The Billion Dollar Cultural Economy - 3 Lessons To Get Your Business Booming

Whether an art gallery, a museum, a science institution, a historic site or a cultural attraction, venues need technology to bring their story to life. The average visitor to a cultural attraction is increasingly digitally savvy and expects a world-class and engaging experience they can self-curate. Venues must not only deliver both the traditional basics but also embrace emerging technologies. At the turn of the millennium, cultural centres started exploring audience engagement through devices, causing a knee-jerk explosion of apps, digitisation and millions being invested into digital media teams.

Thankfully, venues and the arts are moving into a Third Age in terms of embracing digital. Since the first visitor headphones, digital technology has facilitated Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, 3D Sound and Immersive Walks to engage, inspire, educate and drive visitor footfall. Consumers are looking for shareable experiences that their devices alone can’t deliver. Many museums and galleries have become ‘destination venues’ with vast immersive digital ecosystems that deliver an unparalleled wow-factor real-life experience.

Many top venues put themselves under enormous pressure to ‘do an app’, but often choose design aesthetics over user-friendly functionality. There are few museums in the world where more than 1% of visitors download the branded museum guide app to their cellphone. A more flexible approach to technology can create an experience with the capacity to not only digitally recreate battles or castles, but one that reflects the interests of each individual visitor. With digitisation, museums can also supplement the creation story with contextual information, images and film footage from their vast archives and include other relevant collections based in cultural centres abroad.

Christopher Bazley, Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development, Antenna International "The ultimate aim for digital experiences is to unleash the power of great collections in a way that is intensely personal for the user."

Christopher Bazley has over 15 years’ experience advising the world's greatest museums and cultural attractions. Working for Antenna, the world's leading provider of audio tours and multimedia tours, Christopher has delivered solutions that have enriched the experiences of billions of visitors across more than 1,100 cultural sites globally, winning international awards and generating significant revenues for clients along the way. Christopher has spoken on cultural interpretation, produced papers on Mobile Applications in Museums, and addressed both commercial and non-governmental bodies globally.

How important is digital transformation to cultural venues and where is it heading?

Everyone knows digital is vital, and fortunately the industry has moved on from wanting standard apps to asking for more tailored solutions. The ultimate aim for digital experiences is to unleash the power of great collections in a way that is intensely personal for the user. The Sistine Chapel and The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial just required digital group guides that preserved the dignity of those sites from the millions of people who visit them, whereas The Smithsonian Institution has a goal of creating happiness through engagement, so needed bigger scale solutions. Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality will soon allow for historical reconstructions of ruined abbeys, castles and the recreation of battles, which will be an exciting addition to the digital toolkit.

In 2018 Antenna developed the Hirshhorn Eye app for The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, which is currently sweeping the board for international awards. The super-fast and effective Image Recognition function and the way the artists of the work featured were integrated into the production proved a winning combination. When you look at what some of the digital early adopters are doing, such as SFMoMA, there is a conscious dialling down of the digital fireworks and a very real embrace of ‘eyes up’ in the gallery. Using audio-based experiences to draw people closer to the art, with the device, far from producing eye-catching interactives, firmly left in the pocket.

We have all become more comfortable with the ubiquity of the digital world, so we are more selective in its use in arts interpretation.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, their app is currently sweeping the board for international awards.  (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)


Are there any changes in consumer consumption of culture and can you compete with sofa binge watching?

In Antenna focus groups, teenagers liked the idea of long-form experiences that linked exhibits and objects across a gallery, so at SFMoMA, the audio walks are a range of cross-gallery experiences. We also noted that visitors are less comfortable in the voids between viewing pictures, which could be the beginning of a more immersive soundscape approach.  Leveraging emerging technology captures imagination. Antenna just launched a major initiative with the EU as part of the BINCI project, which pushes the boundaries of 3D sound technology by creating innovative soundscapes in St. Andrews Castle, Scotland, The Miro Foundation in Barcelona and The Pinakothek in Munich.  Last year we created an award-winning love themed sound walk for The Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where teenagers like the idea of long-form experiences that link exhibits and objects across the gallery  (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)


What do you feel venues need to do to adapt to this new environment?

