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What makes live events feel personal in an age of algorithms making the calls? That's the tension marketers are living in right now. Ben Kruger, Chief Marketing Officer at Event Tickets Center, sits at the center of this shift. He has spent 20 years shaping server-side systems and performance marketing strategies, including a decade of persistence chasing a role at Google before landing a position in New York just as eCommerce demand went into overdrive during the pandemic. Now, at ETC, he runs marketing for more than 130,000 live events simultaneously. It's a scale that forces automation to step in. The industry moves in real time, resellers update prices by the hour, artists trend globally overnight, weather can shift demand before a stadium gate opens. Ben credits Google's AI tools and internal models as a competitive advantage, but he also talks openly about the risks. The early excitement of automation gave way to skepticism after seeing unaligned promises from new platforms and unpredictable campaign be