and other stores by the end of the year, for now there are only seven in place. By contrast, Los Angeles-based Ticketmaster has more than 175 outlets in Southern California, mainly in Blockbuster Video, Tower Record and department stores.

Duncan said the Dodgers were willing to continue to do business with Ticketmaster, but that the company refused unless it was through an exclusive arrangement.

Ticketmaster executives declined to comment on their negotiations with the Dodgers. Fred Rosen, chief executive of Ticketmaster, simply said, “We chose to pass.”

But Ticketmaster sources said that the company’s sales volume with the Dodgers was minuscule compared with the volume of business done with other teams, including the Cleveland Indians.

That was largely because the Dodgers were the only team that assigned Ticketmaster an allocation of several hundred specific seats for each game, instead of allowing the company to sell the best seats available at the time of the sale. Sources said the allocated seats cost more and were generally inferior to those available at the box office or by calling the Dodgers directly.

Ticketmaster continues to have exclusive deals with 75 professional sports teams, including the Anaheim Angels in baseball, the Los Angeles Lakers in basketball and the Los Angeles Kings in hockey.

The Dodgers were a breakthrough client for Ticketmaster in the early 1980s, and now could play that role again with ETM, a 3-year-old company trying to crack the competitive ticket sales business.

Schniedermeier said that, when idle, the kiosks will show highlights from recent games as well as pictures of the Dodgers’ star players. He added that he hopes the Dodger images will help generate traffic at the kiosks, and lead to sales of concert tickets, ski passes and other items offered through ETM.

“A lot of people will look at the kiosks simply because the Dodgers are on it,” Schniedermeier said. Duncan said that several hundred Dodger tickets were sold through the kiosks on Monday, the first day they were available.