(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
LP: Let's start easy. What's the name of the company mean? What is a Round Room? Because every time I say it in my head, I think, is that like a rubber room?
Stephen Shaw: In 2016, I was just about to launch the company. I had visions of the business and was trying to figure out a brand. Full disclosure, I am a big Phish fan. I was tearing through artist catalogs from the Dead, Phish, and I saw Round Room, an album that I know—it's not one of their best, but I know it and I like it. And I thought that works. Why it worked to me was we perform shows that are in rooms. We are performing shows in 360-degree spaces, whether immersive experiences where we call it in the round. The name fit the vertical and the project mandate that we were getting into, and it felt like it all worked. And so I went with it.
LP: I'm curious about the sort of market opportunity you guys saw. Does the market opportunity exist because the larger vertically integrated players in your space, or in the live entertainment space, they've kind of seeded family entertainment and IP? What were you seeing that made you think this was worth jumping into?
Jonathan Linden: That's a good question, and I think you got part of it. When we were at CPI, Concert Productions International was a boutique touring company doing the Rolling Stones and Barbra Streisand. There was longer time between tour cycles then, so you had to activate the overhead and you got into kids and family tours, Broadway shows, traveling experiences, and exhibitions.
When that business got sold into Live Nation, obviously as a publicly traded company, it was pretty laser-focused at the time on sponsored touring and the direct ancillaries like Ticketmaster, and some of these other elements didn't make sense to them. It was a great opportunity. AEG was developing and becoming bigger at the time, and on straight concert tours, it was really large promoters, large companies butting heads and driving down the prices. We saw the opportunity in all this other ticketed entertainment that had historically been sort of a sleepy spot where we thought that's an exciting area. Based on the stuff that we had done as part of CPI, we liked it.
LP: When I think about the music space as different from where you guys are operating, whether it's on the promotion side or whether it's on the ticketing side, my view of the world is that it's really hard to enter that space or to compete at a scaled level if you're not going to have vertical integration between the promotion and the ticketing, as well as other ancillaries. It seems to me that's different in family entertainment and IP and exhibition. Do you see a world where that might not be different? Is vertical integration interesting to you?
Stephen Shaw: I think for us, we are trying our best to control and manage every aspect of everything we're doing. We do all the producing in-house, we have a marketing team, and we work with ticketing platforms and providers that we have long-standing relationships with. But we understand the realities of the current industry and that if we want to tour one of our kids' IPs or even our full kids' division, we're going into venues, attaching promoters to those venues and to those presentations of that show.
There already is a ticketing business. There already is the contract with that venue for that ticketing company. For us, it's a hard one to break into from the kids and families perspective, where we're going into institutional venues, big theaters around the world. From exhibitions, there's a lot more opportunity to control and vertically integrate all of the ancillaries around you. It's a bit like the Wild West or what concert touring probably was thirty-five years ago.
We're going into venues that don't have a company attached to them. There aren't that many players that are willing to stand up and say, "I want to promote this company, this exhibition, this experience in this market." Now every day there become more, and every day more people are getting involved in this space because it's growing and it's big time and the business is great and can be very strong and lucrative. But for us, I think our focus has primarily been, let's create the best events, let's deliver it to the market in volume, and let's figure out how to globally distribute all of our content.
LP: Along those lines, I remember fifteen, twenty years ago when we were working together looking at the exhibition business and specifically looking at spaces. We'd have an opportunity with a new property and we'd know the property needed to be in New York for X amount of time. I can remember very clearly going with colleagues of ours and just scouting locations and looking at places.
It's always stuck with me how interesting it is to look at nontraditional space, whether it's a warehouse or a loft or whatever it is. I use this story a lot—years later when I worked at Amazon, part of what I was doing was looking for nontraditional venue space to put on events. And it really activated in me this idea that everywhere could be a venue. Once I started to go visit other cities and look around, it's like, oh, that would be really interesting to stage something there.
With that sort of long-winded preamble, I'm curious, as the exhibition space has evolved, are you finding that you are going into purpose-built or preexisting exhibition spaces? Or is there still an interest and an opportunity to just go scout and find places that are nonintuitive or not really existing venues? And do you have a preference? How do you think about venue in the exhibition space in particular, when you're going in and setting up camp for a while?
