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Ticket resale is not a business people love. It is a transaction, often an anxious one, and in 2016 StubHub decided it wanted to be associated with what happens after the purchase instead. Its parent company eBay announced a new vision and identity on 4 May 2016, arguing that the richest moments in life were becoming less about what people own and more about the experiences they share, and that those experiences had become a new social currency.

President Scott Cutler said live events were evolving alongside an experience economy that prizes one of a kind moments and shared memories, and that StubHub's new vision charted a path to be more mobile, social, personal and global. Chief marketing officer Jennifer Betka described a move from a static world where most of an event happened offline to a dynamic one where nearly everything is shared, and said the identity reflected StubHub's aim to connect people to events that inspire shareable memories.

The Drum heard the same story from international marketing director Charles Davies, who said the rebrand grew from the insight that the best experiences happen outside normal routines. He described competitors as very transactional and said StubHub wanted to lead with experiences, then follow with product features and a social strategy that encourages people to share that they are thinking of going, that they have bought a ticket and when they will arrive.

Visually, eBay's release promised a more contemporary and globally relevant logo, livelier design elements and a bolder, more flexible colour palette. The Drum reported a library of five colours, meant to let the company target different audiences and work with partners from pop singers to boxers. The speech bubble became the system's workhorse: StubHub said it now expresses the range of audience emotions and symbolises the stories fans share, and The Drum noted it can flex to frame the event or artist a customer is going to see. Davies said a new design book allowed the brand to tailor material for anything from Adele to boxing.

Losing the exclamation mark was overdue; it made the old logo shout like a discount banner. Turning the bubble into a container is the smart part, because it gives a reseller with no product of its own a way to borrow the energy of whatever is on stage. The risk is that a flexible bubble in five colours can become anonymous, and the experience economy language is more consultancy deck than consumer promise. Still, it repositioned a cold marketplace around the thing people actually buy tickets for.