An industry colleague, Bob Cooney, currently stranded in Australia due to the coronavirus, has put together a fantastic virtual event for the location-based entertainment industry – ShowUp. It’s shaping up to be a very different conference as more than half the speakers have never presented at an amusement industry conference before. Too often the LBE industry gets stuck in its silo, when to stay relevant to the modern consumer, it needs to understand what is happening and changing in the entire consumer leisure world. The conference covers three days and features more than 40 sessions and at least four new product launches. And it’s pay what you want pricing.
“Saying this has been a difficult year for our industry is the understatement of the century,” commented Bob Cooney, “We’ve had plenty of discussion on how to survive the pandemic. Now it’s time to talk about what’s coming in the future. There’s so much to be excited about.
“The collision of rapidly changing consumer trends and accelerating adoption of emerging technology is creating massive disruption and opportunity for location-based entertainment. I want to educate the amusement operator community so they can prepare for the near future. One only needs to look at the movie theater business to see a stark example of what happens when operators don’t stay ahead of consumer and tech trends.”
I’ll be participating in two different panel sessions and giving a keynote, “Nothing is Normal – The Post Pandemic Location-Based Entertainment Consumer.”
Check it out now and get it on your calendar
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.
