Curating a transformative experience, on budget and while hitting financial objectives, is hard. 

To get there, you need to have the right budget, based on realistic projects – and you must also know your audience. But how might you find out these things if you’re about to open your first location-based entertainment concept at a retail centre, for example?

Some people who might have some solutions for you are Dana Harrison & Eric Williams from Placer.ai, a location analytics company that provides insights into any place in the US, and Matthew Cross, CEO of OE Experiences, a consultancy and experiential development company that monetises the Experience Economy by creating a powerful bridge between the creative and finance worlds for immersive dining, themed hospitality, and location-based entertainment projects across the US.

The two worked together on the Sony Wonderverse project, with Placer.ai providing attendance and marketing data at a granular level, which then substantiated the qualified opinions of the OE Experiences consulting team. In this Campfire they explain how they partnered to work out the answers to these big questions using data.

Expect to learn:

• How to use Placer.ai to vet attendance and visitation, work out if a location is as popular as a landlord or broker may say, and identify your feeder cities.
  

• How to understand current demographics and whether you’re designing for the correct audience  – and if your budget and marketing match up.
  
• How this affects your marketing – where else are your customers going, and can you market there? How can you bundle tickets? And who should you boost your social ads to? 
  

• What all of this means for investor confidence.

We think their work is crucial both for experience creators, who want to know if their idea will work in a specific market, and for real estate owners, who want to know which experiences will be successful and turn their estate into an experience anchor. 

Knowing what to programme where and when – for example whether to go for a family-focused IP experience or a competitive socialising cocktail bar – can save some serious headaches down the line.

Know Your Place: The Importance Of Understanding Your Market

What makes the work Placer.ai does interesting for experience creators is that it gives deep insights into what any place in the US is really like – and how those who live there behave. By harnessing anonymously aggregated data from mobile devices in partnership with location-based apps, the company can tell you things like foot traffic to a place, where someone has visited, where they live and work, and where they like to go.

This data set makes up 8% of the US population, with an algorithm that estimates visitation to a location based on these and other insights. Every location is analysed from an aerial viewpoint, and algorithmic insights overlap with market insights so people can learn who their visitors really are and take action on these insights.

For OE Experiences, this information was vital when negotiating for a location with a landlord. 

“They will always say it’s full of people and viable. But the reality is, how do you define ‘coming to the market’ – are they visiting a theme park? A nearby beach? A road? Sometimes it’s about trust, and sometimes it’s about calling BS!” – Matthew Cross

In one significant example, a landlord had shared attendance of 31m per year based on the number of cars in a parking lot extrapolated up – but Placer.ai data put this at more like 19m. This was vital information, as once you know how many people are available to you as prospective customers, it informs everything else you do.

“The economics and the fundamentals of whether or not an experiential business will be sustainable is often a derivative of your top line revenue. And that’s a function of attendance and per cap revenue. And attendance is usually a function of capture with how many people are there.” – Matthew Cross

The Impact Of Place Data On… Demographics & Design

On the Sony Wonderverse project, the team were engaged to reconcile some conflicting opinions not with more opinions, but by substantiating with data.

“It’s far more substantial to inform with data rather than raw creativity.” – Matthew Cross

It’s a core concept of business that you need to know your audience and design for them. But there’s a tension here: you learn more about your audience over time, but what can you do at the beginning of a project when you’re evaluating a location? Who your audience is will affect everything from the programming to the layout of the space to choosing an IP that will resonate.

This also plays into other business decisions, such as whether you’re inducing new customers to visit a location or capturing existing ones. In other words, are you an anchor tenant or an inline tenant?

A landlord would love you to be an anchor, as they’d love to expand overall visitation to their development as part of their growth strategy. But if you’re an anchor, that means the tenants you’re capturing don’t yet exist, which will inform your marketing budget. This also drives the relationship with the IP or licensing fee. 

