Wearable Devices + Live Concerts = Marketing Success

Wearable Devices are providing digital marketers with a new way to reach target consumers, especially in live concert settings and festivals. For this year’s Lollapalooza, concert-goers will have a bracelet pre-loaded with their credit card information. They receive this bracelet before the festival begins and through RFIS technology are able to tap the bracelet against a payment pad to purchase various food, drink, and other merchandise at the music festival. While this “tap and pay” method may not seems like the most innovative way to utilize wearable devices at concerts, it will provide marketers with proof that mobile payment isn’t the only way to go when it comes to alternative payment methods at live events. If successful, this wearable technology could open a new door to that way that marketers think about creating a “frictionless” method for consumers to interact with their brand.

There have been more experimental ways in which wearable devices are being used in live concert settings to communicate brand value to consumers. At SXSW 2014, Pepsi sponsored a bracelet that used Lightwave technology to measure audience biometrics such as motion, volume, temperature, and movement. The measurements obtained by these bracelets were linked to accounts of the bracelet wearers who were also the concert-goers. They were then instructed to do certain actions. Successful achievement of the action (measure by the Lightwave bracelet technology) would allow the audience to reap certain rewards. 

For example, it wasn’t until the volume in the room reached a certain level that a performance was “unlocked” and officially began. In the same concert, the audience member with the most movement measured (presumably the most dancing) would be scored at the top of the leaderboard and receive certain Pepsi sponsored prizes. In another sound related biometric measurement, once the volume in the room reached a certain level, another Pepsi prize was unclocked and the entire concert received free drinks from Pepsi. This example demonstrates sun and connectivity between the live concert, the wearable technology, and marketers using digital marketing to reach consumers in an alternative and unexpected fashion. 

Video from SXSW Pepsi BioReactive Concert:

Another example of a more experimental use of wearable technology in a live concert setting uses the Google glass technology. While some companies allow audience members with Google Glass to record concerts, opera fans attending concerts by On Site Opera Company have the opportunity to read the opera supertitles, the translation of the opera’s libretto, through Google Glass instead of on the screens on the back of chairs where supertitles are typically presented. 

The company who creates this technology, Figaro systems will attempt this again with the Wolftrap Opera on July 25^tth, ; however this time it will also present the supertitles on mobile phones, tablets, and other devices that can connect to the internet during the performance. As wearable technology becomes even more of the norm at these live music events, digital marketers will not be far behind. This fully integrated method of reaching your consumer is what some will consider intrusive but others might consider to be a more organic way to inserting into the authentic concert experience.