The inimitable value of live experiences

Hello all, it’s edition 132 of The SEG3 Report. This week I’m looking at Grant Thornton’s Experience Economy Index and exploring the magic that happens when you put down your phone, both for fans and the folks building experiences for them.

Plus, our speed reads:

Let’s get into it.

A few weeks ago I went to a Cake gig at the Roundhouse. I don’t really know Cake (except for that ‘Short Skirt, Long Jacket’ song), but a friend of mine was going, and I managed to secure a ticket thanks to another friend in the industry. The venue was packed, and everyone was clearly excited.

When the band took to the stage, one of the first things they said was that it would be a phone-free gig. And lo and behold, not a single person (that I could see, anyway) pulled out their phones. It was refreshing, and made the concert that much more fun for not having to stare through a sea of screens to try and glimpse the stage. Instead, everyone revelled in being in the room together, experiencing the joy of live music. 

More and more spaces are becoming mobile phone-free, to greater and lesser extent. What this is indicative of, to me, is that people are craving places where they can connect with other people, face to face, over a shared passion (or, ahem, a fandom). 

In edition 118, I wrote about how physical presence for brands and entertainment is becoming a trust signal in its own right. Grant Thornton’s Experience Economy Index explores the consumer-side evidence for this thesis, and proves pretty clearly that experience and participation are swiftly becoming a cornerstone for anyone trying to cultivate, and keep, fans. 

According to the report, 40% of UK adults say digital overload makes them prioritise experiences where they can be fully present. Even more striking, 51% think more events should restrict phones and devices.

That doesn't mean everyone wants a pouch on their smartphone. I still remember going to a film screening where not only were we asked to put our phones in bags (this is fairly common practice at press screenings), but those bags were then locked away. We were given a token to exchange upon our exit, and it made leaving the cinema that much more tedious and frustrating. The screening was in 2018, and it’s an experience I still remember to this day, and not fondly.

It’s all about balance. Having a phone-free event could be one lever for creating a successful fan experience, but the wider point is that every digital touchpoint at an event needs to have a purpose. Technology should remove friction, not replace the human relationships that bring the value to the event (something I talked about last week when I explored the International Olympic Committee Trustworthy AI Framework).

As our world becomes more fractured and more digital, it makes sense that these kinds of shared experiences built around sports, entertainment, gaming and music have a rarity value added to them. It’s not as big of an ask anymore to get people to put away their phones, but it has to be done the right way.

Of course, the digital layer still matters enormously; the argument is to have tech for a purpose, not just tech for tech’s sake.

This also goes back to my favourite touchstone, the digital, life, product hand-off. In edition 120, I wrote that Discord and Sony’s Resident Evil mission online was a good example of this in practice. The digital layer rewarded fans for taking part by matching it with a physical experience at San Diego Comic-Con built on the same story, and the product was the film itself. It’s the same hand-off strategy employed by Coca-Cola’s Stefan Rothenbuehler, who shared with us on The Speakeasy how the company uses ‘consumer-centric’ data to build its experiences.

All of this to say, the mechanics of how your digital interface marries to your live experience is the most important thing to work out. 

The report's deep dive is on immersive attractions, defined as paid experiences where people take part rather than simply watch. An estimated 17.3 million UK adults went to one in the last 12 months. Median spend per immersive experience is £210, against £88 for a gig, £63 for live sport and £15 for the cinema.

More and more venues are catching up to this gap. Sphere’s Las Vegas segment brought in $266.0 million in the first quarter of 2026, up 69% year on year, driven by higher per-show revenue for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere. A venue built around being inside the story is earning more per show than its earlier programming.

Little Lion's founder Tom Lionetti-Maguire, whose company runs The Crystal Maze LIVE, said that the best immersive experiences, "combine the quality and replayability of a video game with the energy of a live event.”

This is something Carlotta Rossi-Spencer, Banijay’s former head of Branded Entertainment, touched on when she joined us for The Speakeasy. People who have never seen The Crystal Maze can enjoy the live experience regardless, and the experience has the ability to turn a visitor into a fan of the show, and a repeat viewer. 

That replayability is something we’ve talked about before, specifically in edition 105, and Pokémon GO's multi-season run at MLB ballparks. In this example, the experience mechanics give fans a reason to come back, rather than just collect something and move on. This ongoing participation turns a one-off visit into a habit. 

→ Remember: if your live experience is built for watching, you're now competing with something people will spend a lot more on, because they get to take part. 

As a side note, what’s most compelling about the amount people are spending on attending immersive experiences is how the price breaks down. According to the report, admission is only 37.5% of total spend. Travel, accommodation and food and drink each make up the other 62.5%. That’s a gap that merits its own attention.

People build a day or a weekend around these events. 53% of attendees travelled specifically for the experience, and 55% stayed overnight. 37% ate or drank at local businesses and 32% shopped locally. The economic impacts go beyond any individual event, venue, or IP, and are part of a broader ecosystem that encompasses tourism, hospitality, and service industries. This is a theme we’ll cover more at SEG3 LA this December in our IP in the Real World session, with speakers from Bandai Namco and Cosm.

In the report, 66% of Gen Z have attended an immersive experience in the last five years, against 36% of all UK adults. And 30% say they're spending more on experiences than a year ago, compared with 16% of everyone.

