The Digitization of the Music Festival

Prepared by Kevin McGovern kmcgovern@sapient.com

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1.  5 High Level Trends

2.  Social Amplification

3.  The Digitally-enhanced Festival Experience: Pre, During, Post

4.  Measurement & Learning

5.  Thought Starters

AGENDA

01 High Level Trends The Festival Landscape

IN 2014

60+ festivals will take place in North America

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Ubiquitous

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TREND 1/5

FESTIVALS HAVE BECOME UBIQUITOUS

•  No longer are festivals considered a meeting of super fans and roadies

•  Festivals have become a part of our lives, and especially our summers

•  “Festival Season” is a real thing

•  Overall perceived value of a festival is much higher than a normal concert experience

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TREND 2/5

ATTRACTING HIGH QUALITY ARTISTS

•  Artist quality is high and getting higher due to acts being able to tour through festival dates

•  Headliners still drive headlines (and ticket sales), but the internet has ensured that upcoming acts attract significant attention as well

•  Mix of old acts and new – creates community and diversity (and sometimes a once in a lifetime event)

•  Not crowd sourced, but crowd

influenced

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TREND 3/5

CREATING IMMERISIVE EXPERIENCES

•  Technology has changed the way we experience live events through participation, sharing and personalization – on-site or at home

•  The entire festival experience has gone digital – from increasing awareness pre-festival, to empowering social sharing interactions and deeper experiences during-festival, to sourcing talent suggestions year round

•  Wearable technologies will expand the possibilities of interaction

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TREND 4/5

PROVIDING CUSTOMIZED & INTIMATE OPTIONS

•  While music still tends to the connective tissue, festivals have embraced other forms of entertainment like comedy and film, as well as the showcasing the arts, culture, learning and development and lifestyle nuances

•  Festivals have become lifestyle events with a matching soundtrack

•  Personalization is powered through scheduling and recommendation technologies to allow individuals to customize experiences

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TREND 5/5

ENHANCING THE SOCIAL NATURE OF A CONCERT

•  Today’s festival is truly customer-centric: the grounds are time based (scheduled events, set times) but the journey from stage to stage is undetermined and filled with social and sharing opportunities

•  Experiences can be shared both within

the physical environment and seamlessly shared virtually – at the same time

•  Physical presence isn’t required to share the experience

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ENABLED BY TECHNOLOGY AND DRIVEN THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA AMPLIFICATION

ENHANCING THE SOCIAL NATURE OF A CONCERT

FESTIVALS HAVE BECOME UBIQUITOUS

ATTRACTING HIGH QUALITY ARTISTS

CREATING IMMERISIVE EXPERIENCES

PROVIDING CUSTOMIZED & INTIMATE OPTIONS

02 Social Amplification Amplified Experiences through Seamless Social

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Social Trends

1.  Social integrated into entire experience

§  Pre: discover, plan §  During: communicate, coordinate, share §  Post: recall, remember, analyze, enjoy

2.  Creating customer-centric communities to find reasons to engage (strategically) year round §  Festivals posting some original content but focus on

reposting the community’s “dreaming out loud” to promote socializing during the “offseason”

3.  RFID + social integrations (just the start) §  At Coachella, more than 30,000 people registered to

use the Live Click stations to update their status on Facebook. Bonnaroo took it to a whole new level with over 74,000 registrations for check-ins at the “largest Live Click Stations ever made.”

Overall, social is playing a massive role in the festival experience - pre, during, and post – to amplify and extend seamlessly.

"You  can  leverage  social  media  and  other  media  partnerships  to  reach  a  tremendous  amount  of  people  without  having  to  necessarily  use  a  huge  adver8sing  budget.    Your  message  needs  to  come  at  an  audience  in  an  authen8c  way,  as  people  will  pick  up  on  that  and  the  word  will  get  spread  organically.”  

 -­‐Superfly  co-­‐founder  Rick  Farman  

03 The Digitally-enhanced Festival Experience Technology pre, during and post festival

PRE-FESTIVAL

•  The build-up strategy •  Ubiquitous channel presence presence •  Website, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Foursquare, Mobile

Apps, Email Newsletter

•  Pre-lineup release, teasers •  Countdown to release on social channels •  Sweepstakes, ticket sales deadline dates

•  Social amplification •  Facebook, Twitter registration of wristbands (more on this)

•  Schedule lineup, Mobile app updates •  Artist spotlights

•  Spotify playlists •  Slacker radio integration

•  Personal scheduling and sharing Page 20

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DURING FESTIVAL

§  Instagram (hashtag #strategy for live participation)

§  Kiosks for social sharing/check-ins (branded) §  Powered through RFID integration

§  Means you don't need your phone to share §  Can also enable commerce (no need for credit card, ID) §  Integrates with digital, branded merchandise (photoframes, tweets, etc.)

