The Immersive Experience Trend and What It Tells Us About Where Live Entertainment Is Going

The immersive entertainment trend is not primarily driven by technology, despite the prominence of digital and augmented reality formats in media coverage of the category. The most commercially successful immersive experiences are the ones that create genuine participation through scenario design and narrative, with technology playing a supporting role or no role at all. The escape room is the canonical example: no technology, enormous commercial success, and genuinely immersive participation.

The appeal of immersive formats is the specific form of agency they offer. Passive entertainment provides excellent content. Participatory entertainment provides the content and the experience of genuinely influencing it. The player who solves the puzzle, identifies the traitor, wins the cooking competition, or masters the cocktail technique has a different relationship to the experience than the audience member who watches it happen. Agency creates investment. Investment creates memory.

The social dimension of immersive formats also distinguishes them from passive entertainment in commercially important ways. Shared participation in an immersive scenario creates a specific social bond — the bond of having collectively navigated a challenge — that shared passive entertainment does not. This bond is the product that immersive entertainment is actually selling, and it is why immersive formats command premium pricing relative to their passive equivalents.

For brands, the immersive trend is a signal about where their audiences most want to spend their discretionary entertainment time and money. The consumer who is choosing between a concert and a murder mystery evening is choosing between passive and participatory entertainment. An increasing proportion of them are choosing participatory, and the brands that create the best participatory experiences are the brands that win their time.

Connect Community's entire concept portfolio is built on participatory design principles. The immersive dimension is not a format feature. It is the fundamental design principle that every concept is built from.