Jonathan Linden: It's evolved a little bit. There are some established venues—our F1 exhibition, for example, is in the ExCeL Centre in London, which has had similarly situated projects and has been set up like that. So there are some that have stepped up to the moment and created a venue, but we're still doing a lot of looking at venues, particularly through the pandemic period where buildings changed their purpose and people who were going to have a gigantic celebrity chef restaurant sort of come and say, "This isn't coming to be, could you turn this into something?"
It's interesting the way you frame it because the opportunity can be exciting sometimes when people call you with a unique opportunity and you get to go see it. The flip side is with some success of some of these types of projects, you get a lot of calls from people who have a drippy basement somewhere that they think can be turned into an exciting space. One of the benefits that we have is we've learned some of the hard lessons of coming in and out of these types of spaces and figuring out how you load in and out, where's the bathroom going to be, where's the merchandise area going to be. When it's not preestablished as it is in an arena or a theater, you have to figure it out.
We've been able to do that efficiently in a lot of places, and we still get calls from people who are somewhat quasi-competitive where they say they've come up with a show that's selling some tickets and gaining some traction, but they have no idea where to take this next or what it means to tour something like this. It's a benefit for us that we've been in this space for quite a while.
Stephen Shaw: I also think that this experiential world has grown so significantly over the last twenty years that every day there's more venues being sort of purpose-built for this space. As Jonathan rightly points out, the infrastructure is such a benefit to us. But the fact that they've had other shows—some of these venues like ExCeL in London have had other shows—the marketing side becomes a lot easier. You're not sending people down to an address at the corner of Mercer and Broadway in SoHo. You're sending people to the large conference or exhibition space where they've seen these three other shows previously and they say, "I know where to park, I know where I'm going to get my beer before, and I know what I'm going to go see."
LP: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that. When I was working on the Bowie 75 pop-ups, we had a very similar experience in that the places were spiritually connected to him. One was in the neighborhood he lived in New York, and the other was the very location where they shot the Ziggy Stardust album cover. But they weren't known event places per se, so that had to become part of the story—location had to become part of the story as opposed to saying this is a place you go anyway, this just happens to be the cool thing that's going on there right now, even to the point of telling people how to get there. It wasn't obvious how to find the place.
I could imagine that as exciting as the blank canvas of a new, never-before-seen spot is, whether it's building the physical plant or just educating the audience—I'm like, it's actually going to be good, just go there. It's different when you have a place that's a known quantity.
Stephen Shaw: Yeah, we did that with the Rolling Stones exhibition in New York City, a show called Exhibitionism. It was in the most spectacular event space, a big, beautiful warehouse, open vast. It was twenty thousand square feet and it was an old art studio gallery. But it was tucked south of the Meatpacking District, and every advertising we had to give directions on every ad mat in every post. We just saw the challenges of, oh, you found a great space, but people don't know where it is. And so you gotta give them subway routes and what to say to the Uber and all that.
Jonathan Linden: Yeah, that's a common question I find a lot of people—you explain it to them and you tell them how cool it is, and they're like, "Is there an obvious place for that Uber to let you off?"
LP: What was the first show you guys did under the Round Room umbrella?
Stephen Shaw: It was the Stones. It was Exhibitionism.
LP: Oh, really? So you started small?
Stephen Shaw: Yeah, well, listen, this is the fortuitous bounces that you need when starting a business. I remember I was up in Canada after I had left my previous job and was sort of mapping out what I want to do, plans, getting everything organized from a corporate legal perspective. And I got a call from a company called TEG, Ticket Tech Entertainment Group in Australia, and they had invested in the Rolling Stones show that launched at the Saatchi Gallery in the summer of 2016.
They said, "Listen, we've just launched this show. We have great creative. We worked with the band. It's a fantastic show. We have no idea what we're doing. We have no idea how to operate it and we have no idea how to control crowds and flow and ticket and all this stuff. Can you come and have a look at it and see it and we want to bring it to North America."
So I went on a plane, went to London, saw the show, went from London down to Sydney to meet with the producers and the investor group. And on the way back, I mapped out my scope or Round Room scope of work for the production and told them what we could do. By the time I landed, they'd already accepted it.
