A Bow to the Silver Screen
For generations, Hollywood studios have connected with passionate audiences through stories that move us, taking us on journeys to distant lands and foreign minds, but it is only in recent years that studios have begun to truly know the audience beyond the screen.
The surge in streaming, particularly the blockbuster launch of Disney+ in 2019, is a testament to the power of stories to take us to new places. It is a major step-change for channeling consumers’ emotional engagement with entertainment product toward developing new revenue streams. It also demonstrates how the studio successfully leverages a portfolio strategy of acquisitions, innovation, direct investment, and smart merchandising to increase the metabolism of direct fan engagement.
Engaging Entertainment Fans.
Audiences have always had a desire to be a part of the fictional worlds they know and love, but until recently, those stories were bound by a studio system that viewed the theatrical window in one of two states: open or closed. At the very peak of cinema-led movie consumption, the results told a dramatic story: beyond opening weekend, even the most successful blockbuster box office receipts typically followed an exponential decay of 50% of the prior week’s gross, baselining about six weeks post-premiere.
Since the beginning of time, the customer relationship has been owned by intermediaries: publishing and cinemas. At the box office and behind the scenes, it's clear that valuable brand equity is caught somewhere between authorship and distribution, and might offer even greater artistic and commercial success beyond the conventional model.
Shaping the future of entertainment would require transforming the studio mindset to embrace a more persistent and personalized audience connection beyond the ticketed transaction.
This movement is an entire ecosystem of engagement that starts with the underlying movement strategy of the story itself. Today, we shine a lens on one iconic experience originating in a galaxy far, far away, as a stepping stone for the larger industry transformation toward greater fan focus and audience engagement.
Merging Virtual with Reality
As Chief Experience Officer of The VOID, I led a multi-disciplinary team that created a working model of virtual reality (VR) and translated it into an award-winning, multi-destination experience with the launch of Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, produced by ILMxLAB. Starting with two Disney flagships in California and Florida, we launched a dozen destinations and activations in 18 months across North America, UK and UAE, ushering in a new wave of storytelling for thousands of guests everyday.
How It Worked
The VOID was a destination that inspired you and your friends to explore fully immersive environments as active participants in the stories you love. Delivering cinematic adventures on physical stages, it engaged all the senses, creating shared memories in pursuit of a common goal. It was for everyone.
Beyond seeing and hearing, guests explored untethered while picking up objects, feeling heat and cold, and even caught the scent of burnt marshmallows in Ghostbusters. One of the hallmarks of The VOID was the unmistakable sense of presence, where each step transformed the illusion as the experience unfolds.
Earned Secret
The cinematic entry point was just the beginning, as the key to the plot ultimately resides within the hearts of entertainment fans, whose affinities are to a specific character franchise, genre, actor, or director.
For The VOID, the dominant question was whether it could deliver a viable business model along with potent feeling at scale, more than an experiment for the sake of technology. Combining world class IP with a multi-dimensional technology opens up a new frontier of experience, but the real breakthrough is in realizing our own contributions to the unfolding of the story.
"Immersive" is easily ascribed to technology today, but at its roots is shared emotion, shared caring, and shared feeling. The human element of immersive is something we all can access regardless of technology.
By creating a baseline of sharing in common, we can realize a potential universe that is so much bigger than the ticketed audience when fans become part of the adventure.
From Anaheim to Orlando, and London to the Mall of America, The VOID delivered unprecedented customer satisfaction scores of up to 87 NPS. A new wave of storyliving invited audiences to contribute to the unfolding of the story at flagships, retail venues, and pop-ups, as well as a featured participant in the Disney Accelerator and at TED. A recurring revenue model was born, defying the six-week box office decay curve. And for the fervent fan bases of Star Wars, Disney Animation, and Marvel Cinematic Universe, we extended the IP to new consumer touch points while upholding an artistic legacy and brand reputation that is second to none.
Reflections
Great franchises are a testament to the enduring power of character to take us on an emotional journey, a modern day parable for magnetic brands that draw fans together through their shared affinities and take the stories they love into new places.
