Bob Rogers – 2024 Themed Experience and Attraction Academic Symposium Keynote
- Artificial intelligence is both an exciting opportunity and a terrifying threat. Some all-new jobs are being created. Some established jobs are being eliminated or changed beyond recognition. Your students will tame and ride this tiger or be eaten by it.
- Secondary markets? Buzz Price was a mentor of mine. He was the economic feasibility pioneer who told Walt where to locate the first Disneyland and where to put Disney World. Toward the end of his life Buzz pondered that we have developed the great mega markets, such as Southern California, central Florida, Tokyo and others. What remains are the secondary markets, too small to support a mega park. But what can they support? Sustainably support! Today our industry is grappling with that question. Trying things. Some will work; some won’t. One of your students may master this and make a fortune.
- Sculpt-able digital screens. As many of you know, today, in secret laboratories, we’re learning how to bend and sculpt television screens. Not tomorrow, and not next year, but soon enough we will be able to sculpt digital image forming surfaces into any complex, compound, oddball shape or size we want, including faces, sculpture, scenery, props, even costumes…. The surface of anything, no matter how oddly bent or sculpted, can be coated with a TV screen. What will your students do with that? Which skill sets will that obsolete? In addition to that, what other new wonders are today percolating in secret labs and will soon become possible? Your students of today will one day have these and other great toys.
- Climate Change – Except for the loss of a few mature trees, our Orlando area parks survived the recent hurricanes this time. But knowing how much worse it could have been, for our parks and for our guests… And knowing how much worse it could become with advancing climate change… how should we shape our future designs so that they are safer and better protected from damage and from operational disruption? Should we be master planning parks that are half indoor and half outdoor? Are the Chimelong Spaceship in China or the indoor theme parks in Abu Dahbi a model for the future?
- Commoditization — How will we deal with the constant commoditization of our art? When I started, if you could so much as spell “Imagineer” you were considered a wizard. Today we are too often reduced to a commodity, no more valued than a journeyman plumber. To a certain extent we are doing it to ourselves! I sometimes worry that organizations like IAAPA, are teaching us to all be like our competitors, making us more like each other, rather than more original. Also less unique and therefore less valuable. How do we steer clear of the pressure to be like everyone else? How do we strive for original work? Well, not by copying each other! And not by just replicating what is working elsewhere.
I’ll give you an encouraging example: In 1978 a bunch of crazy French people in a small remote village in the French countryside, a significant distance from everywhere, opened their own theme park. They had a big advantage. They had no bloody idea what they were doing, what a theme park was or what it should be. They had never been to IAAPA. There was no TEA to join. There were no how-to books. They were on their own, in the middle of nowhere. Like you, and like the original Imagineers, they were figuring it out on their own. As a result, Puy du Fou became one of the most stunningly original, astonishing, daring and truly wonderful theme parks in the world. All because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s what made them original. If you have never been to Puy du Fou, you owe yourself a tax-deductible trip to western France. Meanwhile, how do we prepare tomorrow’s creative leaders to be more original, and resist the gravity well of replication.
- New Metrics for Tomorrow – It’s time for some new metrics. Remember the film and book, Money Ball, which challenged the metrics traditionally used to value baseball players? In our industry we over-rely on real estate metrics like the cost per square foot, as if we were selling carpet instead of experiences. Our current metrics often fail to put enough value on effectiveness, originality, quality, impact, brand-sustainability or even profitability. Which of your students will solve that one, and give us some new, more meaningful metrics, that measure and guide us toward the experiences our guests value rather than toward the lowest common denominator?
- Shopping Malls – We still have more built retail shopping mall space than we need. What can be done there? That’s a huge opportunity. Currently, many developers imagine that themed entertainment is a superficial aerosol spray and if you walk down the center of their mall, spraying it in the air it will magically revive their dyeing paradigm, causing their obsolete business model to resume working. Sorry, but it won’t work like that. But when they do finally figure it out, and when shopping malls really do become themed entertainment, what will it be? And how will that impact theme parks?
- Mobile phones – We make our money charging admission to places. One of the great, still-incompletely-solved puzzles of our industry is how the virtual world we carry in our pockets can be merged with the physical lands that our industry creates and charges admission to. Recently, I read where an 18-year-old girl had written, “The objective of themed entertainment should be to take me to a place I can’t otherwise go, and to so overwhelm and charm me that I forget I have a phone in my pocket.” Or does the answer lie in the opposite direction, causing the user’s phone to become the magic wand that guides them through the places we create, giving those places added life, animation and interest? Or maybe both of those directions?
- But of all the opportunities out there, the 9th one stands above the others. If you remember one thing from my talk today, please remember this. Challenge Number 9 is not just an opportunity, it is a higher calling.