The Audience of the Future Immersive Audience Journey report

This report is a result of research conducted by Digital Catapult on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), in collaboration with the Audience of the Future Demonstrator programme. It provides a detailed overview of the concept of ‘audiences’ when applied to immersive productions in the fields of art, culture, heritage and entertainment.

The immersive Audience Journey report is aimed at supporting the UK immersive market growth by providing immersive content creators and practitioners with sources and methods of capturing future prospective audience insights, especially in view of Covid-19. The impact of Covid-19 together with multiple market barriers such as lack of investment interest and slow consumer adoption means that understanding these audiences is now more critical than ever.

The goal is to raise awareness of best practices within the UK immersive community, and share these approaches so that they can be adopted on a more widespread basis by those organisations growing the immersive culture and economy.

“This report is a must read for anyone wanting to produce enthralling immersive work. It will help build a better understanding of current and future audiences, how to attract them, retain them, and, importantly, how to grow them.” – Dr Jeremy Silver, CEO of Digital Catapult

“By sharing the insights from this report, we aim to raise awareness of best practices within the immersive community to help creators and production studios as they pivot their models.” – Professor Andrew Chitty, UKRI Challenge Director for the Audience of the Future and Creative Industries Clusters Challenge

The Immersive Audience Journey report creates an important new framework for exploring how audiences in different market segments behave around immersive content.

The research in particular adopts the customer journey map approach as a structure for defining the different phases that audiences go through: becoming aware of an immersive production, considering attending it, paying for it, experiencing it, and possibly recommending or re-engaging with it. This shifts the perspective from looking at immersive as a technology – or set of experiences that the technology enables – to looking at how audiences experience immersive productions as art, cultural or entertainment services.

The journey map templates included in the report are intended to support immersive producers when designing their audience journeys, from a production (task/responsibility focus) and experience design (emotional arc) perspective. Blank versions of the journey template are available to download as useful tools to map out immersive audience journeys.

A more focused understanding of the target audience will be key to the success of immersive productions in the future. Success might not be qualified in terms of massive mainstream breakthroughs, but rather as more comprehensive reach and engagement with viable niche audiences intensely interested in the work and large enough to be commercially viable.

For more information and to read the report in full, access the publication below.