• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 2, 2010

A trio of former Ticketmaster executives on Tuesday debuted Rockhouse Partners -- a Nashville, TN-based agency, which aims to connect brands with sponsorship opportunities in the entertainment industry.

Co-founders Tawn Albright, Kevin Brown, and Joe Kustelski all hail from Echo, Ticketmaster Entertainment's digital marketing firm, where Albright served as CEO, Brown led strategic marketing, and Kustelski was vice president of product and technology.

"Sponsorships have become the glue in connecting brands to the entertainment industry," said Albright. "The way the industry is moving, brands are demanding more value in the form of measuring data and proving ROI."

Rockhouse Partners' initial clients include C3 Presents -- organizers of Lollapalooza and the Austin City Limits Music Festival; Lance Armstrong and the RadioShack Pro Cycling Team; and several regional partners.

Founded in Nashville over ten years ago, Echo specialized in managing artists' online presence. Ticketmaster acquired the agency in mid-2007 for a reported $25 million, but last April announced plans to relocate its existing operations to the company's Los Angeles headquarters.

At Echo, the executives who would become Rockhouse's founders managed 15 million consumer database relationships, 200,000 paid fan club subscriptions, one million mobile fan records, and more than $25 million in ticket sales annually.

According to Kustelski, that experience assures that Rockhouse will be anything but a run-of-the-mill marketing firm. "We launched this venture hell-bent on not creating just another digital marketing firm," he said. "We're creating scalable technology products that address specific business opportunities, we understand the value of data, and we bake measurement into everything we do."