How ‘immersion’ is changing the entertainment game.
Immersion entertainment is becoming big business thanks to demand from millennials
Call Stephen Geddes’s FlyOver Canada what you want — just don’t call it a movie. It’s a ride, or an experience, the co-founder of the Vancouverbased entertainment company said, “but the images on their own don’t do the ride justice.”
Since 2013, audiences in downtown Vancouver have experienced a multi-sensory 20-minute tour of the country while sitting in chairs that twist and turn as Canadian landscapes roll past on a curved 60-foot screen, all the while being sprayed with the smell of the ocean or gusts of Arctic winds.
The ride, Geddes said, cost $20 million to develop and has pulled in audiences of tourists passing through Vancouver and local customers looking for an immersive experience of Canada’s diverse landscapes for about $20 apiece. FlyOver Canada, which counts Vancouver Canucks owners Aquilini Investment Group among its investors, has grown to the point where it’s now looking to open a second location, this time in the U.S., at Minneapolis’s Mall of America.
By offering consumers an immersive experience, Geddes and his co-founder Andrew Strang are tapping into a growing trend that promises to shake up the entertainment industry. JWT Intelligence identified immersive experiences as the leading trend changing the entertainment industry in 2014, and it is continuing to play out.
“I think we can see it in the consumer data,” JWT’s worldwide innovation director Lucie Greene said in an interview. “Consumers overall, despite slow growth in the economy and even during austerity, were spending on experiential categories.”
More recently, the Boston Consulting Group released a study that showed experiential consumer categories are growing twice as fast as sales of consumer luxury items, and the market is expected to grow even further. Then, Eventbrite conducted a survey recently that showed 78 per cent of millennials (broadly defined as the generation of consumers in their 20s and early 30s) are prioritizing spending on experiences over consumer goods.
In addition to FlyOver Canada’s ride, experiential categories include consumer spending on events such as music festivals — the fastest growing category in the music industry — adventure races and even trips to a day spa. Especially among millennials, Greene said, these experiences are “all the better if they can Instagram them.”
To serve the market’s rapid growth, the broadly defined “experiential” category is also growing to include new activities. One manifestation of this trend, Greene said, is the rise in popularity across North America of escape rooms, which are already popular in Asia and parts of Europe. After gaining traction in Toronto and Vancouver, escape rooms have opened in the past year in Edmonton and Calgary.
Consumers are willing to pay roughly $25 a person to be locked in a darkened room — sometimes tied up in a straight jacket, or locked in a smaller cage within the room — and left for an hour to figure a way out.
Edwin Tsui, co-owner of The Locked Room in Calgary, says his customers get a “rush” out of the experience, which requires solving a combination of logic-based puzzles and puzzles involving physical dexterity to get out of his escape rooms within an hour.
“People like to compare it to a real-life video game,” Tsui said, “but it’s really more appealing than that because a lot of people aren’t video-game players, but they’ll really enjoy the interactive experience of solving the puzzles and the sense of camaraderie and teamwork from unlocking each lock.”
Tsui thinks there’s a big market for companies offering fully immersive experiences and notes that his business partners in The Locked Room, Kyle Fitzgerald and Adil Hooda, founded a zombiethemed adventure race held immediately north of Calgary, where participants try to outrun and survive a horde of zombie-costumed volunteers.
While escape rooms might be a new offering, Greene said high-adrenalin adventure races are examples of immersive experiences refreshing old activities.
For instance, when Montreal-based Moment Factory turned a pathway in Parc de la Gorge near Coaticook, Que., into a two-kilometre enchanted nighttime forest walk with the help of smoke machines, luminescent displays and the natural landscape, the goal was to bring 7,000 people out to the park. Éric Fournier, a partner in Moment Factory and the executive producer, said the experience helped draw 70,000 visitors to a remote pathway some two hours east of Montreal.
Moment Factory’s goal, Fournier said, is “creating and producing collective experiences and fighting against this tendency of individualism with video games and having a relationship with your phone.”
Since the company was founded in 2001, Moment Factory has been contracted to develop technology-assisted immersions for places like Coaticook, as well as in larger centres and for brands including Cirque du Soleil, the NBA, NFL, Oakley sunglasses and even a pair of banks — Alberta’s ATB Financial and Caisse Desjardins in Quebec. Moment Factory is now working around the world, Fournier said, as more companies are trying to use immersive experiences to create an emotional reaction to their product with their customers.
Greene said the beverage industry, in particular, is making use of this trend of providing unique experiences to “enhance their brands.” Absolut Vodka, for example, created an apocalypsethemed art bar for their customers in Hong Kong and then marketed videos of the event.
A more Canadian example might be Molson Coors Brewing Co.’s decision to fly a handful of its customers to a hockey rink on an isolated mountain top — and then film the experience for ads that ran during the Stanley Cup finals.
“I think it’s becoming more mainstream, and it’s something that brands are offering even if it’s outside their category,” Greene said. “So, it’s becoming a customer engagement thing.”
The goal, Fournier said, is to create an experience that will cause people to react. “If you can trigger emotions that people don’t expect, then people will want to talk about it,” he said.