For the first time since the advent of Covid, large-scale festivals are back on the agenda, and with them comes a high density of consumers.
In 2019, over 5 million people attended over 1,000 music festivals across the UK, contributing over £1.7 billion in Gross Value Added to the economy according to a report conducted by the House of Commons. The UK’s diverse festival scene not only has an eager clientele awaiting to return, but also represents a huge opportunity for brands to collaborate and utilise an industry that is adapting how they make the use of their space to bring a new, revitalised attraction to a refreshed audience. Location Live has found that for this reason, festivals are set to become the most important destination for summer retail.
Live event or festival spaces are the ideal locations for brands to capture a variety of potential customers, as they bring together people from a range of demographics to create a concentrated audience who are relaxed and open to experiences. Traditionally, utilising these spaces for activations and experiential marketing ventures hasn’t been easy. Now, through a series of notable partnership agreements, Location Live’s online platform lo:live can now facilitate for agencies to have direct contact with festival owners and organisers whose venues can add to their consumer experience.Location Live, the location scouts for marketing campaigns, compiled their industry data-driven report, the LO:DOWN 1.0, to reveal how global brands are changing how they reach their key audiences. The report found that 81% of searches on their digital location scouting platform lo:live specifically filtered to locations with a greater than 50% ABC1 demographic. This represents how uncertainty over footfall predictions caused brand campaign strategies to re-think how they target their demographic, with a ‘quality over quantity’ targeted approach taken. Kevin Cavilla, Chief Technology Officer at Location Live, analyses how the data captured in the report details the revival of the retail industry: ‘The purpose of lo:live was to radically expand the marketplace by taking the complexity out of the location search-and-book process in experiential marketing. lo:live removes transactional barriers and cuts out unnecessary intermediaries and mark-ups. However, we also knew when we were designing the architecture of this intelligent ‘self-service’ platform how powerful lo:live would be as window into the marketplace and the very pulse of campaign planning. lo:live captures UK-wide data from real-time transactions so that the platform’s AI-powered analytics can filter the data for insights into emerging space trends, supply and demand indicators, and market behaviour by industry sector and target consumer demographics. “Like the lo:live platform itself, the activity data is unbiased and acts as an impartial witness to industry planning perceptions and mindset. Moreover, the data is crystal clear and unambiguous, because lo:live transactions are direct, frictionless and transparent. For example, during the pandemic we quickly identified an emerging ‘hyper-local’ phenomenon where brand activation campaigns were reoriented to touchpoints closer to consumers. We immediately became aware of the move to outdoor locations with larger spaces for engagement which challenged landlords to respond to the trend and activate parts of their portfolio previously under the radar of this media. “In these situations, we are able to alert to our clients to these shifts in demand so they can make fully data-backed decisions when searching for space. Landlords benefit by being aware of these realignments and how to price inventory in response. With our data-driven report we are sharing these insights with the broader marketplace as a compass for them to validate their campaign planning direction and baseline strategies, or realign them as necessary. Everyone wins when the market is better informed and more efficient. Call it a digital “democratisation” of the industry.”
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