Ideas We Love: Shared Reality 🤓🍻⚽️

Issue Number 27: New social entertainment enterprise COSM wants to get you closer to the biggest acts, action and each other... without headsets or surge pricing

Hello there, how’ve you all been?

We gave ourselves August off from the hustle, grind and Huel-shots at IWL Towers, to prepare strategies for (unsuccessfully) getting our hands on some Oasis tickets.

Little by little did we know you’d just have to be willing to suck up the price that old-skool touts would charge on the night, from the official vendors a year before. If we were to start a splinter-feed called Ideas We Hate 🖕 implementing surge pricing for concert tickets would have to be post #1.

However…LIVE! events that are typically oversubscribed and inaccessible owing to cost, scarcity or geography neatly segues to the next type of “reality” we can burn into our memories, load into our trends decks, plot on our hype cycles and make the new and improved ‘one last thing’ in our PPT recommendations.

The Idea. Shared Reality 👀🤓🍻⚽️

COSM (short for Chapel of Shared Mirrors) is a company that started building planetariums to now pioneering a new kind of reality that transforms physical spaces into fully immersive environments… that place audiences at the heart of the art and the action.

The below image isn’t ringside at UFC 303 in Las Vegas, it’s ringside but from hundreds of miles away at COSMs Los Angeles venue.

Ringside from thousands of miles away. Courtesy of COSM

Nuts huh.

Similarly to Las Vegas’ sphere, the set-up incorporates an LED Display that wraps around and above the audience, turning any venue into whatever you can imagine.

Transporting guests onto the field, court or ring of a major sporting event, launching them on a journey through space, or placing them in the front row of a concert with friends; Shared Reality merges the virtual and physical worlds in ways that can be shared with others in-person rather than via clunky, low-res, 2D avatars.

Here’s a sizzle-reel of some of the action that’s been showcased recently.

The first site was opened next to Los Angeles So-Fi Stadium, the second in Texas, with the plan to roll these out internationally.

To give you a sense of what it’s like to be there, here’s a recent video capturing the winning goal from Manchester United’s opening match of the Premier League season against Fulham last weekend, that you may have seen cuts of doing the rounds on LinkedIn.

Why we love this idea 💕

There are two elements within Shared Reality that get our personal and professional pulses racing.

One being technical 📽️🎞️🤓

The first two COSM Experience centres are in essence 20-meter LED Domes.

Creating 5,000 square-foot displays in stunning 8K resolution, double the spec of an Apple Vision Pro with over 29.5 million pixels shining ten times brighter than the iMax; those I know who’ve been to the COSM Centre in L.A. say the definition is unreal, unlike anything they’ve witnessed before, and undeterminable from the “real” thing in-stadia.

In a world where A.I. has levelled the playing field between brands big and small for standard video production polluting our feeds, this type of experience and associated technical capability is a way to help brands stand out and stand apart again.

The other being social 🍻🙌💕

Shared reality, unlike virtual reality or mixed reality in their current form builds the raw emotion and energy of live events into the experience.

Not only are you placed by the pitch, you can hug your mate or high-five and jump on a rando when your team scores or wins the game. Which given it’s nigh on impossible for most fans of most teams to be in the ground to watch their team (there is currently a 37 year waiting list to become an Arsenal season ticket holder), Shared Reality is a pretty good alternative.

Oh and you get lovely cold pints brought to your seat too. Winner.

What we’d try and do with it and for whom…

The point of this section is to suggest things we’d like to do free from the shackles of budgets and approvals and in this case rights holders - so here are some things we might look to do if we were in charge of commercial opportunities over at COSM.

#1 Pouring Rights 🍻

High-end entertainment experiences like these aren’t just an opportunity to sell food and drinks, they help brands associate with the best ways to experience and enjoy the world.

Many booze brands adopt a 1/9/90 approach to on-trade distribution. “Tastemaker” Bars vs. “Style” Bars vs. “Everything Else”. Being prominently positioned in 1 & 9 positions the brand. Being distributed across all helps grow physical availability and revenue. Although the 1 & 9 Bars know their clout and can trade it accordingly

You can see a disorderly queue of BigDrinksCorps looking to secure exclusive pouring rights that they’ll look to pair with our next way we’d help COSM make more money.

#2 Screentime 🥽

Unlike broadcast feeds, COSMs partnerships with various rights holders (Various Sports, Cirque Du Soleil, Various Artists) enable them to go pitchside, courtside, stageside, up in or above the stands with their own cameras to create their own content feed bespoke to their original screen set-up.

This means they control and feasibly can create their own unique, proprietary set of ad-experiences woven into the show format for brands to engage guests and fans watching it; working with their production team to create visual spectaculars, born from each advertiser’s brand world, akin to the anamorphic billboards we’ve seen explode in recent times like these that Korean digital designers D’Strict keep knocking out of the park.

