It is not surprising that the immersive entertainment economy is dominating the frontier of the culture/technology intersection as the world emerges from COVID-19. Simply, people are hankering for physical experiences.
The data shows, however, that there remains a challenge in getting people off their couches. Has complacency set in? Have our habits changed how we book tickets, and what is it that is getting us out the door?
At the recent REMIX Summit in Sydney, presenter Michael Rodrigues (24-Hour Economy Commissioner and Former Managing Director of Time Out) said: ‘The pandemic has caused a reset how we think about our city,’ adding that when we do emerge, ‘the action is really mid-week’.
He continued by saying that ‘the decentralisation thing is very real’ and that it has been the leisure market driving the post-pandemic chapter of engagement. This ground roots knowledge echoed recent research by REMIX co-Founder Peter Tullin, conducted in partnership with the British Council.
Tullin said that we are experiencing ‘the immersive revolution,’ which in part has been spurred on by ‘the reduced demand for retail and office space in our cities’.
Tullin believes the global wave of closures of traditional ‘bricks and mortar retailers’ (aka businesses like Macy’s, Debenhams, Barneys and JCPenney) has finally hit the spiky end of changing consumer tastes and a shift towards ecommerce. This is a huge opportunity for creative industries to step in and reactivate these spaces, and the data is confirming the trend, he noted.
How our couch war dovetails with the immersive revolution
Sitting on a panel with Rodrigues, Beau Neilson, Executive Producer and Creative Director of Phoenix (Sydney), said: ‘In feedback we get, the thing that constantly comes back is it’s the immersive quality and the intimacy that is drawing people out – that it is consistently the experience as the sum of the parts, not the show itself. It’s that shared experience they can’t have at home.’
Tullin said, ‘If we need to find new ways to attract people into the city, then the booming experience economy, combined with the boundless ideas of creative entrepreneurs, could unleash an avalanche of immersive experiences to fill these gaps.’
We are starting to see it already, with Tullin citing London as leading this push with 44 immersive experiences currently on offer (14 of them permanent offerings). These include Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City, Peaky Blinders: The Rise, ABBA Voyage, Dr Who: Time Fracture, Frameless and The Lightroom.
He used further examples of decentralising, such as Meow Wolf – described by Tullin as ‘a powerhouse in the immersive industry’ – creating The Real Unreal, which opens in July in a vacant retail space in a former suburban Texan mall. In the UK, there’s Wake the Tiger in Bristol and Secret Cinema with its upcoming Dirty Dancing production in Birmingham.
Read: Minister gunning for more immersive experiences
Australia is also not immune. Rodrigues said, ‘Investment is now spreading out of the city, with a reawakening of the suburbs, thanks to the pandemic. Outer lying areas have experienced double the growth, up to 20% in spend,’ since opening up.
While we are yet to have a site at the scale of TeamLab or Meow Wolf, visitation numbers to The LUME and Fortress are substantial. ‘THE LUME down in Melbourne sold 700,000 tickets to its Van Gogh show in its first year – by my calculations that would make it the most visited cultural institution in Australia, in terms of tickets sold,’ said Tullin.
THE LUME converted 3000 square metres of space inside the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC), while Fortress Games has claimed dead-mall tenancies in Melbourne and Sydney, and is expected to grow elsewhere. While in Adelaide, the pop-up immersive experience from Montreal (Canada), Mirror Mirror, will open with Illuminate Adelaide.
Is this pond-skimming, or how deep is this trend?
Just before the pandemic, there were 759 new immersive experiences globally in 2019 – a figure clocked at a $62 billion industry. ‘There are currently nearly 2500 escape rooms in the US alone, and then we’ve got things like teamLab claiming its Plants TOKYO as the most visited museum in the world with 1.2 million visitors,’ continued Tullin.
‘While we can get all heady over such numbers, this trend is not without its challenges. And it’s also pretty confusing to customers as well. There are tickets being sold to 50 immersive Van Gogh shows in different locations across the US at the moment,’ Tullin continued. ‘It’s been like the early days of the internet; it’s a total Wild West. I don’t think there’ll be hundreds of these things around in five or six years’ time.’
So what’s driving it? Rodrigues believes the use of devices in-venue with compulsory check-in has spawned a whole opportunity for in-venue experiences and tech immersion, adding that it has also triggered a whole lot of start-ups in Australia, and elsewhere.
Tullin said that it is also, in part, due to the capacity of immersive technologies for storytelling. ‘Virtual reality hasn’t really taken off in the home in a way that people thought that it would do, but we’re using VR as part of an experience where we’re prepared to go out to those spaces.
‘But the other thing is, creative entrepreneurs are using tools like social media, giving these experience this kind of inbuilt free marketing. What they’re tapping into is a big change in audiences,’ he added. ‘I think it’s really significant for cultural institutions – you’re looking at Gen Z, in particular, and those younger audiences. What they want is interaction, they want immersion, they want experiences. Three out of four are saying they’d rather buy an experience than a product,’ said Tullin.
His data shows that Millennials make up 75% of the workforce. ‘If you’re not playing to these trends, you’re not in the game in terms of the biggest customer base and most lucrative customer,’ he said. ‘We need to be thinking around programming as something that they want to share.’
Immersive engagement can be small scale too
REMIX panellist Alan Jin, co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Surreal (formerly known as Muso), added that the hankering for experiences can also be in a lower key. He has developed an Australia-based software that allows pubs and smaller fringe live venues to better track audience engagement.
‘We call ourselves the anti-metaverse. By that we mean that there has been too much investment into the inner economy – Netflix, Apple [glasses] and the like,’ adding that his organisation aims to arm venues better with the kind of data that will give them the confidence to book gigs.
‘What happens is, these venues decide not to do live experiences when they are not getting the numbers. We’ve started connecting musos to venues to optimise what people want,’ said Jin. ‘We help venues create those live experience across all scales – from acoustic musicians to Fortress. In the past, a pub, for example, might cancel an act perceiving it as “unpopular”. Our software can even overlay the bar spend in a venue, or the weather, or how many fit in a venue, so you can start to map some really interesting trends, making that gig economy more sustainable,’ said Jin.
‘I am pretty pumped, and venues are looking for that more innovative creative experience because they want to compete against the couch, and they are killing it,’ Jin said.
Rodrigues concluded: ‘It‘s about putting in place information flows to better connect and demonstrate this thing call “vibrancy”; it’s not just about turning on lights or calling something “immersive”.’
Peter Tullin’s report on the immersive revolution and The New Experience Economy panel were presented at REMIX Summit, Sydney, June 2023.
REMIX is yet to announce its next Summit date for London.
