How Stage Entertainment runs the show with AI-powered insights

Harnessing AI to connect with audiences as they return to theaters post-pandemic

When van Zandwijk took the social media helm, he not only wanted to help guide Stage Entertainment forward out of a worldwide pandemic, but to leverage the Sprinklr platform in new and innovative ways for a theater production company — on both the commercial and production side of the house. To start, he broadened the way Stage Entertainment uses Social Listening from Sprinklr’s Sprinklr Insights product suite, in three key ways. First, as European audiences emerged from lockdowns and returned to live shows, van Zandwijk wanted to understand how they were feeling about the experience of being in theaters again.

“After we reopened, it was very important to reconnect with our audience, get the right content to them, and, more specifically, to comfort them,” explains van Zandwijk. It was important to understand if visitors felt safe from a health and hygiene perspective. Did they feel comfortable with the new processes in place intended to keep them healthy, and how was color-mapped seating being received?

“That’s where Listening really helped us because we saw that we had quite positive sentiment, and all our safety measures were working well for audiences,” says van Zandwijk. This knowledge then informed the content that the commercial teams put out on social channels. “We used that information to reinforce the sentiment and positioning on social – to say, ‘It’s safe to go to the theater, not because we say so, but because our customers are saying so.’”

Using AI-powered Social Listening for concept testing theatrical productions

Next, van Zandwijk had an idea to use Social Listening as part of concept testing. When a production company wants to introduce a new show in a market, it tests the idea with in-person audiences. Van Zandwijk’s idea was to, additionally, set up keywords and topics to monitor online sentiment around upcoming productions, then analyze the data to help guide marketing activity for the show.

"We have tested this when shows have low familiarity," he explains. “Then, based on that, we plan new marketing activities around that show."

Now, he says, Stage Entertainment has a new Social Listening use case: the marketing team has defined KPIs around marketing efforts against which they measure campaign performance and adjust course as necessary.

Leveraging Social Listening in the show-selection process

Van Zandwijk had one more idea for Social Listening: he wanted to see if he could deploy it in support of Stage Entertainment’s show selection process. When selecting musicals to put into production, Stage Entertainment has always listened to the market to determine which shows will resonate best with its audiences. Now, Van Zandwijk wanted to see if he could leverage the power of AI to understand sentiment around specific shows playing on Broadway in the U.S. and to predict their success in Europe.

"And where sentiment is overwhelmingly positive, can we maybe invest in those shows and bring them to Europe?” he explains. For a recent show selection, van Zandwijk used Social Listening to monitor keywords and topics related to a production that was playing on Broadway. He listened to sentiment in the U.S. and around the world, including in Stage’s European markets. Based on insights he gleaned, Stage Entertainment made the data-informed decision to move forward with potentially producing the show for audiences in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and France.

Asset-sharing performance dashboard enables social media collaboration across markets

With numerous concurrent productions playing in theaters across six different countries and in five different languages, Stage Entertainment’s social teams are creating a lot of content. Teams in each market aim to create full-funnel experiences for audiences — reaching them with relevant, engaging content before, during, and after the show. Social Publishing & Engagement, part of Sprinklr’s Sprinklr Social product suite, serves to strengthen collaboration across markets. This enables local teams in different markets to work from a common platform to optimize their time and their content and fosters a true esprit de corps and sense of community among them.

“We have amazing content, and we have certain shows running in multiple countries,” explains van Zandwijk. “So we thought, ‘How can we optimize that? Let’s share content.’” Content that is performing well in Germany may also play well in Spain and France, for example. So van Zandwijk and his team developed an asset-sharing performance dashboard to which Stage’s social teams have access. They’re able to evaluate the performance of content for each production in each country, identify top-performing assets, and easily share them for re-use in another market.

One of Stage Entertainment’s best markets for social asset performance is Spain. Backstage content from The Lion King production there, has an engagement rate of over 20 percent – compared to a more typical rate of two percent. When those assets were re-used in Germany, where The Lion King has been playing for more than 20 years, it performed equally as well.

“Sprinklr has supported us in building capability for all our international markets, enabling us to become more data-driven,” says van Zandwijk. “In fact, we don't perceive our Sprinklr partners as just partners, but more as colleagues because we work together within Stage as a community.”