By Judith Rubin
Immersive “digital dome” theater has been with us for a good decade and is now well established to the tune of several hundred installations (including portable domes). It now has a trade group dedicated to digital domes: IMERSA, formally established in cooperation with IPS and the help of generous founding sponsors at Chicago’s IPS 2008 meeting last July.
As IMERSA’s director of communications, it’s my job to help spread the word about fulldome, not just within the planetarium community but also to its other developing markets in entertainment and education. My two decades’ experience as a trade journalist, editor and publicist focused on visitor attractions, theater technology and special venue cinema have given me a window into these intersecting markets.
I see digital dome technology as a breakthrough medium for out-of-home visitor experiences, with a vast creative potential only fractionally realized. Its power to deliver unique, compelling experiences provides a versatile digital canvas that invites invention.
But fulldome is also promising from a business standpoint, having a diverse, international vendor community working together to grow the medium and the market, and a significant installation base that makes it appealing to distributors and content creators alike. I believe that, as it moves into its second decade of development, immersive dome theater will begin to realize its potential in ways both inspiring and unexpected.
In this column, we will look at how the art, science and technology of this exciting medium are extending beyond what has traditionally been considered planetarium programming, to attract, educate and entertain visitors and create revenues. We will share practices, developments and viewpoints from inside and outside the planetarium community. This inaugural article begins a discussion of digital dome branding and marketing.
The Gates: Branding Evolution
Without a doubt, it would be useful to have a catchy term denoting fulldome that the public would instantly recognize. It would make fulldome easier to promote to potential new customers as well as to audiences. However, an overarching name has yet to emerge. In lieu of such a term, branding is nonetheless taking place in digital dome theaters. Some have adopted names that attempt differentiation from planetariums, such as CyberDome, Imaginarium, Virtuarium and Immersive Projection Theater. Others use branding that focuses more on content, guest experience or the character of the institution. “
In Denver, we’ve used it to redefine, for the local audience, what a planetarium is,” says Dan Neafus (
right), director of the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He sees branding happening organically as young people are exposed to the medium. A SEOS system was installed into the Gates’ 55-ft dome in 2003, and updated to
Global Immersion’s Fidelity Bright system in 2007. “In these days of social networking,” continues Neafus, “the branding and the name will probably evolve on their own, and ‘fulldome’ may not be the phrase that catches on. Maybe not even digital dome. But if we succeed in terms of maintaining the unique quality of the experience, people will want to repeat it, our theaters will be an essential resource and our venues will be defined by that experience. If 100 astronomy venues succeed in that for a decade, we’ll achieve a critical mass. It’s all about what fulldome can do—great experiences, great content. We have hosted well over 1,000,000 visitors since our digital renovation. Twenty percent still look for the star machine; the other 80 percent take it for what it is. For kids, the Gates planetarium is a digital dome. For teachers, it’s very much about content. They couldn’t care less what the delivery vehicle is: their concern is that the experience justifies the expense and trouble of the trip and the takeaway for the kids.”
That said, how does the Gates make the most of its content? “Number one, respect for the audience,” says Neafus. “Don’t speak up or down to them. Get inside the heads of people actually showing up at your venue. Number two, appropriate use of and respect for the dome venue. The story should be crafted visually so the dome presentation reinforces the message. No PowerPoint (or equivalent). Number three, production quality. It takes a lot of skill to really blend an audiovisual message together on a par with filmmaking.”
Fulldome has raised the bar for production values, but the sophistication of the medium is not always matched by the sophistication of the production. “We need to start taking it up a notch,” says Neafus. “In the planetarium community, most of us do it just well enough. We need to bring in other media producers and pay attention to production values outside our own circles.
” The Gates’ own stream of fulldome content includes
Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity, distributed in conjunction with Spitz and which Neafus reports has been “wildly successful,” with more than 52 venues licensing the show. “We did a fair amount of topic research and black holes was one of the top themes. We felt it would essentially sell itself and it has. As far as the mechanics of marketing go, our museum has a good graphics team and consistency of campaign that are well budgeted. We have good press materials on our website with a whole series of downloadable background art and a background story. It should have a long shelf life.
” The Clark: Lines Around the Block “
Know your audience, know your market and build your audience. We take our marketing and branding very seriously,” says Mike Murray (
below left), director of programs for Sheila M. Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City. The Clark relocated in 2003 to the Gateway Center, a mixed-use development, and opened the Hansen Dome Theater, a 55-ft, 205-seat dome with a 12-degree tilt and stadium-style raked seating containing an Evans & Sutherland Digistar 3 fulldome system. The facility also includes an Imax theater, 15,000 square feet of exhibits, and a busy museum store.
