THE IMMERSIVE AUDIENCE JOURNEY

THE IMMERSIVE AUDIENCE JOURNEY: INSIGHTS AND PERSPECTIVES ON IMMERSIVE ART, CULTURE, & ENTERTAINMENT
A REPORT PREPARED BY AKI JARVINEN FOR UKRI, DIGITAL CATAPULT AND THE AUDIENCE OF THE FUTURE DEMONSTRATOR PROGRAMME

In this presentation Aki Jarvinen, Senior Experience Researcher, Ph.D, Digital Catapult, author of the report The Immersive Audience Journey summarises the report’s main findings and explains why he encourages creators to think about the immersive experiences beyond the story, "Framing immersive experiences under the banner of 'storytelling' in the age of ‘peak TV’ and omnipresent story content is not necessarily a working strategy. Emphasising the experiences seems to differentiate immersive. Immersive producers need to think how to blend production activities into marketing, and adopt holistic thinking around audience engagement. Community building and pre event launch activities can significantly increase awareness and facilitating post event activities contribute to loyalty".

Download the full report here

The original need for this research emerged from the question of audience. There was a recognition that we lacked insight regarding what is immersive audience, or what are immersive audiences.

What is immersive?

Whereas producers tend to associate the term with particular technologies, audiences tend to associate it with stepping into a responsive and alternative reality that has been artificially created for them.

Immersive technologies are typically good at creating these kind of experiences. So immersive is many things, and can be created using a variety of technologies.

Our analysis highlights a common, high level customer journey map approach which has traditionally been employed in marketing, service and design thinking contexts, but we want to encourage more thinking about this throughout the production process.

If immersive producers are able to leverage this more holistic approach, we think that it contributes to a more structured planning of the project which puts it in a better place to succeed. There's so many things grabbing our attention, so alternative distribution approaches are important. One definition from service design literature says that a human centered tool, like the journey map not only includes steps where a customer is interacting with the company, but also reveals all the key steps of the experience. So journey maps help us define gaps in customer experiences, and explore potential solutions.

The Unfolding Immersive Audience Journey in Phases:

Phase 0: Segmenting Immersive Audiences

What we are finding is that the immersive audience is a collection of subsets of audiences, ranging from festival goers who happen across an immersive production exhibited in that festival, whether it's online or location based. Immersive audiences include gamers who are into VR. They include casual AR mobile AR audiences, but also more niche cohorts that might be more profitable and engaged like secret cinema enthusiasts. immersive theater enthusiasts, even VR documentary enthusiasts. The key thing to understand is that the context defines the audience for any given production. So for instance, if it's a location based experience where is it delivered, exhibited, but also on which digital platforms, as the device might dictate and shape your audience, but also social dynamics. So is it something that enables friends and families to go together?

Already we are seeing some clever solutions for post Covid-19 engagement that facilitate for instance, a family or a household come in at the same time to a location based solution.

Phase 1: Reaching Audience Awareness

This is the phase where a potential audience member becomes aware that an immersive production exists, which requires promotion, marketing, and community building. And the key takeaway, I think, from this phase is that immersive productions are challenging to market by traditional means.

In the age of peak TV, where there is an overwhelming amount of streaming television storytelling format content, framing your experience, as the peak in immersive storytelling is not necessarily the most strategically sound choice.

Instead you need to emphasize the unique component of your immersive experience. And that tends to be immersion, whether it's the sense of presence that you feel through, let's say, VR, or the physical set, with projections and props. However, the paradox here is that creating awareness around this isn't very easy to do with traditional marketing means. It’s hard to communicate what is special about an immersive experience via print, or video marketing. You need to be creative.

My one takeaway would be that you should show audiences engaging with the experience in a unique way in the promotion video. Don’t just show the visuals of the experience because that also factors to the next phase which is consideration.

Phase 2: Audience considerations

After becoming aware, your potential audience starts to weigh up whether to attend, or participate, engage, and pay for your experience. Managing their expectations and almost literally telling them the degree of expected interaction is very important. There is also a duty of care, to show that you will be on-boarding them through this and taking care of them during it as well. This may require that you lower the threshold of attendance explicitly in certain cohorts, and this relates to technology acceptance, so how comfortable people are putting on a headset or engaging with a technology that they're not familiar with in their everyday sort of media, and technology repertoire. Multiple things go into those considerations, including the genre and type of content and experience. For example, to engage a broader audience in the thrill seeking aspect of that experience, you might engage your comic lead in your communication and that just might work for you that they can connect with that certain niche.

