“Living Stories” Remain Compelling for Audiences
The opportunities for variation and program alternatives within the “living history” type of “edutainment” are substantial. Consider just a......
AEC brings a long experience as themed entertainment, restaurants, and attractions consultants, dating back to our principal’s involvement in the land use planning and feasibility work for the 15,000-hectare Marne-la-Vallée new town, also known at the time as Euro Disneyland. Those early days included the design-build-operate of Universal Studios Experience Beijing, and our own Donald Bredberg’s helming of Universal Studios’ CityWalk and urban entertainment business unit.
We bring a “pragmatic creativity” to our out-of-home entertainment assignments, steeped in feasibility and build-ability issues as well as the creative. The foundation of our firm is in strategic financial planning, project feasibility, and due diligence, for an array of place products.
We anticipate significant changes in experiential branding in coming years, as the evergreen brands popular with Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation, yield to the social media, electronic gaming, and popular culture brand sensibilities of emerging generations. Should be interesting. Product placement, social media celebrity, co-marketing, and experiential A/R may be the new way forward.
Some examples of our themed entertainment and attractions experience are provided below. We’d note that what we refer to here as themed entertainment, has increasingly been referred to as the more encompassing term, location-based entertainment. Elsewhere on this website we provide our other experience with LBE, outdoor recreation, retail-entertainment, traveling exhibits, media and EASIL production, and event design / production.
Immersive environments as an experiential format may be evolving. Over the past year we’ve been owner’s rep for the design-build of a virtual reality LBE, and the engagement has us musing on the world of possibilities for immersive environments – the real, the live-acted, the virtual, and the imagined. Although virtual seems to be the driving interest of investors, we think the fully mixed-method version will take the day. We’ll see.
