Supanova expands Leap partnership to power next phase of growth

Partner content – For almost 25 years, Supanova Comic Con & Gaming has built one of Australia’s most passionate pop culture communities, bringing together fans of film, television, gaming, comics, anime and more. As the event has grown, so too has the technology and marketing operations required to understand, reach and engage that audience.

 

Through its partnership with Leap Event Technology, Supanova is bringing together ticketing, its event app, onsite capabilities and marketing services, alongside its first-party audience data and marketing technology, to support the customer journey from initial awareness through to ticket purchase and the live experience. Results of Supanova’s partnership with Leap, and in particular Leap’s Marketing and Analytics team, have been noteworthy, with 50x Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and a year-on-year increase in revenue of 32%, representing remarkable growth in a challenging market.

The partnership is helping Supanova address a challenge familiar to many large-scale event organisers: how to turn significant volumes of audience data and engagement into ticket sales while simultaneously managing complex onsite operations, premium experiences, talent, exhibitors and an expanding B2B proposition.

For Stephen Stavroulakis, General Manager at Supanova, understanding the audience and having the technology to reach the right people with the right proposition has become fundamental to running a successful event.

Turning audience knowledge into ticket sales

Supanova’s consumer marketing strategy is supported by a significant first-party database built over years of events.

Using Audience Republic, Supanova captures and analyses ticket purchasing behaviour, identifying high-value customers, segments audiences, and understands the financial contribution generated by individual customers. This sits alongside Leap’s technology, which powers Supanova’s ticketing and the sale of tokens used by fans to purchase celebrity autographs and photographs.

“If all we did was market to our existing audience, we’d probably sell about 75% of the shows because we’ve just built such a powerful and extensive database and our audience is very passionate and engaged. We recently sent an EDM and achieved a massive 70% open rate,” Stavroulakis said.

Rather than treating the database as a single audience, Supanova segments communications according to customer behaviour and characteristics. “Our VIPs are always repeat customers, paying almost ten times what a normal ticket costs, and they’re very loyal. Our EDMs are designed to resonate with our VIPs by state and by age demographic,” Stavroulakis said.

Building anticipation – and converting it into sales

Supanova’s marketing calendar is deliberately structured around the way fans make purchasing decisions. The team aims to confirm as many celebrity guests as possible early, so that enthusiasm and demand are already building by the time tickets go on sale. Further guests are then announced in waves as they are confirmed, with some of the biggest names revealed closer to the event.

“We aim to have a strong group of guests confirmed before tickets go on sale, then continue releasing guests in waves as they lock in,” Stavroulakis said. “We’ve trained our audience to expect multiple releases of guests. We start with a couple of good ones, move to some bigger ones and then, by the end, go to our big ‘whammo’ to get people across the line.”

That timing is particularly important because approximately 70% of Supanova’s ticket sales occur in the final week. Many fans wait to see what the final line-up looks like before committing, particularly because guest cancellations are an unfortunate reality of the industry.

Supanova enhances these announcements through organic content, email, SMS, social media, paid advertising and traditional and digital out-of-home channels. Leap’s marketing services team manages Supanova’s paid campaigns across Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, with different campaigns targeting specific actors, franchises and audience interests.

New channels delivering growth

While Supanova benefits from decades of brand recognition and an established database, it continues to experiment with new ways of reaching audiences. One of its most successful recent additions has been SMS marketing.

“We’ve just introduced text marketing and SMS outreach. When I first came on board about two and a half years ago, I asked, ‘Why aren’t we doing text marketing?’ We eventually implemented it this year, and the results have been phenomenal,” Stavroulakis enthused.

Supanova has also changed the way it uses the large volume of content generated at its events.

“We had incredible video assets we weren’t leveraging fully. Now we’ve started taking video content, cutting it up and promoting it on YouTube and TikTok, generating huge engagement with about a 10-to-1 return. Between text marketing, TikTok, YouTube and our EDMs, our outreach is significantly turbocharged delivering powerful growth,” he reported.

Using audience insight to manage talent risk

For Supanova, marketing performance starts well before an advertisement is placed. Choosing the right celebrity guests can have a major impact on attendance, ticket sales and revenue. The business combines historical insights with feedback from its own audience and intelligence from other international conventions to determine which talent is likely to resonate.

“What we know is that franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek and Lord of the Rings, will always do very well. It’s a combination of what’s currently popular on the streaming platforms and what has historically always done well that we analyse,” Stavroulakis said.

Those decisions carry significant financial consequences. “It can send you bankrupt if you get it wrong, so there has to be a fiscal balance. You can’t bring in too many A-listers all at once because if some of them fail, you’re going to send the business to the brink,” Stavroulakis said.

“It’s about bringing in some really good people who aren’t necessarily going to cost you the earth, while still making sure you run a profitable show because you’ll get the people through the door,” he explains.

Why Supanova moved to Leap

Supanova had worked with its previous ticketing provider, Moshtix, for approximately 12 years when Stavroulakis began reviewing the business’s technology and commercial arrangements.