Putting your production out there takes time, money and resourcing. You need to have people on hand to help participants go through that experience. This is one thing that I feel requires further development on the digital side of things, because people are just not comfortable trying to engage with new equipment like headsets on their own. So how could you facilitate that process? How do you make it as easy as possible to get on board. Also, can you draw attention away from the technology towards the experience itself? That's another element that you want, might want to do.

Phase 3: Evaluating Audience Experience

The decision for an audience member to attend or not to attend might contribute directly to your bottom line and your opportunity to continue the work. Therefore, you need to be aware of the different dynamics that go into these decisions. For instance, the size of a market that you are targeting is one important factor. At Digital Catapult we're trying to get more actual data about Immersive Audiences size, demographics and limits to help guide startups.

Important factors include price and location. A location can be a platform too. So if an AR mobile experience is only available to Android or iOS, then that shapes your audience. A certain kind of headset shapes your audience and price factors into that too, as well as more qualitative characteristics such as technology acceptance in a certain demographic for instance, or the fear of missing out regarding this experience, which might be something that you want to deliberately build. But there are other considerations, like the expected level of interaction. The whole point of an immersive theatre piece might be to take it out from the theatre to the streets and make it a bit more chaotic if you will. But then some of the audience members complained that they didn't always see all the actors and therefore didn't always know where to direct their attention. So if your target participants are more used to traditional theatre where you have a good view to the stage and all the techniques that have to do with lighting and drawing audience's attention to this on the stage, immersive disruption can violate those expectations. If it does that audiences will leave unsatisfied and won’t recommend the experience to others.

We have a tool available to help you test your interfaces.

If the intention is create an experience which gives participants the option to make choices, ideally they will then come out of the experience feeling that it was unique and personalised. But people bring their own personal context, habits and expectation to every experience that will shape how fully they interact with the piece. So if there's a lot of self-interaction, there might be people who just are not familiar with those conventions of interaction, and they might come out of the experience by feeling that they didn't get as much as somebody else. That might feel like a design failure.

User testing is a skill set and a set of know how that small studios don’t necessarily possess, so it tends to get de prioritised in production. In the interviews that we conducted, nobody discounted the need and potential usefulness of user research and testing, but because they weren't well versed in the methodologies, production itself tends to take over, with ad hoc user tests conducted very close to the end. And that also means that their methodology might not be entirely sound, which then might lead to skewed results. For example, the testing cohort might not be representative of the target audience. So it's just another example where time and resource needs to be allocated early on to this and there needs to be somebody leading on it as well.

In larger organisations like museums, there might already be a culture of user research. So, they have experts in house who gather user insights from past projects, to inform a new project and then advocate those insights along the journey.

And they have a very good sort of set structure of where at which phases is production tested, and how that feeds into the process. So we hope to assist people find these relatively accessible methodologies and tools.

But it is very challenging to be able to assess if there's any longer term impact of an experience, particularly in terms of behaviour change over time.

Phase 4: Satisfaction and Loyalty

This is another moment of truth, satisfaction and loyalty. It’s very important especially if you hope people will re-engage or recommend the experience to others. So, if you want to create so called organic growth word of mouth around your production, then you should think about how to facilitate that.

This is where community management comes into the picture. To create a community around your product, where people share stories about using the product and experiencing it. And they've tried to leverage this by engaging the community and listening to them, and so on so forth. But again, somebody has to do, perhaps even a small team, and allocating that responsibility can be challenging, but down the line, it does pay off in most cases.

Another thing to consider is merchandising. This approach has been tried and tested in the amusement park industry. Merchandise can reinforce a participatory experience. By buying a T shirt, an object, a piece of memorabilia that they can take home, audience members might also contribute to that word of mouth.

And the other benefit from thinking about and planning for merchandising is that it creates another complimentary revenue stream for your ticket or download revenues. Again, this is something that needs to be planned in order to be effectively executed.

TEMPLATES

This audience journey is an approach that can be applied in practice, and can inform your thinking about your production in a holistic manner. So therefore, we have included two templates to the report, and also they will be available to download separately as printouts.

Template 1:
The audience journey template which illustrates the various touch points to consider from the point of view of the responsibilities and stakeholders involved in different phases of the journey.

Template 2:
In a 2nd template the user journey is also mapped from an emotional perspective, to help you think in a more deliberate way about how to take your audience from being indifferent, or casually interested, let's say, to being excited and waiting to see your production and then also possibly eager to re-engage or hear about what you're going to do next.

Download the full report here

Jarvinen, Aki. 2020. The Immersive Audience Journey: Insights and perspectives on immersive art, culture, & entertainment. edited by Digital Catapult. U.K.: Digital Catapult/YouTube.