“Attendance is way up in theaters that now have digital capability,” states Murray. “But there does need to be promotion. We put in a huge marketing campaign when
we went to the new facility. Visiting the Clark is a local tradition. We needed to capture people’s imaginations but emphasize that this was something new—a new place that can show you what the universe really can feel like. The immersion effect is something planetarium domes have always provided, but fulldome transforms it into a dynamic environment where you feel yourself part of a moving event in real time. It’s much more powerful and visually potent. In the best cases, you lose track of whether it’s you or the theater that is in motion.”
The Clark’s extensive media campaign included radio and television. “We produced a TV commercial that showed little kids playing with lights in a colander, trying to make stars on the wall,” recalls Murray. “The message was, ‘Remember when it felt like this? We can help you recapture that.’ In our opening months, we had people in line around the block. Within the first six months, we saw four times the attendance we had in the old theater. We wanted to keep the core audience but were also eager to get people into the new facility who had never been to a planetarium before, and grow a new audience. I feel we had a lot of success. Attendance has maintained pretty well even after the newlywed year, with annual attendance around 135,000 visits per year just in the dome theater.”
The Clark has acquired a strong local following for its multimedia shows featuring laser and lighting effects and pop music, building on the legacy of the old laser shows. These shows have helped make the theater a destination for young adults as well as baby boomers, and other institutions have begun to license them.
Another popular Clark show is
The Secret of the Cardboard Rocket, a fulldome adaptation of a show originally produced in 1988, in which a group of children take an imaginary trip through the solar system inside a cardboard refrigerator box. Murray advocates high digital production values and new creative directions, but he’s not a fan of taking content development in the direction of character-based stories.”We’re finding that the more we keep the program centered on audience experience, the better. With the exception of cartoony stuff for kids, we’ve not found it successful in terms of the visitor experience to present articulated characters on the dome. People don’t want to watch others; they want to feel they’re immersed in a journey with the rest of the audience.”
Paul Fraser: Convergence
“If I were the brand manager for this category, I would say, ‘Start with less-is-more and then build up from there,’” says Paul Fraser (
below right), president of Blaze Partners LLC, a Connecticutbased project-management firm specializing in business development for all facets of digital cinema, including fulldome. “For this business to really grow smartly and economically for everybody, you’ll have to be inclusive in the branding or description because there are going to be a lot of different flavors.”
This will be true especially if the anticipated convergence takes place in which science centers and entertainment venues that are currently running film systems in dome theaters incorporate fulldome technology, dramatically expanding the fulldome theater network into new sectors.
Fraser, whose career includes years as branding specialist with Imax Corp. in the 1980s and 1990s, is confident that convergence will take place. Like others with roots in the giant- screen film industry, he observes that the dome sector is under-served, and notes the special appeal of content made specifically for dome presentation. “The endgame for IMAX Dome (aka Omnimax) is that it won’t exist. You can see its demise coming. Imax is not likely to create a digital system for the dome. Giant-screen films were never made exclusively for the dome, and only a very few filmmakers have gone to the trouble to produce with the dome in mind.”
Fraser compared fulldome to other groundbreaking products and pointed out how brands and brand loyalty build foundations. “Fulldome really sprang up to deal with the smaller domes first, and that’s often how disruptive technology begins—not at the bigger end, but in fringe areas the mainstream isn’t paying a lot of attention to. Think about how Nissan and Toyota and Honda started—they didn’t introduce a big sedan, but rather a tiny, little car. When they first appeared, ‘nobody’ cared. For the dome, the future is digital.”
Fraser’s vision of the convergence includes diverse content and live action on the dome. “It’s clear to me there is an appetite for nonastronomy subjects, although they have to be documentary and educational. And from what I’m hearing in the creative community, for the industry to really mature and really continue on this fantastic road, it must incorporate live action and do it well. The giantscreen cinema domes are accustomed to live action. It will raise production standards and budgets, but with the growth of the installed base of fulldome theaters, the industry can raise budgets and make it an economic proposition.”
It is the versatility and transparency of digital technology, and the digital culture we live in that give fulldome its versatility and vast potential, and it is those qualities combined with the uniqueness of the dome setting that give it singular competitiveness with other forms of leisure, in-home and out-of-home.
Marketing and Branding Part II will appear shortly.
This article was first published in The Planetarian, published by the International Planetarium Society Reprinted here with kind permission.
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Judith Rubin's archive
See also:
Trends in Fulldome Production and Distribution: The Paper
Trends in Fulldome Production and Distribution ; The Slides
The Future of FullDome: Pioneering a New Medium
Introduction to FullDome Theaters
"FullDome" Digital Surround Theater Technology Ready to Explode into Special-Venue Markets
Fulldome: Global Immersion's Martin Howe talks about the Morrison Planetarium at the new California Academy of Sciences
Fulldome : Across the Universe
Image: Planetarium Interior, copyright Tim Griffith