In this blog and in our company’s Leisure eNewsletter, I write extensively about our company’s research and analysis of the fast evolving and rapidly changing intersection of personal digital technology & bricks-and-mortar entertainment. The Triple Revolution of the Internet, social media and the always-on-connectivity of now ubiquitous mobile devices is disrupting the entertainment venue industry in ways and at a speed that most in industry fail to recognize, let alone take action to stay competitive.
Below is a graph that illustrates the change in spending over the past decade. The average American household has increased their total spending on all types of entertainment, including admissions and fees at bricks-and-mortar entertainment, cultural and sports venues and on all forms of digital entertainment including social media (88% of social media users consider it entertainment), by one-quarter (24%, inflation-adjusted) over the past ten years, increasing from 3.5% of all their spending to 4.4%.
But here’s what we see as the real mega-trend that should have entertainment and other venues alarmed. Average household spending on both video game hardware and software and on cellular phones and services (think predominately smartphones and apps) has almost doubled (+96% for both), whereas admission and fee spending at entertainment, cultural and sports venues has decreased by one-quarter (-24%), from 16% of all entertainment expenditures to 10%. And when we look at the data year-by-year, it is apparent that the trend started many years before the Great Recession, indicating that it is a long-term trend.
This digital disruption of where entertainment dollars are being spent is something everyone in the business of attracting customers to any type of leisure destination needs to recognize. In order to assure their future they will need to take action to transform their venue to become competitive with the fast growing siren call of at-home and mobile digital entertainment.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