“These questions expand into every operational, marketing and design facet of an experiential tenant.” – Matthew Cross

The Impact Of Place Data On… Marketing & Pre-Operations/Planning

Knowing your demographics can also help when assessing the viability of a location and how best to market it. A sophisticated operator is going to be collecting as much data as they can, asking questions like:

• Where else are your customers going (or coming from) – straight from work, networking, functions and events, MICE, date night?
  

• Can you cross promote with any other locations, i.e. cluster or bundle together to achieve economy of scale/critical mass, and give people enough content to justify leaving their home? If you’re small and new, the ability to reach out to another business is very powerful.
  
• Can you place local ads? If you know eyes/impressions will be driven to a valuable audience, there’s merit to things like old-school billboards.
  
• Should you boost your social media ads, and to who?
  
• What are your feeder cities? Can you leverage chambers of commerce or trade associations to co-opt their marketing?

All these questions should be asked at the design phase, as you’re building out your business and forming assumptions about how many customers you’ll attract, where they’re coming from, and how reliably you think you can capture them.

The Impact Of Place Data On… Investors

All this is great news for experience creators – but how do we make potential investors care? Cross says that you have to start by understanding what “risk” means from a financial investment perspective. 

Risk relates to the standard deviation from expected outcomes – and there is no such thing as a risk-seeking investor, just a risk-tolerant one. An investor’s goal is to achieve the maximum return for a given level of risk – the “efficient frontier” – so they want to know how to mitigate risk to the highest possible degree.

Place data helps here in three key ways:

1. Greater confidence in the design of the project. If you know your audience, and behaviours, you’re enhancing the probability that you’ll get “struck by lightning” and induce capital. There’s still an element of probability, but the more you drive a perception of confidence, the more you’ll get the green light from investors.
   
2. Greater outcomes in operations, marketing and attendance. These drive increased top line revenue for owners and investors. The more money the business makes, the better off we all are.
   
3. Lower, or better quantified, risk. If you’re the owner, you want to be armed with all the tools necessary to feel reassured that you’ve mitigated risk wherever possible, such as an optimistic and realistic vision of attendance. This will lower the demanded return from the investor for taking risk, which drives better outcomes. Post-Covid, we’ve seen a lot of experience creators be put in the position of contributing their services, so these conversations matter. A transparent and consultative approach works best.

Speaking this language and serving as an ambassador for the importance of a good, informed design process is critical to inducing investor capital on sustainable terms. Having access to place data changes the tone of the conversation, as you have a robust data set to substantiate the opinions of your team. 

“Investors need to be able to say ‘here’s why I decided to fund this project’ – this is easier with data rather than just trusting someone’s character.” – Matthew Cross

The WXO Take-Out

Particularly for experience creators, there’s often a feeling that data can strangle creativity and prevent people from taking a risk on an untested innovation for which we don’t yet have the data. As Rory Sutherland says, “Business has lost the art of testing things that you can’t measure, or testing things without evidence they will work. However, the really big discoveries won’t have this data.”

However, the key to using place data like that offered by Placer.ai isn’t to follow the data blindly, but to use it to help question our assumptions, back up our opinions, and convince investors to go along for the ride. If we design purely with data, we’ll likely never discover the next brilliant, unexpected success – but if we design purely with creativity, we might make the wrong choices to give our experience the best chance of sticking around and becoming that success. 

“Success is NOT just about a great experience. It’s about the right experience, at the right time, for the right people.” – James Wallman

So next time you’re designing an experience, ask yourself:

1. How do you currently research beforehand to lower the risk that your experience is brilliant, but not placed well for the right people?
   
2. Do you use data? Do you playtest in the right place / at the right time?
   
3. How do you market your experiences? 
   
4. Do you use Jobs To Be Done Theory, i.e. ask what are people looking to get out of their time? And where does your experience fit in?
   
5. How do you talk to investors right now?

Want to come to live Campfires and join fellow expert experience creators from 39+ different countries as we lead the Experience Revolution forward? Apply to join the WXO today.