We moved forward right away and the show launched mid-September. This was August when I flew down there, went on sale mid-September. It opened in November, just after the 2016 presidential election. And we were up and running. And it was the best thing for Round Room at the time because part of the deal that we structured with them was we will reduce our fees as long as we can have Round Room on everything—every press release, every ad mat, every marketing materials. We have to push this and have brand Round Room. And they said, that's great for us, because they didn't have a known brand that they were pushing. TEG was the money behind it, but they weren't the producing company.
That allowed us to sort of get into the space. Our goals were kids and family and exhibitions and experiences. Those were the two sleepy sectors, areas of entertainment that we said, "Listen, we can make this great. We can really put high production value and make this great." And that one just fell into our laps. We were like, this is absolutely fantastic. We got it done. We did a great job. The show was phenomenal. That was the kickoff point, the launching point.
LP: I want to dive into the exhibition business a little bit, but I'm going to come back to that later in the conversation. I want to ask you about working with these intellectual property brands. I'm really interested in two aspects of it. One is the creative and the development process for a show or for one of your products. And the other is sort of a subset of that, which is maintaining the integrity of the brand's voice. Where do you come in in the development process? I fully accept that it may be it depends or that there's a spectrum. Are you getting a phone call? Are you pitching somebody? And then when you first talk with them, where are you in the process? Is it just, there's a brand manager somewhere that says, we think we should be in the live space, come tell us how to do it. Where do you guys plug in to the IP?
Jonathan Linden: I can start that. When you say it depends at the beginning, obviously you don't have any shouts. And so you're trying to get in the room and you're trying to explain what you can do. Because there is a barrier to entry that these brands, and as you rightly point out, their IP, they're really valuable. They're iconic IP. We had Entertainment One was bought by Hasbro for four billion. And I think most people would say the vast majority of that was Peppa Pig.
These brands have great value and you can consume that content these days anywhere you want, whenever you want on your phone, on your iPad, on your streaming service. Live is the last frontier of sort of really going there and seeing it. And it's a key touchpoint that's important for us.
At the beginning, it was trying to find our spots and trying to get into the room. We've obviously established ourselves now where we're receiving a lot of calls, which we're grateful for. And the process usually starts where there's a vision that the brand has where they want to explain to you how they can see it. And then we usually have our team translate what that would mean for the stage.
But all the way back to competing and sort of differentiating ourselves from the major promoters—as Stephen said, we continue to do all this stuff ourselves, including producing, which most major promoters don't do. They promote and tour existing content. They don't create content. And so that's something we've done, and it can be a fulfilling but somewhat daunting task at times. We've got a major brand and a concept, and you've got to translate that to something that goes on the stage with the discerning audience of young children who need to be engaged and delighted and at times aren't shy to tell you what they like and don't like.
Stephen Shaw: Yeah, it's a great question because it's such a priority for how we operate that side of the business. We worked very closely with the IP owners. We have been taking a very collaborative approach. We will have our creative team, whether it's writers, directors, choreographers, any set, scenic, design, music, work with their team—brand team. They get the data dump. They sit in the room. We draft out scripts and creative concepts and we're sharing it with them.
It was never this "thank you for the license, we're going to go off and create a show and hope you like it." We wanted to create authentic experiences. Everything that we were producing needed to be incredibly accurate because as you pointed out, you're gonna get called out on it if you screw up. From our side, that was always an approach we took. It worked from the first show that we ever did, which was PJ Masks with E1. And it's worked with every piece of IP that we've produced a live theatrical stage show for.
LP: What are the rights you're acquiring in your deals? In other words, if you do all this production and creative work, let's say a new song gets written, who owns the song?
Jonathan Linden: The rights we're getting are usually live stage rights, and we usually have them for a period of time. Often in these deals, if you meet a certain success threshold, you can extend, but that gives us a bit of an opportunity that if we do it right, we're going to have an opportunity to continue with the product.
The IP owner owns the content generally, because they own the IP. And so it's theirs and we're the licensee. As far as all the ancillaries like music and if you do a screen capture and do sort of a video or a tour production type of an approach, it's usually a collaboration. They're happy to do it with you. But to some degree that depends on the licensor because some of them have their own music area and some of them are happy to explore it with you, but it usually depends on the IP, how you can best structure it.