§  Mobile app comes alive (push!) §  Custom scheduling, peer-to-peer messaging (groupme integration)

§  Festival driven-sharing §  Build hype, keep people informed

§  live tweeting

§  live Facebook pages

§  Live streaming (mobile-friendly) §  Ustream (festival), chirpvision (crowd sourced) Page 22

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DURING FESTIVAL (Scheduled tangent)

•  There were 893,339 total conversations about “Coachella” between Thursday, the day before the show, and Monday, the day aster the festival ended. That’s almost a million social posts in five days!

§  Most of the social posts about Coachella (45%) were published on Monday aster attendees, bloggers and news outlets had the chance to digest the whirlwind of a weekend

§  92.4% of the Coachella conversation took place on Twitter as opposed to other media channels

§  Bonnaroo 2012: Live Clicked 250,000 times, generating over 3 million Likes and comments, and around 200 million page impressions - the largest integration between a live music event and social media in history

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POST-FESTIVAL

§  Continued engagement, starting from “See ya next year!” §  Social presence 365 days a year

§  Sharing encouraged and rewarded §  Reposting #hashtagged content

§  Storytelling through brand promise in social channels §  “radiate positivity”, “enjoy life”, “be good to each other”

§  Re-live the festival §  Watch the recorded performances

§  Measurement/refinement of channel strategy

§  Document and share wins (PR stuff) Page 25

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04 Measurement & Learning Tracking, analysis and optimization in digital

MEASUREMENT & LEARNING

§  Build tracking into the sharing process to gain analytics into clicks, sharing, channel engagement

§  Works in social links, in-app links, email, etc. §  Very easy to do:

§  All links trafficked through bitly before they’re shared

§  www.website.com/tellyourfriends becomes www.bitly.com/tellyourfriends

§  Integrates nicely with Google Analytics for richer intel

§  Social listening §  Process the comments from pre/during/post §  Learn and improve

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05 Thought Starters Technology-driven festival experiences

TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED EXPERIENCE

§  Wearables: §  Google glass throwback experience: see any show as if it was happening in CBGB §  Scan your RFID wristband to automatically receive digital content about the band that you

just heard

§  Social Amplification: §  Community correspondent: live, on the scene social reporting, crowd-sourced §  Freemium ticket model: Pay if forward (use social networks to scale positive behavior:

donations of time, money) and get free tickets

§  Location based: §  Geofencing of sponsor offers (with Zoove's StarStar) to power/unlock experiences and

content - Eg. dial **ford

§  Live Visualizations: §  Visual leaderboard for most shows attended, most days at venue, biggest crowds §  Visual of people moving at large venue: http://apps.opendatacity.de/relog/

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The White Stripes - “Ball and Biscuit”"

TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED EXPERIENCE

§  iBeacon: the next wave in location technology and interaction design §  Standalone iBeacons: low-cost gizmos that continually beam out a Bluetooth signal,

running for up to a year on a small watch battery

§  iBeacons are used to enable communication with physical things (or locations) §  iOS 7, Android 4.3 feature

§  Example use case: Everyone sitting inside Bar Kick pub in London will find the most recent digital editions of two popular magazines ready to read in their device’s Newsstand app, free of charge

§  Festival cases: §  Leave a digital message at the station/love notes §  Experience hotspots: trigger a classic recording, an anecdote, an inside story, just by

being in a certain location in the city

§  Gamification: §  “Festival within a festival” (unlock the experience by visiting certain places, events, in

order) §  Superfans unlock creature comforts: on-site refrigerator, VIP upgrades, restrooms Page 32

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© 2013 SAPIENT CORPORATION | CONFIDENTIAL

THANK YOU

TOP RATED VENDORS §  Festival mobile app development: Aloompa

§  Mobile group chat: GroupMe

§  Radio/discovery integration: spotify/ slacker radio

§  Mobile geofencing: Zoove's StarStar system

§  RFID: id&c

§  On-site RFID seamless sharing: Intellitix

§  Mobile streaming: chirpvision

§  Roadtrip Integrations: waze

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