Slap Global brings humor to the stressful ticketing landscape with ‘Daily Show’-style campaign about a fake investigation.

Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the ticketing world knows how broken it is, and it’s getting worse. SeatGeek acknowledges this in a new campaign from Slap Global that humorously positions the lack of problems with its own app—which simply works as it’s supposed to—as a news story worth investigating.

The creative centers on a smarmy journalistic interviewer, played by improv comedian Matt Cook, who grills SeatGeek execs about the app’s features. Cook hams it up throughout, even though he finds little scandal—or rather, that the scandal is a ticketing app that won’t give you endless headaches.

The spots were directed by Matt Aselton at Arts & Sciences and edited by Geoff Hounsell at Arcade.

Slap Global’s creatives told Ad Age in an email that they started with the truth that the bar for customer experience is incredibly low in the ticketing industry. The line
“Expect the Expected” came first, and everything else flowed from there.

“We were in the area of treating a non-fantastic thing as big news,” they said. “That led us to some of segments of ‘The Daily Show’ where they investigate news stories with a tongue-in-cheek manner. And that got us to our journalist/interviewer character. The campaign idea also let us talk about all the other innovations the SeatGeek developers have to make buying concert and sports tickets a no-brainer.”