At first, screen-based experiences might be offered exclusively to brands distributed on-site as part of any distribution deals. Then when live sports are being screened COSM might help those brands stage the most beautiful pints, to match the beautiful game, collapsing the funnel as guests can simply tap a button and have what’s being shown brought straight to their seats.

But if we’re Commercial Directors representing COSMs shareholders we want some media $$$s from brands not distributed on-site too. Why wouldn’t we. We’ve got targets to hit.

Hence once we’ve exhausted that revenue stream we’d go after brand $$$s and offer a unique service to brands wishing to take any “brand” ads up a notch in ways that make them more attentive and memorable - cinema advertising on steroids - that can scale-up as COSM adds more locations. Or just augment what’s on the billboards, pitch and surrounding stadia to promote brands wishing to pay for the privilege.

But where else might those brand experiences be distributed?

#3 COSM Lite <-> AppleVisionProMax

Seeing Shared Reality and people’s reactions to it has changed the way we think about Virtual Reality and how it might start breaking through into the mainstream.

Three of the main barriers to adoption to V.R. at this point in time are price, limited utility and whacking a bloody great big headset on your head - an experience like COSM can transport you and your friends to live events on the other side of the world without one but will ask for between $30 - $300 per time for the privilege (range in seating prices for a single show).

We might be over our ski-tips a little, but here’s how we see shared reality as part of the entertainment ecosystem moving forwards.

Actual Reality remains the pinnacle of live-entertainment, but surge-pricing across tickets, travel, hotels and hot-dogs mean £1,000+ per person for a ticket / hotel / food + drinks to see a AAA act - resulting in live-events with the most popular talent only being accessible to a privileged few.

Friends of friends Stateside are already saying it’s cheaper for their family to get on a plane and see Taylor Swift in the U.K. than it is to see her Stateside with re-sold tickets, which with surge pricing coming into play will increasingly just be the price of “tickets”.

This is where Shared Reality comes in. Becoming a way to compensate for a lack of “physical” ticket availability/affordability by putting you on the front row for whatever you’re into, for a fraction of the price, near your doorstep and extending rights holders opportunities to monetise their acts/events.

You can imagine a world in the not too distant future where movie theatre chains are licensing COSMs tech and content formats (a bit like they do for iMax screens) and re-kitting some of their real-estate to create new, higher ticket revenue streams beyond movies.

Ker-ching for rights holders, COSM & movie-theatre chains.

Virtual Reality becomes, weirdly (as devices fall in price), the democratised version of live entertainment for those who haven’t got the time, the money, the connections or the inclination to be at these types of events in-person, or for that specific artist/event.

Or simply an upgraded way to watch the game at home which inevitably comes at a price-premium vs. simply watching the broadcast feed on TV.

The full COSM visual spectacular, but you might have to pour your own pint.

Chewing on this, if we were Meta or Apple we’d be looking to pal-up with COSM to create season tickets with a difference that virtually place their V.R. users in the front row of whatever’s being shown at COSM - maybe given the various angles COSM shoot from enabling the user to be the director.

From wrap-around high-energy, awe-inspiring views to offering informative layers next to or on top of the action.

Immediately levelling-up the reasons to buy, use and re-use a V.R. / M.R. device.

Heck if we were Apple and had Apple’s $270BN cash-pile we’d just buy them now, trial content formats with their MLS coverage before going on a content acquisition spree to scale it.

Simples right?

If you liked this, you’ll love…..

Writing this got us thinking of some other next-gen experiences, that left a similar mark on us at different points in our lives across different types of realities.

Tupac & Company Playing Coachella 2012

A “wow” moment that at the time was indistinguishable from magic.

ABBA’s Voyage playing London every night

The Tupac performance, no doubt becoming a proof of concept for the likes of ABBA Voyage which has given long-retired artists a new lease of life.

Smugglers Run: Star Wars Millennium Falcon Ride @ Disneyland L.A.

A similar, but different kind of shared reality that blends the same “screen-wrap” with a multi-player experience that sees a bunch of Disneyland guests take control of the Millennium Falcon.

Meta Quest 3: Mixed Reality Thrillboards

A brand experience to promote the latest Meta Quest device, that turned billboards into thrillboards by creating a mixed reality horror scene behind the poster-site.

Check it out here.

Krypton Factor & Knightmare

Most people over the age of 40’s first engagement with virtual reality in the U.K. came courtesy of seeing it woven into popular TV game shows at the time.

As the final challenge before the assault course on The Krypton Factor where contestants had to land a 747 on Hong Kong’s notoriously difficult landing strip.

…And the backdrop to an entire mixed reality gaming show for teens called Knightmare, where contestants would send a team-mate across a CGI backdrop unwittingly to some very entertaining deaths.

Until next time

We hope you’ve enjoyed this one, we’ll see you next time.

If you enjoy this Matt & Tom also write things down elsewhere.

Matt is building out ‘The A to Z of Media Planning’ and Tom regularly shares thoughts on modern communications planning here.

Matt & Tom 💕