LP: I'm curious if you could maybe compare and contrast the break-even economics of a family entertainment tour against a concert tour? Is it a similar model financially and playbook? Do you know you have to play X amount of cities and then you're in the black? How do you think about your upfront and your break-even and your show run?
Stephen Shaw: Obviously the general form of a P&L looks similar to a concert tour. There's no artist guarantees, but there's IP licenses and you're paying a royalty and you're sometimes paying an annualized minimum guarantee to them. From a show perspective, we understand what the market looks like. We understand what ticket sales are going to be and we understand how much yield per attendee we can generate.
We sort of take that as the first piece of information to then say, okay, here's what we think the show could cost to build. And what we've done differently is we've been very efficient with our costing and how we've built shows to make them more tourable to then create efficiencies on the operating side.
Shows were built ginormous and they would take six to eight hours to load in and the local promoter would be waving his hand saying the labor bill's getting too high. We've done a very good job of creating shows that all the promoters can then make money from. And that was the ticket to success for us, because if you could spend X amount of dollars on your CapEx, but know that every show that you're going to go into, not only are we going to make money, the licensor will make money, but that promoter in the venue are going to make money.
Then you create longevity. These brands, the amount of resources and time and money and efforts they're putting into these brands, a lot of them have a good three- to five-year shelf life. So then if you're touring that entire time and making everybody money, it can just continue to tour. Blippi, our sort of top kid show has been on the road essentially since the day the doors opened after COVID and hasn't stopped. And that's because everyone's doing well with it. The audience is there and we've created a P&L that everyone signs off on, is excited about, and can generate some good earnings.
LP: Do you find that you're educating your IP rights holder partners on the dynamics of the live business? Do you have to explain to them, here are the stakeholders on a tour, or even at the event level, here are the stakeholders? Here's what we have to leave on the table for everyone, or here's how we have to structure this thing? Otherwise, it's no more than a good idea on a piece of paper. If it doesn't function this way financially, because it's not just about us as your touring partner, and you as the rights holder, there's other folks here that need to dip their beak. Are you providing that educational role?
Jonathan Linden: For sure. And as we've become more established, we have greater ability to sort of have those conversations with the IP partners. When you're in the early days, you have to try to cater to them to the best of your ability. And as you have more established position in the market, we could push a little bit. And with some of them, as Stephen says, something like Blippi, which has been around for a while, there's more of a relationship over time.
But inevitably there are times where they think it needs to be a certain length, that they—the common one is they think it needs to be a certain capitalization. Like if it's not several million dollars, is it really going to be exciting? And you have to explain that there's efficiencies and ways of presenting it in a dynamic way. It's not a matter of how much money is on stage. It's a matter of how it's presented and how it's done.
But inevitably we have to explain that the venues are only of certain size and scope. You can only get to so many markets at a time. And so there's inevitably an education process. We've been fortunate to have a few key partners who have been partners for years. And so they come up the learning curve and they're partners with us and they understand it better. And it's the ingredients for greater success together.
Stephen Shaw: But then there's some licensors that we know it's going to be impossible to deal with. We know that their brand teams will say, that the approval process will take months. And we just now don't deal with them because we know that we could not create a show that fits within our budgets for what their desires are. And so it's sort of like non-start.
LP: Yeah, I talked to somebody a while ago who I used to work with and she came from the licensing world in terms of merchandise and brand licensing in that world. I had made the comment ignorantly that at least the characters don't talk back, and she said, well, it's not the case because especially when the creator of the character is still part of the team and has very specific ideas about what the IP should appear on, shouldn't appear on, and it's often just as difficult as dealing with an artist or a band not wanting the character to appear in certain contexts and ultimately, you defer to them either because you have to contractually or because they know something about the essence of the brand that's right. And so sometimes a lot of money can get left on the table, but it may be in the service of the brand long term.
Stephen Shaw: Yeah, I think that's right. As I said, from the start, we work so closely with every brand to create authentic accurate depictions of the animated TV series on stage. But for us, it goes back to your original question, which is you have to let them know how this is going to work from a P&L economic side.
