The Digitization of the Music Festival 5 High Level Trends Social Amplification The Digitally-enhanced Festival Experience: Pre, During, Post Measurement & Learning Thought Starters

1. 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

3. 01High Level Trends
The Festival Landscape

4. 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

17. 02Social 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

19. 03The Digitally-enhanced Festival Experience
Technology pre, during and post festival

20. 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
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22. 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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24. 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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25. 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)
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27. 04Measurement & Learning
Tracking, analysis and optimization in digital

28. 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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29. 05Thought Starters
Technology-driven festival experiences

30. 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”"

32. 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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34. © 2013 SAPIENT CORPORATION | CONFIDENTIAL
THANK YOU

35. 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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