Geoff Shames has been a Hive partner for twelve years, which might make him the longest-running one on the books. He found the platform before it was a platform, back when the team was working with bedroom DJs doing SoundCloud drops and free downloads.
Today he runs an agency that handles tour advertising and built an automated ad deployment tool called Event Sheet.
On a recent episode of Backstage, Geoff sat down with Ian and Pat to talk about where AI is actually delivering results in live event marketing and why the biggest barrier to adoption is not what most people think.
The real barrier isn't resistance. It's the starting line.
The common narrative is that live events is slow to adopt AI. Creatives protecting their turf. Promoters who do not want to hear about it.
Geoff sees it differently, and he has the client conversations to back it up.
"I don't even know that many people are hesitant to AI," he said. "I think they don't know where to start."
Event marketers are not debating whether AI is real. They are slammed. Three on-sales this week, a newsletter deadline, a headliner who just changed the flyer. AI does not slot into a workflow unless someone shows you exactly where it fits.
Geoff draws the line between functional AI and replacement AI. The functional side saves time through research, ad analysis, and workflow automation. That is where adoption is happening. The replacement side generates the flyer or writes copy from scratch. That is where creatives push back.
"Nobody looks at Zapier and is like, oh, Zapier is going to replace my job," he said.
One question that changed the playbook
Geoff's agency built custom GPTs to analyze ad performance. They export raw campaign data, feed it in, and ask questions about benchmarks and blind spots. By loading six months of ad data into the GPTs and iterating at three, six, and twelve month intervals, Geoff's team drove some of their costs down by as much as 30 percent.
But the best insight came from the simplest prompt. Geoff loaded all of their ad data and campaign strategy into a GPT and asked what they were missing. The answer came back blunt: they weren't doing anything after events. He didn't disagree. They had a small internal playbook, a post-event ad to push SMS signups for the next show, but not much beyond that.
That single prompt surfaced an obvious gap and unlocked a whole category of post-event plays his team had never run.
The 48 hours nobody is using
Geoff's agency started running post-show merch sale ads targeted at fans who had engaged in the previous seven days in that market. The ads ran for 24 to 48 hours after the show and then shut off.
"It was an absolute smash," Geoff said.
Fans are riding the high from the night before. The merch table line was too long, or they did not want to carry a bag all night. So you hit them the next morning.
"Yo, thank you so much, Kansas City, that was phenomenal. If you didn't pick up your merch, here it is."
That window after the last encore is the most emotionally charged touchpoint in the marketing cycle. Fan intent is at its peak. And the vast majority of independent promoters do nothing with it.
The same window works for SMS signups, presale pushes, and first-party data capture at the exact moment the fan relationship is strongest. When someone opts into your SMS list the morning after a show they loved, that is an owned relationship. Not rented from a social platform and not dependent on an algorithm.
Almost nobody in the independent space is running this systematically.
Sold out IS NOT THE FINISH LINE
Most teams treat a sell-out as the end of the marketing job. Geoff treats it as the beginning.
"Now you have scarcity on your side," he said. "Tickets are no longer available. Now everyone will jump through 30 hoops to get a ticket that they can't buy."
The play: run contests for guest list spots. Collect phone numbers. Get fans to commit to future shows while the energy is fresh. Reaching them costs nothing. You are giving away a guest list spot you were going to give to someone else anyway.
If you announce a second date, you walk into the on-sale with a pre-qualified list. If you do not, you still captured the most motivated segment of your audience for the next tour cycle.
This connects to something Geoff sees coming. Venues evaluated not just by room size and location, but by their ability to move inventory through their own fan data. How many verified, high-affinity contacts do they have in email and SMS? Can they actually sell the show?
"I definitely have venues I prefer working with more than others, because I know they're good," he said. "They're going to help."
Venues investing in first-party data today are building an advantage that compounds. The ones treating data capture as an afterthought are going to feel the gap.
Automate the hygiene. Free up the hours that matter.
Geoff calls the marketing baseline "event hygiene." On-sale announce. Before-you-go email. Flash sale cadence. Post-show follow-up. If you perform these steps at this cadence, you will sell more tickets. The best teams run this playbook on every event.
Most teams do not. Not because they lack talent. Because they lack time.
"People are slammed," Geoff said. "It was too hard for us to launch a 70-date tour. And we had to build a tool."
That tool became Event Sheet, which deploys ad campaigns for a 200-date tour in 90 seconds. It removes the data entry so the marketer can focus on strategy.
Geoff sees live events and e-commerce as mirror images. Music and entertainment is ten years ahead on creative and fandom, but ten years behind on performance marketing fundamentals. The teams closing that gap pull tactics from other industries instead of waiting for someone in live events to figure it out.
"If Procter and Gamble is spending a bunch of money on CTV, there has to be a reason," he said.
Where the freed-up time goes
The point of automating the hygiene is not efficiency for its own sake. It is creating space for the moves that require a human.
Geoff is obsessed with pattern disruption. His agency has crushed campaigns on Tabula and Bing, channels where nobody in live events is spending. He is building creative intelligence into Event Sheet using machine vision to analyze which ad creative performs best. He is exploring AI video clones of artists for personalized SMS outreach.
You do not get to the frontier work until the basics are handled.
"Writing emails faster, that's not the thing to be staking your success on," he said. "It's got to be something else."
The something else is using SMS to reach a younger audience for a legacy act trending on TikTok, running a post-show merch push while fans are still riding the high from the night before, treating a sold-out show as the start of the campaign rather than the end of it, and building the kind of loyalty program nobody in live events has pulled off properly yet. These moves require a marketer who understands the market, the artist, and the moment.
AI does not replace that instinct. It gives you the time to act on it.
Start with one question
If your team has not started, do not try to overhaul your workflow. Export your ad data from the last six months. Drop it into ChatGPT or Claude. Ask the question Geoff asked.
What are we not thinking about?
That is how his team found their best tactic of the year. The same approach works against email engagement data, SMS conversion rates, and ticket sales patterns. You do not need to be technical. You just need to be curious and willing to experiment.
