Crowd Connected: Observing Fan Behavior During Events

– Crowd Connected
Making sense of myriads of data

Pollstar spoke to James Cobb, CEO of Crowd Connected, a technology that gathers crowd data to help event professionals make informed decisions.

In recent months, there have been calls for banning mobile phones at gigs by artists and individuals, who believe going to a live concert should be a physical, and maybe spiritual, experience only. But let’s face it: People won’t be told they cannot take out their phones at a gig, if they won’t even put it away to safely cross a road. Which is why it is Cobb’s goal is to bring the digital and physical live event experience closer together.

Crowd Connected runs in the background of the event’s or venue’s official app. It locates mobile devices in a number of different ways, including GPS, WiFi and pinging signals between the phones themselves. “We’re not exchanging any data between them, there’s no privacy issue. It’s just a raw signal that helps us work out the distances to see where everybody is,” Cobb explained, adding: “We don’t know who any of these people are, we don’t have their email addresses.” The company does not sell data to third-party advertisers; the data’s sole purpose is to allow event organizers to understand people’s movements.

How far does the average festivalgoer walk, how many different acts do they see, how long do they spend at the stages, how long at the food and beverage offerings: Crowd Connected produces detailed analysis about what’s happening in real-time. “If we can help the festival organizer reduce the queue lengths and move their staff around to address crowding issues, it makes the festival better,” Cobb said.

Promoters can target their guests with messages only relevant to people in a certain area, which is particularly attractive for sponsors, who can send out branded push notifications only to those festivalgoers that haven’t yet been inside the sponsored area. It prevents guests, who are already well aware of it, from feeling like they’re being spammed.

Cobb recalled a festival that wanted to send a message just to those people that had tents in the campsite, to tell them that winds were coming and to make sure their tents were pegged properly. Only people that had been seen at the campsite in the middle of the night before were targeted, so people, who were en-route to the site but didn’t actually camp there, wouldn’t be bothered.

The company is going to launch a new safety and crowd management product making full use of targeted messaging in time for the 2018 festival season. “Until now crowd safety managers and event controllers have been using the system purely as a monitoring tool, setting up a real-time heat map as part of the screens in their control room,” said Cobb.

The new product will be all about communicating with the public during an incident. According to Cobb, “it will enable people to, very quickly, either initiate pre-planned responses – sending specific messages to specific people in specific areas with instructions what to do. Please use exit B, don’t use the green route, please leave by the way you came in or not. By targeting people at different stages doing different things, you can create a much better, much smoother incident response. You can provide proper detailed information to the right people for the first time.”

Since no incident ever unfolds exactly as laid out in a contingency plan, the new product will also allow promoters to dynamically respond to changing situations, in case a certain exit is compromised, for example. They can target the people on their way to that exit by simply drawing a circle around them and send out an updated message with new instructions.

– Crowd Connected
CEO James Cobb

Crowd Connected also offers a staff and asset tracker, a credit-card sized hardware tag that can be attached to any kind of valuable asset, such as vehicles, or senior staff members and team leaders to keep track of them on the map. “You can imagine that being used to locate security response team or even a VIP customer. You might want to know that your VVIP customer is about to arrive so you can greet them by name at the door,” said Cobb.

Tens of millions of observations can be gathered at one single festival, and Crowd Connected’s data-processing pipeline will make sense of it all, be it in the form of a table of how many people were at the main stage in 15-minute intervals over the day, a chart of which acts had the most people seeing them, or a metric summarizing the number of people who visited an area and how long they stayed – in real-time or after the event, depending on what the promoter is looking for.

Knowing whether a festival‘s audience tends to watch entire sets or move from stage to stage for a couple of songs only can also help the festival’s booking team make decisions. “How many different stages should I have, how many acts should I put on each stage, should I be spending a lot just on the headline act or is that actually not what’s bringing people to the festival,” said Cobb.

He knows that the human element cannot be replaced, and emphasized: “I am not for a second saying that charts could somehow programmatically book a festival, absolutely not. But they might in some way help inform the decisions an experienced booker is making. In the same way a heat map in the control room is never going to replace the CCTV or stewards. It’s another input.”

The system also works in venues, with pilots running this year in a couple of UK ones. How long does it take people to get through security screening, how long are the queues at the box office, do people typically take a certain staircase to get to concourse one – the benefits are similar. Said Cobb: “If you can understand that someone is on their third visit to the arena this month, frequently visits the food and beverage outlets, but has never visited the VIP area, let’s offer them a free upgrade to VIP this visit.”

Crowd Connected offers differently priced tiers, depending on how many insights, analysis and tools any given client chooses. Prices can range from $1,500 to $20,000 per festival, which is a ballpark figure: the company works out packages with each client individually. Clients include Coachella, Roskilde, Fuji Rock, Latitude as well as the 2017 UEFA Champions League finals in Cardiff.

Going forward, Cobb wants to enhance the communication with festivalgoers. The audience will be able to pull up a map and be shown different points of interest – bars, stages, toilets – and seeing the queues in front of each. The “ultimate idea,” he says, is to make turn the phone into the perfect festival guide, “like having a friend with you who’s been going to the festival for 20 years, knows everything about it, knows every act that’s on and where they’re on, knows what’s going to be busy and what’s going to be quiet, and is able to take you to the right place at the right time.”