Connecting Communities: LIVE NATION
Product Strategy | Interaction Design | B2B2C | Client
HOW might Live Nation reinvent its event sponsorship model to engage fans and brands beyond live events?
Live Nation is a live entertainment company that promotes, operates, and manages ticket sales for live entertainment in the United States and internationally with a 150M user base. We worked specifically with the Media & Sponsorship division.
We proposed two different platforms with features that would enable Live Nation to give brands a more active role in fandom while also deepening a user’s relationship with music. Fanfare offers users a space for fan clubs to congregate and #Sharp offers users a smart music news curation platform.
Design Brief
Capitalize on Live Nation’s position of strength to unlock new, unexpected growth opportunities that can be scaled to shape the next frontier of live events and music culture.
Role & Contribution
Experience Design Lead: Led team (3 strategists, 2 experience designers, 1 creative technologist, 1 visual designer) through opportunity identification, concept ideation, refinement, and testing. Presented final interactive prototypes to company executives including President of Media & Sponsorship.
Deliverables
Ecosystem growth strategy
Concept prototypes
Overview
Outcomes
96% positive in-app feedback for Fanfare during pilot testing
91% positive in-app feedback for #Sharp during pilot testing
01. Rethinking the sponsorship MEDIUM
02. Non-tactical advertisements are a turn off, connecting users to where they already exist and showcase behaviours
03. Brands are defined by the communities they support as users seek meaningful and intimate relationship formation between communities.
3 Big Takeaways
Fans treat their music as a deeply personal and ever-evolving social badge and currency. Live experiences have an especially deep impact on how they define themselves, something that transcends any single event. Brand partners are actively looking for ways to connect with fans beyond events, but this need remains underserved by Live Nation. There could not be a better time for Live Nation to launch a media platform as live events thrive ‘post’ COVID that helps brands elevate fandom.
The most common form of brand activation exists at the event itself in the form of pop-up brand activations (e.g. Red Bull having a booth at a concert) and free gifts (e.g.: Neutrogena having sunscreen available for free throughout the venue at Coachella). We wanted to re-imagine the relationship that brands could play in the delivery of bringing a fandom community closer.
We identified a growth opportunity for the core business in connecting brands to digital spaces that fans already exhibit behaviour and interest and expressed the opportunity in two different executions:
#Sharp, a curated music news platform that serves fans hyper-personalized content.
Fanfare, a personalized music community platform that helps people find and build bonds with those who share the same taste in music.
01. Rethinking the sponsorship MEDIUM
#Sharp, a smart music news platform, full UX Flow
Fanfare, a comprehensive fan community platform, full UX flow
As scary as data monitoring is in 2023, 88% of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization — with more than half reporting a lift greater than 10%. To the extent that recent surveys show that 42% of consumers get annoyed when their content isn’t personalized, and 66% of consumers will not purchase from a site when they feel the content does not speak to their specific interests.
When relating back to a platform, the onboarding experience is crucial to the platform’s success. We designed with intention in making sure users are able to import as much of their preferences and existing behaviours as they desire, allowing for users to still have control over how much data they share and giving transparency on how the platform gained the input/ from where/ how that information will be used.
02. Non-tactical advertisements are a turn off, connecting users to where they already exist and showcase behaviours
#Sharp onboarding
#Sharp privacy settings
Fanfare onboarding
Fanfare onboarding
03. Brands are defined by the communities they support as users seek meaningful and intimate relationship formation between communities.
There is a clear white space and transformation opportunity for Live Nation when it comes to connecting fans, engaging them beyond ticket sales, discovery, news and interaction, etc. which leads to an opportunity to build mechanisms that nurture long-term relationships with people. To meet the strict KPIs from brands, it is critical to have a sticky platform that users want to be present on.
Brands can embed themselves into #Sharp’s news feed by sponsoring various tiers of tags that transcend content and artist for a more evergreen platform.
#Sharp
At the highest level, brands can sponsor general interests, like Champion sponsoring all street style related content, dr
iving equity for brands and giving them a meaningful way to converse with and understand fans.
#Sharp
For more specific tags, like Vinyl, brands can engage with customizable content and benefit from targeted reach.
#Sharp
At the lowest level, and the most specific tag, this can also work as an auction model (like Google Ads) for specific widgets, helping brands show up in the most relevant contexts.
Fanfare can offer a customizable tiered partner participation model offered flexible opportunities for Live Nation to capture sponsor’s media dollars.
Fanfare
First Tier: Platform Tool Sponsorship
Brands can show up within the platform tools themselves, creating opportunities to build evergreen moments throughout the platform beyond specific activations (e.g. Adobe sponsors the tool that allows fans to create events)
Fanfare
Second Tier: Host Events & Activities
They can also create activations around shows that are customizable by crews or tag (e.g. Coinbase and Veeps create a live streaming event, Genius powers trivia and games across the platform)
Fanfare
Third Tier: Sponsor User Content
Brands can also boost the events and activations created by verified users, and the rewards given to fans for engagement. (e.g. Bacardi sponsoring verified-fan Kathryn’s Odesza after party, Branded badge “brought by Amex” in profile)
Please reach out for a full project process walkthrough!
Interactive prototype can be found here
#Sharp: https://video.eko.com/v/AEr2Q3?autoplay=true
Fanfare: https://video.eko.com/v/zr91k3?autoplay=true