A USC Annenberg and Acceleration Community of Companies study of Gen Z sports fans found 39% said they have attended a live game mainly for celebrities, concerts or brand activations, and a further 39% said they would.

As ACC's Monica Chun put it: "For previous generations, the game was the front door to fandom. For Gen Z, it's often the last stop."

In short: new audiences are arriving, but not necessarily through the front door you built.

This is the new ‘side door’ to fandom: the concert, the celebrity appearance or the brand activation that gets a young fan into a stadium before the sport itself.

And this is applicable beyond sports. Folks buy cinema tickets, tune into TV shows, and go to events because their favourite creators, celebrities, or other people in their ‘trust circle’ rate those experiences.

This side-door strategy was part of Disney x NFL’s collaboration, which we covered in edition 119: Disney characters could pull someone who likes Star Wars towards an NFL team, creating a football fan out of a Star Wars fan. 

This ‘side door’ can happen organically, if you’re lucky, but building them out specifically, through partnerships and relationships with creators and trusted voices in fandoms, ahead of time is only going to make it that much easier to draw new fans to your IP.

→  Whatever the entry point, the event around the game, sport, movie, or IP does audience-building work, so it has to be good enough to turn a visitor into a fan.

In writing this paragraph, I just recalled a moment from one of my favourite TV shows, Schitt’s Creek. In it, Moira Rose, played by the late, great Catherine O’Hara, strolls into her son’s store while live-streaming on Instagram. David (played by Dan Levy) says, ‘You look like the downfall of society’. 

This is exactly the tension that exists between the digital and live experience. Having just enough digital infrastructure to create a seamless experience without putting a phone up in front of someone’s face (literally or metaphorically) is the balance that anyone building a live experience around their IP, game, or sport needs to strike. 

There are other things to consider, too. Designing multiple doorways into your IP or sport, through partnerships with content creators and other brands with fans, creates a new entry point for discovery (and we all know how badly everyone is competing for attention).

The key takeaway? People want to be present and to take part.

Fans are telling us they value this in-person connection, so every screen or digital moment in a venue needs to enhance that. Digital experiences need to point people back to the live one seamlessly, and the live experience itself needs to be engaging and participatory enough that people are more than happy to put down their phones. 

The American Entertainment Alliance is lobbying to change how streamers commission and own content

TL;DR

Why you should care

There are four key things the alliance is asking for:

The timing of this highlights a shift, and perhaps a fear, within the entertainment industry. The AEA launched a week after Paramount closed its $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, and lays the blame for today’s era of consolidation on the FCC scrapping its Financial Interest and Syndication rules back in 1993. Those rules stopped major networks from owning the shows they aired or controlling their syndication, so independent producers kept their rights and had guaranteed access to broadcast. The AEA wants the streaming-era version of this bygone legislation.

Under the AEA’s proposal, after a few years those rights go back to the production company, which could then sell the show again somewhere else instead of it staying locked to the platform that first commissioned it.

For folks building IP, that changes who you’d be negotiating with. A show you want to partner on could have a new rights holder a few years in, and a different place to watch it. We’ve already covered one studio building shared ownership into creator deals from day one: the Fox Creator Studios, which I wrote about in edition 116. The AEA is asking the law to make something like that the default.

The 50% spending quota is the biggest number and is the most straightforward. It follows a broader push for indie production support, like the UK’s Independent Film Tax Credit (IFTC), which launched in 2024.

The algorithm component is super interesting to me, specifically in this era of choice overload and lack of accurate data. When you open a streamer, the shows at the top of your screen are chosen by the platform’s recommendation system, and you can’t see how it decides. The AEA wants that opened up, and wants platforms banned from “self-preferencing”, which means pushing their own titles ahead of someone else’s.

This means production companies will have a better idea of who is watching their shows, and accurately measuring audience data is key to anyone in any part of this ecosystem, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago. For an indie producer, knowing how the algorithm works is the difference between a show being made and a show being seen. And for brands looking to partner, it means a clearer understanding of how to target your specific audience.

WSC Studios is building an in-house studio that makes animated kids’ series for sports organisations, aiming to cultivate long-term fandom

TL;DR

Why you should care

Most sports content starts with the live game, which is a hard place to start for a six-year-old. WSC Studios is proposing another way in: a kid falls for a character first, and attachment to the sport grows organically from that passion.

Itai Epstein, who heads the studio, says lifelong fandoms form young, which we already know to be true. It’s something we’ve covered way back in edition 94, with the golden age for discovery sitting around age eight. Giving an eight-year-old a character or story to love is an authentic, sustainable gateway into long-term fandom.

If the strategy of building sports-adjacent entertainment that isn’t the sport itself sounds familiar, it’s because it is. As we covered this in edition 119 (and, ironically, in the long read above!), nearly half of Gen Z sports fans say they got into a sport through something outside it, like a show or a game. WSC is building that route on purpose, and aiming it at that golden age for discovery.

MLB is one example already using a similar strategy via their YouTube channel, which features original series spanning animation, player storytelling, highlights, educational and creative content that brings baseball and softball to young audiences in new and engaging ways.

There are a few points that will need clarity as the studio continues to develop its original franchises. In particular, the question of ownership around these characters and IP, as well as where exactly AI sits within the workflow (as we know, transparency is paramount when it comes to implementing AI in creative output).

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!