The sport and entertainment management industry offers an incredible array of roles and paths to career success. University of South Carolina alumnus Brannon Desseyn found his niche early, leading to a career as a leader with the world’s most prominent ticket sales platforms.

Like every student in South Carolina’s world-renowned Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, Desseyn was required to complete an internship and a practicum as an undergraduate. His practicum with Rockhouse Partners marketing agency in Nashville led to being hired full-time before he graduated in 2014 and launched his career. 

“One of the things that was really clear to me was there was this big opportunity to help people in the industry understand how they can use data to sell more tickets,” he says. His innovative thinking guided clients to focus on fan affinity to drive sales for events like college football bowl games.

"We got into trying to figure out the affinity of a fan based on where they were sitting in the stadium. Were they sitting on the South Carolina side or the Mississippi State side?" he says. This experience sparked his interest in using data to enhance customer engagement.

Desseyn’s next career step was joining Aloompa, the first to design apps for music festivals. He played a pivotal role in the development of the Bonnaroo app and worked on projects that utilized sensors to track festival-goers’ behaviors. He also worked on an activation with Coachella and H&M clothing stores that sold Coachella items, alerting Coachella fans when they were near an H&M store.

“What I was actually responsible for was gathering data using sensors around the music festival to figure out what sponsorships you're interacting with, what artists you're seeing, what people you're hanging out with,” he says. “That becomes really interesting data to understand what artists are actually driving people to the festival. How long are people interacting with sponsorship activations? Can we actually estimate the impact or the revenue generation that these sponsorships could have from these activations? So that was a really, really cool project for me to work on, and that was kind of my introduction to managing a technical product.”

Desseyn would then accept a management role with Ticketmaster, leading a team focused on using customer data to improve marketing and sponsorship efforts. His proudest accomplishment there was creating a system that could send real-time offers to concertgoers based on their ticket purchases. 

"We enabled Live Nation sponsorship to sell activations when people scanned into Live Nation amphitheaters. My team would basically look up that ticket scan in real-time and determine if [the customer] had an American Express card, and send a push notification offering a $25 credit," he says.

COVID-19 marked a turning point in Desseyn’s career. Ticketmaster limited investment during the pandemic, leading him to join Eventbrite, where he adapted the platform for virtual events. 

“One of the clients was a local beer festival in Nashville, and they moved everything to do virtual beer tastings,” he says. “It was really interesting to see the industry progress through COVID and help event producers survive during that time.”

Now a product lead at SeatGeek, Desseyn is excited about the future of ticketing technology, particularly in the realm of access control at venues.

“We’re thinking about facial recognition, biometric data. We see a future where those become available or impactful at entertainment venues as well,” he says. “AI is a really interesting piece. There's a lot of excitement, but no one has quite figured out how it's going to be impactful yet. So that's another area where we're excited to explore opportunities to make everybody's lives easier.”

It’s a bright future and an ever-evolving world for a man who was a self-described data nerd growing up. Taking Excel classes in school helped develop his passion for data, and he arrived in the industry just as the technological revolution of the iPhone, Facebook, Amazon and Google was hitting its peak.

“Before that, you didn't go to school to become a product manager. You had to take your skills and apply them. And so it really became my dream job. It was a perfect match between entertainment, technology and working on the business side of things,” he says.

As a USC student, he gravitated toward the entertainment side of sport and entertainment management. He remembers classes with Paul Graham and Todd Koesters as particularly influential.

“One group project for Dr. Koesters was finding a publicly traded company and mapping it to a sports team and having to develop a pitch,” he says. “That was really interesting and exciting for me, kind of the first place you start to get into solutioning, which is part of product management, telling that story.”

Desseyn has called Nashville home ever since finishing college at USC. Perhaps surprisingly given his career focus on technology, he and his wife and their son live on a small farm outside the city, with two dogs, two horses and 20 chickens.

A decade after his college graduation, with so much success already, Desseyn offers simple advice for current students: get involved and be open.

“There's a lot of opportunity to get involved in entertainment, whether through internships or just working with local bands, finding bands online that you want to help. If you are a self-starter and looking for those opportunities, you can really get involved even before you graduate and have a really stellar resume to take in,” he says. “An agency is a great place to intern because you get exposed to so many different types of work.I learned that I loved data, but also you get exposed to other  things that are applicable to the job you’re interested in.”