I’m bored; let’s do something. Not all that many years ago that is something most people frequently experienced. Back then basically all we had to do at home was listen to radio, watch network TV shows on our cathode ray televisions and play board games. And when we were away from our home electronics, we could really become bored. When you’re bored, you look to do something to relieve that boredom. A visit to a location-based entertainment venue was often the answer back then.
Today that situation has dramatically changed. We are bored far less often due to all the digital content options at home, whether it is watching streaming movies, television shows or sports on our HDTVs, playing video games or immersed in social media or other content on our digital screens. And we are no longer bored when away from our home electronics with the smartphones and sometimes tablets we carry with us everywhere. According to Nielsen’s Third-Quarter 2014 Cross-Platform report, U.S. adults spent an average of 46 hours, 44 minutes per month connected with content through a smartphone app or mobile web browser. That’s almost double the 26 hours, 13 minutes they spent in the same quarter two years earlier. And Nielsen reports that 68% of adults used smartphone apps to relieve boredom or to kill time, 70% of the time while they were by themselves.
Boredom used to be location-based entertainment’s friend. That has changed today. The bar has been raised to get guests in the front door of entertainment venues, as they’re rarely bored anymore.
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.
