Dive Brief:
- This past weekend, Fandango tested allowing people to buy movie tickets from within the Facebook app, according to a report by the The New York Times.
- Fandango President Paul Yanover told the Times the idea went beyond purchasing ease to also make buying movie tickets more social through options to invite friends.
- “Consumers, particularly young ones, find it inconvenient to hop into different silos to get something done. They want it all in one place," Julie Ask, an analyst with Forrester, told the Times. "That sounds obnoxious, I know — the definition of a ‘first-world problem’ — but it’s true, and Fandango is solving it for them.”
Dive Insight:
Fandango's new deal with Facebook illustrates how social media apps on mobile devices are slowly becoming one stop shops for services and products — a trend that follows recent research demonstrating that mobile users spend 85% of their time on apps, with only their top five apps seeing frequent engagement, according to TechCrunch.
Fandango, which is owned by NBCUniversal, seems to be ahead of the curve when it comes to complete social media integration for the platform, as it already allows Apple iMessage users to buy tickets in-app and is further planning to launch purchasing options on Snapchat, which reaches about 150 million daily users globally. Last week, Snapchat announced the development of three new consumer targeting tools for marketers, so you can probably expect a few of those freshly optimized ads to have Fandango in the title in the near future.
While Fandango has dominated the mobile ticketing space for several years, the category is heating up this year, with newcomer Atom Tickets, which is backed by several major studios, entering several markets and planning a national rollout before the end of the year.