Connecting communities: LIVE NATION

Experience Strategy | Interaction Design | Client

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.

Team
Susie Lee,  Proto Innovation

PROCESS

Event sponsorships are inherently B2B2C opportunities, meaning:

• Sponsors’ needs center the value proposition

• New ideas must appeal to sponsors’ desired customers

• The best concepts meet both sponsor and customer needs

Our ultimate goal was to find new ways that Live Nation can build and strengthen relationships between sponsors and their customers.

There were multiple levels of stakeholders to keep in mind: client stakeholders (17 clients ranging from Vice Presidents to Chief Operating Officer, Media & Sponsorship), brand sponsors, and the fans (end customers).

Defining the Opportunity Landscape

Cultural paradigm: We sit in an interesting time of human behavior. During the peak of Covid-19, people we inhibited from enjoying live music events the way they did prior to the pandemic. There was a shift from people brushing up shoulder to shoulder to enjoying music from the comfort of their own homes. In order to identify opportunity landscapes we conducted market analysis + sizing, customer behavioral research, and took into consideration Live Nation’s right to win.

We conducted an audit of documents from the client in order to get an understanding of the client as well as secondary research to discover trends that exist in the live entertainment space. From these, we came up with questions to ask the client as we conducted client stakeholder interviews.

Derived from the insights of our stakeholders, we identified three different potential opportunity spaces:

• Creating new sponsors: Enable non-endemic brands to tap into the power of live music

• Extending core sponsors: create targeted pathways for large endemic brands to increase engagement with fans between every event

• Scaling smaller sponsors: Empower small, endemic brands to participate in live music without a heavy lift

In order to prioritize which area to ideate in, we conducted further secondary research as well as primary interviews from both sponsors (brands) as well as the end users (fans/ customers). I mapped a fan’s journey for becoming a fan/ the pathway to attending a live event as well as the aftermath of the event. I, then, identified potential touch points/ moments that we could ideate within.

Key takeaways

Brands:

• Empowering the fan through brand experiences

• Objects are a critical component of a well-rounded/ impactful experience

• Rethinking the sponsorship MEDIUM

• Brands defined by the communities they support

We narrowed down to focusing in on extending core sponsors expressed in the form of focusing on fandoms and creating new sponsors expressed in the form on focusing on beyond IRL experiences. We presented both opportunities areas to our client stakeholders and received feedback.

Beyond IRL

+ Potential to reach large audiences which is currently a disadvantage in live events.

+ Opportunity to control the whole fan journey beyond isolated moments

- Requires new capabilities as aggregating eyeballs and audience is not a core competency outside of our live events.

- Already filling these gaps through partnerships and social relationships even through there’s a potential for a proprietary solution.

In collaboration with our strategists, we identified ‘extending core sponsors/fandom’ as our primary area of focus.

Criteria for selecting the richest opportunity:

• Leverage existing assets to provide a strategic advantage

• Provide a new context of the world

• Ride macro behavioral tailwinds

• Evergreen platform

REFINED GROWTH OPPORTUNITY

While enabling core sponsors to engage with fans in more innovative ways, we wanted to fuel fan identities holistically to build enduring relationships beyond isolated transactions.

Live experiences have an especially deep impact on how they define themselves, something that transcends any single event.

Our brand partners actively look 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.

Ideating concepts

I led the experience team through the ideation phase with an internal team ideation workshop. We conducted an internal ideation session. In teams of 3, we provided stimulus in the form of the fan journey as well as the brand + fan research takeaways and participants had 15 minutes per category to think of at least 3 ideas in each. We ran the ideas through 10 individuals that fit the target audience group and did a dot-voting exercise for prioritization as well as gain feedback on the ideas. From here my team and I created 3 different concets.

Concept 1: FANFARE

The truth we feel:
Social networks have made it easier for people to connect, but harder to truly bond with their networks.

The behaviors we observe:
Fans are building communities around their favorite artists, but these tend to appeal mostly to diehards, while remaining disorganized and fragmented.

Final Concept prototypes