I have been obsessed with audiences for a long time. By that, I mean since I was staging dance shows for soft toys, or imagining I was the host of Ready Steady Cook every time I made a peanut butter sandwich. This progressed from school plays through drama school, to theatre and live art where my interest only deepened.
Happily, my colleagues at Flying Object share my obsession, albeit from a slightly different angle. Easier on the Artaud, but a similar curiosity into emotional landscapes. What will resonate with a particular audience? How can we elicit an emotional response? We talk a lot about audiences in the office, always putting them at the centre of our work . This goes beyond the standard, high level definitions - who they are, what they want, why they need what we are offering - to more granular details. We go foraging in message boards and take Reddit deep dives. We lead wide-ranging interviews, digging into the specifics. It’s often a peculiar or precise detail where imagination snags, where ideas can take root and grow.
This was very much the case on a recent project with global life science company Abcam. They asked us to work with them on their evening engager at the American Association of Cancer Research trade show in San Diego, one of the biggest science conferences in the US. It is one of Abcam’s flagship events within the industry, with approximately 25,000 attendees. Commonly the engager events are free drinks in a chic bar, with some nice nibbles. Absolutely fine, of course - who doesn’t love free drinks in a chic bar, with some nice nibbles? - but this year Abcam wanted to do something different. Something unusual that would stand-out, ultimately building an emotional affinity between customers and the Abcam brand.
We started with the high level characteristics. We knew that 80% of the attendees were academics and 20% were industry. Our audience then, were a group of people who work tirelessly to make progress in the field of oncology. What drives someone to dedicate their life to this vital exploration? How can we engender the awe that first attracted them to science? We started digging for potential answers. A particularly pertinent find was a Reddit thread with a picture of a blow-up planetarium in a school gym. The comments underneath were gold:
“Was the best experience of my childhood.”
“My favourite day in school was when they set this up in the gymnasium.”
“I worked with one of these at a summer camp recently and can definitely say they are just as cool when you're an adult!”
“We went in every year from first to fifth grade. It never got old for whatever reason.”
“The best day of the year.”
“I remember being so excited for this.”
We could hardly not.
Yup, this reddit thread was definitely a contributing factor to why I spent most of late March planetarium wrangling (aka searching for planetarium owners willing to trade a grade-school gym for a warehouse in downtown San Diego).
The event, of course, developed and progressed. We worked with two artists to create an immersive film to be screened in the planetarium, where voices from real scientists were interpreted through image, sound and music. The planetarium experience was paired with a thematically linked food-and-drink offer - think nibbles served in petri dishes, and cocktails you mix with pipettes.
The launch point, however, was a very particular audience insight garnered from an internet deepdive, which was paid-off in the delighted response from people at the event itself.
I look forward to the next weird and/or wonderful place our collective obsession will take us.