Multi-market live events rarely offer a clean experiment. A single program running in several markets during the same seven-day window comes close: the same format, sold to different audiences, under different local conditions, with every dollar of spend and every ticket sold logged the same way. Five such runs closed out Week 1. Here is what the data says.

The week closed at 25,531 tickets and $1.26M in total revenue, against $165.3K in media investment. Blended cost per acquisition landed at $6.47 a ticket; blended return on ad spend at 7.6x. Those are the numbers that get quoted. The more useful ones sit underneath them.

Across the five runs, CAC ranged from $4.56 to $11.53 per ticket, a 2.5x spread in the same week, with the same format and the same offer. ROAS moved between 3.95x and 11.27x over the same set. Line the runs up by ticket volume and a pattern shows, imperfect but real: the smallest run, 3,040 tickets, carried the highest CAC; the largest, 6,744 tickets, carried the lowest. The three in between don’t sit on a straight line. One of the higher-volume runs undercuts the trend with a CAC nearly as low as the top performer’s, but the two extremes alone are hard to read as coincidence. Scale doesn’t guarantee efficiency. It correlates with it often enough to matter.

Net revenue per attendee (ticket and concession revenue combined, after acquisition cost) ranged from $33.97 to $46.87 across the same five runs, and it doesn’t track CAC in a straight line either. The run with the second-lowest CAC also produced the second-lowest net revenue per person; two runs with distinctly higher acquisition costs out-earned it on a per-head basis. Cost efficiency and per-person yield are different questions. A single blended ROAS figure tends to answer only one of them.

Week 2 adds two more concurrent runs to the set. Same read, more data points.