I also think we are still very much a white, middle-class experience and that needs to change. I sit in a lot of meetings around the world with venues wracking their brains on how to be more inclusive, how to reach out to audiences that don’t visit museums, how to engage people from different socio-economic backgrounds and I really want to encourage them to have fewer internal meetings and just to get out there: to those estates, those communities and begin to engage them with designing those experiences and initiatives directly.  We do a lot of this at the moment and quite apart from it being really rewarding, it does often turn the whole concept on its head.  But this is the future, and as part of that process, I think we are going to see really innovative and thought-provoking work.  I really respect what a small group are doing in Berlin: engaging Syrian refugees to become tour guides to the Berlin State Museums, for other refugees.  When they got into the museum, they discovered huge amounts of objects from their home: which engendered all sorts of discussions about cultural appropriation, belonging and meaning.  Great stuff!

What are the 3 areas that you feel businesses should be focusing on to maximise footfall and sales as digital becomes even more dominant?

Visitors, visitors, visitors.  Everyone working in the cultural arena are really only beginning this particular journey and it is going to be brutally crucial in the future, as cultural attractions compete with other forms of leisure and entertainment for people’s time.  I mentioned just now that we are still very middle class, very white.  I also feel that so much of what is created has not changed vastly in 20 odd years.  Take the whole heritage ‘industry’:  it’s very Baby-Boomer centric.  And that is totally fine.  But the Baby Boomers have all hit 70.  And if you think about an average interpretation programme, it is usually created with a view to it having some relevance for at least a decade.  So if you are looking at The Baby Boomers as your audience, then they will be hitting 80 within your time frame.  And whilst they are going to be the most energetic, prosperous and travelled lot of 80year olds in the history of humankind, the average age of the average visitor to a museum or an historic site is much younger.

The average age of visitors to Versailles?  37 years old.  Born in 1981.  I think that has profound implications for every link in the chain of the visitor journey, from how a venue reaches out to global audiences, to thinking about what they can do when they are on site, to how to engage with them.  It even impacts what they sell in the shop, the food in the café.

Palace of Versailles, France - the average visitor was born in 1981, success is knowing your consumer's wants and needs


What is the importance of visitor data?

Vital. We know that 4.5 million people go through the doors of The National Gallery in London each year. Notre Dame say they get 13 million.  But what do they do?  The rise of digital, for the first time really gives us the potential to understand what the visitor actually does in their visit.  That has huge implications for everything and everyone.  Just imagine, if everyone had a device given to them when they entered the space.  How they used that device can inform the entire visitor experience creation.

Just by following people through their language preferences leads to really interesting thinking about how different nationalities engage with cultural sites.  In trials that we did with a certain major art museum in The Netherlands, we saw that Dutch and German visitors spent almost three times longer in the museum than Spanish speakers.  That led to all kinds of interesting realisations.  Of course, if you are coming from Madrid, or Mexico – you are on vacation and you want to fit in as much as possible: so you are only going to allow yourselves 45 minutes in the museum.  Whereas if you have just driven over the for the day, and you live an hour away, you can be more leisurely.

Imagine if we get to a stage that we can know that – say – Chinese visitors on average turn left when they enter a building?  We don’t know that yet, but just imagine if we get to a stage where we know that kind of thing: or that people tend to spend an average of three minutes in front of a Henry Moore, but two in front of a Monet?  In the sites where we are running data; we are already seeing that some of the objects that have the highest profile in the gift shop are sometimes only the third or fourth most-engaged with object in a collection.  Fascinating stuff!

Cultural institutions, like businesses, are having to change to meet the various needs of today’s consumers. They too are brands, but their product is culture. Their success depends on how they shape, host and distribute their messages. The three main lessons to be learned from museums and galleries for wider business is the emphasis on understanding the wants and needs of the visitor, the use of data to create meaningful insight into patterns of consumption and the importance of substance over style - always better to adopt functional technology that consumers can easily navigate.

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I am the Global CEO of digital agency Feed and have always championed technology as the key to unlocking a world of creative potential and business success. When Feed wa...