Crossing The Divide.
Making even the
Mona Lisa Smile.

Digital transformation to assist art galleries participate in the experience economy.

The Past, today…

Art galleries, bridges to the past, are generally places of quiet contemplation, as well as offering a space for introspection as visitors engage with the artworks and process their understanding of each.

From a purely artistic point of view, the individual’s own thoughts about a piece don’t need any connection to the artist or the motivation for their artwork, but for many people, such information is incredibly interesting or revealing in terms of the motivation for the piece. Many people also enjoy hearing the thoughts and opinions of others regarding the artwork to broaden their own unique understanding.

Chatting to other visitors in the gallery or the gallery staff (even the artist, if he or she is present), can provide some insight into these questions but deploying an Audience Engagement Platform (AEP) offers the greatest possible engagement for visitors and the gallery itself.

An AEP is a cloud-based, digital audience engagement platform and app, rapidly becoming a crucial part of the attraction management software landscape that is driving the digital transformation of the experience economy. This SaaS (Software as a Service) platform and app can be licensed by an attraction operator, venue or event organiser and delivers a simple to use digital experience solution for both operator and visitor.

From an operator perspective, the platform gathers valuable data about audience interactions and behaviour on-site - think Google Analytics for your gallery venue, whilst giving visitors a more immersive, interactive and engaging experience.

The AEP is a vital tool for assessing visitor and audience behaviour like dwell times for example, or gauging their perceptions on certain displays or artworks, as the operator (you the art gallery), can send visitors real time messages, information, Q&As etc based on their tracked journey through your gallery. Built up over a period, these insights draw a picture for the gallery in terms of the curation of future exhibits and/or identifies areas that may require additional input to increase visitor engagement.

The n-gage.io audience engagement platform, for instance, is highly customisable but yet simple to operate without any technical expertise – and as it operates as a cloud hosted platform, it presents an extremely cost-effective way to manage and deliver an immersive experience to visitors, whilst upping the insight factor for the operator (you, the gallery). No need for large upfront app development costs and ongoing upgrade fees.

Enhancing engagement through a customisable app creates a host of benefits for the operator - performing like a digital tour guide, it presents a wealth of opportunities to get personal and build on turning one-off visitors into loyal fans, even once they have left your venue. All the while, the platform is unobtrusively logging the level of engagement to better understand the visitor’s areas of interest.

Additionally, the AEP can also push additional information to the visitor on specific topics using the valuable insights and intelligence gathered by the platform. Tracking behaviour in retail and triggering content for example is nothing new, but apply these principles to a gallery by introducing beacons and other tracking technology, and you have an instant means of creating a more customised and personalised experience for your audience.
In the art gallery context, an AEP could conceivably break down the barriers of understanding by presenting information on the artist, their background, and influences. This can include audio-visual presentations as well as visuals of the artworks on display and many other relevant artworks.

The AEP also offers the potential for the sharing of comments and interpretations about the artworks with hundreds or even thousands of other users, thereby massively broadening the understanding of the artworks in question. At a gallery, one might speak to at most a dozen people and get their unique interpretations on an artwork, but the AEP allows an enormous amount of sharing of opinions and interpretations, which guarantees a far deeper and richer experience for the visitor. This also increases the reach for the gallery itself and boosts awareness.

The fact that the AEP, through the app, is portable also means that visitors can take the experience home with them to continue the engagement.
From a revenue generation point of view, as aforementioned, the AEP can track each user’s time spent viewing or engaging with each artwork, and through that it can provide relevant data to offer information about upcoming events, when relevant artworks are for sale, as well as memberships to art galleries and societies that might be of interest to each visitor.

The Present - Immersive art experiences come of age.

As noted in a recent Blooloop article, art experiences are evolving. As well as being places of quiet reflection, they are fast becoming exciting places for digital art exhibitions that promise a full-on immersive interaction between visitor and display/exhibit that provides endless hours of entertainment.
Technology is bridging the divide between aesthetic and action, which resolves itself in these fused, integrated experiential pieces, where past Masters and new installations, can come alive in the hands, minds and emotions of the observer, or participant.

Hereto, the AEP can excel, not only serving additional content to visitors, but through the audience experience app, galleries can automate pre-planned guided tours and trails and up the gamification component of engagement for the younger generation - increasingly more important in the digital age as they too become custodians of our precious artworks in the future .

As before, the engagement need not finish there when, armed with intelligence on the visitor and their interactions, the gallery can keep in touch with upcoming events or, digitally signpost them and then help navigate to other similar exhibits of interest.

No signal? No problem. As the platform and app caches much of the required data on app installation, many of the primary features of a digital experience will continue to function in areas of poor or no signal.

Audience Engagement Platforms help galleries to stimulate action with redeemable offers, discounts and special purchases to further grow the number of visitors that can become fans and ultimately members.

It’s surely enough to make even the Mona Lisa smile.

To discover what other benefits an audience engagement platform can bring to your business and transform your visitors’ experiences, let us show you – book a demo today.