“Leap’s ticket percentage is already lower than competitors, but the key question for us was how will they treat our tokens? Leap’s answer was simple: they are treated like tickets. Which enables us to pay the same percentage on token sales as ticket sales. That one change alone saved us an enormous amount of money and was one of the major reasons we made the jump to Leap,” he stresses.Supanova had worked with its previous ticketing provider, Moshtix, for approximately two decades when Stavroulakis began reviewing the business’s technology and commercial arrangements.

With the existing contract approaching renewal, Supanova went to market and evaluated several providers, eventually narrowing its decision to US-based Tixr and Australian ticketing platform Ticketbooth, which has since rebranded as Leap Event Technology.

While technology was important, Stavroulakis said local operational support was also critical.

“The reason I ultimately chose Leap was because, for us to run our events in Australia, we need boots on the ground. Our ticketing partner has to provide ticket scanning staff, point-of-sale staff and operational support,” he said.

Commercial considerations were equally significant. Supanova generates revenue not only from admission tickets but also from tokens purchased for celebrity photographs and autographs, making the way those transactions were charged important to event profitability.

“Leap’s ticket percentage is already lower than competitors, but the key question for us was how will they treat our tokens? Leap’s answer was simple: they are treated like tickets. Which enables us to pay the same percentage on token sales as ticket sales. That one change alone saved us an enormous amount of money and was one of the major reasons we made the jump to Leap,” he stresses.

From ticketing provider to broader technology partner

As Ticketbooth transitioned into Leap, Supanova expanded the relationship beyond ticketing. Rather than negotiating individual solutions separately, Stavroulakis sought a longer-term partnership combining ticketing, marketing and the Supanova event mobile app.

“When they mentioned they were in the process of becoming Leap, I wanted to negotiate a broader partnership, beyond a one-year agreement. A longer-term relationship and stability was important to us,” Stavroulakis said.

“We’re now utilising Leap’s app, and it’s been fantastic. It’s helped us get more people onto the service, which has increased our SMS database and improved the overall experience we provide to patrons.”

The result was a multi year agreement bringing multiple aspects of Supanova’s event technology and marketing requirements into the broader Leap partnership.

“As part of that multi-year agreement, I bundled in the marketing services from Leap, all the ticketing services, the app and a number of other things. We have a solution that now really works for us and underpins future expansion,” Stavroulakis reported.

Expanding beyond B2C with Level Up

Supanova’s next phase of growth is increasingly extending beyond its traditional consumer audience.

Through Level Up, Supanova has introduced a Friday event designed to connect students and educators with businesses, universities, TAFEs and technology organisations. After beginning with an event in Brisbane, the concept has expanded quickly into other Australian markets.

“We are now in our third year of Level Up. Level Up started with one event in Brisbane, which went incredibly well. The following year we launched in Brisbane and Adelaide, again to much success. This year we ran in Sydney and we’re running Adelaide and Brisbane again. Next year we’ll deliver five Level Up events by introducing Perth and Melbourne into the mix as well,” he enthused.

Because student and teacher attendance is free, the model creates a new audience and potential growth channel while increasing the importance of corporate partnerships and sponsorship revenue. That is shifting Supanova’s marketing requirements from predominantly B2C engagement towards a combination of consumer marketing and B2B sales.

“Previously we weren’t doing any of that. If I look at our current exhibitor list, which is in the thousands, we’re basically order takers. We open bookings, they come to us, they attend every show and they exhibit across all six shows. Selling exhibition space isn’t really the problem,” Stavroulakis said.

“But now we’re examining sponsors and corporate partnerships much more closely. We’re moving towards introducing a lot more B2B marketing than we’ve ever done before,” he said.

Supanova has begun using LinkedIn advertising through Leap alongside email outreach and LinkedIn Sales Navigator as it develops this capability. In addition, the Leap Mobile App offers features that elevate sponsor and partner engagement with attendees, increasing ROI and providing actual metrics to evaluate results, something that can also be used to upsell partner packages.

“If you think of marketing and sales like a car, marketing is the accelerator. From our perspective, our consumer marketing is already strong. What needs to improve now is generating more sales from the corporate side,” Stavroulakis said.

Connecting the data behind the experience

The broader transformation has reinforced another lesson for Supanova: technology delivers significantly more value when information is connected.

Historically, different parts of the business were supported by multiple systems that did not communicate effectively with one another.

“Centralising our data has made a massive impact for us bringing it together unlocks massive efficiency gains and richer analytics,” Stavroulakis said.

Supanova is also exploring Leap Conventions – an event management tool developed specifically for the fandom convention market providing systems that manage diverse requirements such as artist and guest management, staff and volunteer management, site management, and even vendor and exhibitor site sales. Leap Conventions can serve as a bridge within the Leap technology environment, providing connections between the mobile app, event websites, and operations. “Currently we’re leveraging a free trial of Leap Conventions to act as a middle bridge,” Stavroulakis said. For Supanova, the utilisation of integrated Leap systems demonstrates how event technology is moving well beyond simply processing ticket transactions.

Ticketing remains critical, but the opportunity increasingly lies in connecting ticketing with audience data, marketing, apps, onsite operations and emerging B2B opportunities. As Supanova approaches its 25th anniversary, those capabilities are helping the business understand its audiences more deeply, engage them across more channels and build new avenues for growth.

 

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