As the pandemic has caused many changes in the entertainment industry, it has also highlighted the need for technology and understanding our audiences. For Blackpool Grand Theatre, the future of theatre relies heavily on their IT systems and analyzing their audience-data in order to create the best customer experience.

Audience data can help you ‘act when the time is right‘ and the need for a more clear path is definitely now. Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus and restrictions, many organizations have had to learn to adapt and take on a new approach.

For Blackpool Grand Theatre, working on audience-data and IT solutions has become a top priority, including integrating Activity Stream as well as other companies such as Spektrix, Audience Agency (Data and Digital), the Arts Council England Digital Culture Network and The Evergreen Agency.

Blackpool Grand Theatre has highlighted 6 illustrations detailing the future of theatre:

  1. An audience of people in a theatre setting holding and looking at their phone, with the show about to start, and their phones all displaying the same message: “It is time to mute your phone and dim the screen”.

  2. A family sat in a lounge watching a theatre production from the comfort of their home

  3. Interval notifications – Someone standing in a theatre looking at a television screen which shows a bar heat-map based on card transactions allowing customers to choose quietest bars in the intervals.

  4. Two people looking at one mobile screen and choosing their drinks to order from their seats.

  5. A row of seats with people in them accept one empty chair that has an A5 personalized birthday message from the chief executive to the customer.

  6. Consumer booking their theatre tickets through Alexa.

What does this mean for Activity Stream?

The ultimate goal at Activity Stream is to help our clients connect with their audiences and understand the best ways to do so with their data. After the lockdown period – and with the many restrictions to consider when reopening – there is an overwhelming amount of information to have to process and understand in order to recover. Having support from technological-based systems will allow organizations to not only recover, but eventually progress and bloom with a new method.

“In marketing, I think the biggest benefit is relevance. By targeting better, the audience will experience that the communication is relevant, and will therefore start listening more to what you tell them. Better segmentation in email almost always results in higher opening rates, higher sales per email, and fewer unsubscribes. It’s an investment that has an enormous impact (and the right tools will help minimise the effort required).
-Martin Gammeltoft

To read more about the story you can check out the story The Future of Theatre.