Pacers plan to connect fans with food faster
App helps people find shorter lines
The Indiana Pacers want fans at their home games to spend more time cheering for the team and less time waiting in line for tacos.
To that end, the NBA team is working with a startup called WaitTime, which will use cameras and artificial intelligence to send fans to the shortest lines. If it works, the Pacers could stand to make a lot more money — a report this year by Oracle Corp. estimated that more than 40 per cent of American fans said they’d abandoned queues in the past year without buying anything because they got tired of waiting. The same report estimated that fan spending in the U.S. would jump 42 per cent if wait times were halved.
Pacers Sports and Entertainment will pay $150,000 in upfront costs and about $9,000 a month to WaitTime, which will equip the arena with cameras that take 10 snapshots per second. Their software turns those photos into information that’s broadcast to fans on monitors around the venue. It’s also shared in real time with the team and Levy Restaurants, which operates the 18,500-seat Bankers Life Fieldhouse in downtown Indianapolis.
“We already know our sales numbers per stand,” Pacers’ Chief Technology Officer Ed Frederici said. “Now we’ll know how long someone waits in line per stand, and how much attrition there is per stand. We’ll have a finer grain of detail to optimize the fan experience.”
The Pacers will also have the option to sell ad space on WaitTime’s monitors, which were scheduled to make their debut Thursday night when the team hosted the Chicago Bulls in a pre-season game. Frederici said the team expects the sponsorship to cover the roughly $108,000 in annual costs with ad sales, and maybe more.
Founded in 2013, WaitTime has done pilot programs with the Pistons, hockey’s Detroit Red Wings and football’s Detroit Lions.
“Some teams still put employees on the concourse with clickers and clipboards trying to count people in line, and count who leaves,” said Zachary Klima, WaitTime founder and chief executive officer. “We’re trying to revolutionize that process.”
In addition to the monitors, fans can access WaitTime’s data through the Pacers’ mobile app, part of the team’s push to make it a bigger resource for its fan base.