Archives | July 2009 | Bemusement - The Attractions Industry Blog

Friday, July 31, 2009 Theme Parks: Shamu Rocks I was fortunate enough to see the remarkable and award winning "Believe" production at Seaworld last November but missed "Shamu Rocks", which when the park is open late is the last show of the day. Received these stunning images and really looking forward to experiencing the show in person. Shorter and less educational than Believe, the focus is on the dazzling video, glitzy wet suits and a live rock guitarist. Oh and the whales, which are pretty impressive too...

Thanks to Alan Stein for the images and to Elaine Swanger for formatting. See also: Themed Entertainment: A UK family with three children visits Orlando Theme Park Design and Project Interruptus – David and Linda Smith of Smithink, former Busch Entertainment execs, carry on Alan and the Whales: Theme park design & animal attractions for Busch Entertainment
Posted By Charles Read -- At 1:24 PM \| Comments (0) \| Trackbacks (0)
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Categories Amusements Parks, Attractions Business Tags production, SeaWorld, shamu, show
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Tuesday, July 28, 2009 Amusement Parks: Freestyle Hairloss. The London Bridge Experience is looking for a zombie on £30k a year . Great PR/marketing stunt very similar to the recent “Best job in the world” PR campaign run by the Queensland Tourism Authority...

Sure enough the press have lapped it up and the attraction has created a good bit of buzz and gained coverage in a number of the country’s most influential media outlets (eg The Times, The Guardian, Blooloop, etc). This canny faux-recruitment-as-PR is catching on too, just this morning splashed across the TV and papers is news that Wookey Hole, an attraction in Somerset, is looking for a Witch. Pays well and applicants mustn’t be allergic to cats apparently. Also arriving in our office today (or rather our chunk of cyberspace) a press release from a company purporting outrage at the new Freestyle Music Park’s TV ad campaign in which a coaster rider loses his wig during one particularly violent dip. (see : Leading Hair Loss Website to Urge Boycott of SC Theme Park ) The note declares in part that, "The officials at Freestyle Music Park should be ashamed and embarrassed for not only promoting this cheap, low-level and insulting ad, but then by defending it as 'fun'. The issuer of this indignant statement is a web-based company that provides consumer information about hair-loss treatment. The company even labels baldness as a physical disability. It brings to mind Bob Newhart’s great skit about the guy returning a toupee to the department store from which his wife bought it (“Mr Wonderful”, is that right?”). [See Dean Martin trying to be a straight man here] Entirely coincidentally, the company is also happily placed to assist such poor people – those unfortunate Hogarthian grotesques- by providing them with the very best in wigs - sorry, “hair systems”. Refreshing to see such altruism in the corporate world! Zombies, witches and wigs: different flavours of chutzpah to admire (or not). Some would call it guerrilla marketing . Maybe a bit of cross pollination is in order as I’m pretty sure zombies are follically challenged and even witches have bad hair days. Spent each of the last two weekends at festivals in Dorset in the West of England, Thomas Hardy country. Four days of constant rain, listening to a wide variety of folk musicians from the four corners of Bulgaria and trudging through 6 inches of mud. Bought a hatful of CDs by bands I hadn’t heard of playing songs I’ll not hear again. Will use them as drink coasters. Smug man with a beard and beads in his Yurt next to my tent, managed to play guitar badly through two nights without it being smashed over his head. Saw one of the BBC’s Happy Shopper intellectuals, Mark Kermode, a man who (seriously) reckons “The Exorcist” to be the best film ever made. These festivals attract people hawking New Age wares and therapies by the truckful. There were homeopaths, aromatherapists, a Reiki practitioner, a Palmistry technician (the word “technician” meaning there’s some kind of science involved you see), crystal energy consultants, reflexologists, ozone therapists, urine therapists, ear candlers and all manner of traveling salesmen peddling their wares and services to people with mud up to their knees. Didn’t see any zombies or witches. Maybe they should advertise next year?
Posted By Charles Read -- At 8:04 PM \| Comments (4) \| Trackbacks (0)
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Categories Amusements Parks, Attractions Business Tags coaster, freestyle music park, marketing, wigs
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Friday, July 10, 2009 Attractions Marketing: Twittering and 100 million Marie Celestes. Blogs are so 2008 aren’t they? Just 12 months ago it seemed like every man and his dog had their own blog. Millions of stream-of-consciousness online journals were launched and the blogosphere had developed into a virtual world where everyone and their opinion was important. It was a free for all - everyone’s opinion could be heard. The traditional media, newspaper, radio and television, was so old hat, with their so-called “experts” and their interesting, clever and well informed people...

Alongside the reputable blogs, the work of writers, academics and specialists, the new medium gave a much neglected but vociferously opinionated demographic a voice. Step forward the bigots, the ill informed, the deluded. Publish and be damned. The number of blogs is mind boggling. China alone has over 78 million (see: How Many Blogs Are There? Is Someone Still Counting?) but it looks like there has been a sea change in this last 6 months. A kind of evolution has been in operation and if nature is famously “red in tooth and claw” then the virtual word is equally unforgiving. It transpires that of the countless millions of blogs started, the vast majority are now, like digital Marie Celestes (albeit with a cargo of Britney Spears videos, cut price Viagra and Nazi memorabilia), hopelessly adrift and abandoned. Put simply the number of live (ie updated) blogs is decreasing rapidly. The New York Times noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about "Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest", which highlighted Technorati's 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, "that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned". What is happening though, is not really the death of the blog. It is the sorting out of the wheat from the chaff, a kind of natural selection. As the Guardian put it, it is not blogs but “The long tail of blogging (that ) is dying”. In essence, the best blogs, the most informative, the most well written, the most popular, will carry on, but the enormous number of blogs started on a whim will not. So what is this 95%, this vast number of ex-bloggers now doing? Anecdote says they are on Facebook and twittering. Twitter is, as you will doubtless know, the latest social networking story and the social network of choice now for millions of new twitterers. Almost every zoo, theme park and visitor attraction is now twittering as are thousands of celebrities. Twitter has become so all consuming in the last year that a British newspaper ran a (worryingly plausible) Aprils fool joke about it being finished with print and moving its news to Twitter. However, after 18 months, will people be tweeted out? Will they lose interest in Twitter as they did blogging? Will there be millions of dead Twitters as there are dead blogs? The important thing is that visitor attractions keep pace with their customers. If the public wants to tweet then tweet with them. Next year it will probably be something different. The individual brands are in a sense irrelevant, (MySpace anyone?) as the social networking landscape changes so rapidly. As Holiday World's Paula Werne said in our recent feature Attractions Marketing and the Power of Mommybloggers, “you cant do ‘em all" (although Paula is industrious and keeps Holiday World on the crest of the wave, running 4 accounts on Twitter alone!) Furthermore, bearing in mind Governor Schwarzenegger's proposal to replace text books with E learning in the state of California will a similar thing happen in the future at theme parks and zoos? Do these developments point the way to the entirely paper free attraction without paper leaflets, plans, guides and the like? Will we all be fiddling with our phones as we walk the park? I think not. PCs were supposed to herald a paperless office. In fact they have done quite the opposite. Perhaps the paperless park will appear with the paperless office?
Posted By Charles Read -- At 6:42 PM \| Comments (2) \| Trackbacks (0)
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Categories Amusements Parks, Attractions Business Tags facebook, linkedin, marketing, social networking, twitter myspace
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