You need to let them know that if we create this show or add this set piece, it's going to move us into another truck, which is going to add labor time and bills and add to the promoter and then the promoter is not going to buy anymore. And then it just goes downhill from there and you say, we'll have a twelve-week tour. We could do a full fall leg. But spring next year's not going to be as strong, not going to have the same type of volume.
And the best licensors that we have are the ones where some of those key people on their side have come from the live space. We have one licensor that we deal with at Moonbug, a woman named Susan Vargo, who has a history in live entertainment. And she just gets it from the outside. And so for our benefit and the success that we've had with Blippi is because of what we've created, but what we've created with Susan and her team and the learnings that we all share, we're all sort of on the same page from the outset, and that's allowed us to thrive with this piece of IP.
LP: What goes into making the decision to work with promoters in a sell-off situation versus four-walling the whole thing yourselves? Outside of it, I mean more on the touring side, what goes into that decision?
Jonathan Linden: We've always liked the model. And maybe it's because we go back to the concert business. We've always liked the model of local promoters. They know their market the best. They know how to market their buildings and their area. And so we've continued, obviously it helped when you're starting a business from the beginning to have the comfort of the structure of getting a guarantee.
And before you leave for the tour, you've mitigated a lot of your risks. We've always liked and believed that you can have partners in all these different regions and, something you said before, everybody can sort of wet their beak and everybody participates on the tour and that, we think leads to success. We've done the occasional four-wall, but that's not really our model.
LP: Yeah. Is it for exhibitions? Is that the predominant model in the exhibition space?
Stephen Shaw: The sell-off or the four-wall?
LP: Four-wall, like you go in and you just take over the physical plant and you do it all?
Stephen Shaw: I mean, we have more of a hybrid approach on the exhibition side. But on the touring side, our goal is volume. Our goal is global distribution. Our goal is to have a lot of good touring pieces of IP out on the road. And if you think about it, if you want to keep your overhead efficient and not have a twelve-person promoting team or a marketing team that's buying ads and placing media in every one of our markets—I mean, Blippi this year will do 250 shows. If we had to promote 250 shows, our team would be huge.
When you look at the economic side of it, you're thinking, "Hey, I can go into this model. I can reduce my top sort of potential, my upside by fifteen points to have that promoter built in. He can handle all of that work. We can keep our overhead efficient and we've protected all downside risk." So just, it made so much sense to us from a business standpoint, from a risk standpoint, that this is all we do with our kids and families.
And what happens with that is that you ultimately get this network of promoters that are fantastic, that know what you're doing. They buy in because hey, it's a Round Room show. It's not just this IP. We've had the same group of promoters in all of these markets forever, and the relationships are so strong. They buy everything.
LP: You mentioned the example of the 250 Blippi shows going out per year. Is that one production or is it similar to theatrical where you could be in multiple cities or multiple territories at the same time? Or is it just, there's one on the road?
Stephen Shaw: We have with Blippi, we've created three Blippi shows through our license. We acquired our license in 2019, but got on the road just before COVID and then pulled it off, but we typically only tour one in a certain territory at a time. So we have one Blippi show in North America right now. We have Sesame Street Live in North America right now.
We route them accordingly. They started one side of the country piece and then cross over and don't have too much interaction because we don't want to cannibalize ticket sales from one show to the next. But when we create a show, it does its eighteen months to two years in North America and then it goes internationally. And the new show comes out in North America and then that will go internationally when the third show comes into North America.
So we're constantly updating, rotating, creative. The new Blippi show just launched three weeks ago and it's fantastic. Live musicians and they're all playing instruments on stage and the kids love it. We try to create this concert experience. But for us it was, be very methodical and strategic how you do it. Don't overplay your hand and ensure that you have a lot of volume in the market and everyone's doing well.
Jonathan Linden: And one of the benefits that we caught just in the evolution, which you'll probably remember from when we worked together is when you'd have a popular brand in North America many years ago, and you wanted to take it other places, you had to do a bunch of research and try to figure out in that territory of the world, what channel airs the brand and is it popular? And what's the penetration? And what are the TV numbers?
All of these brands have come out of streaming services or YouTube, and there's just a realization that they're mostly registered a popular everywhere. Blippi came out of YouTube and you can watch it whenever you want, wherever you want. And it just has pretty global penetration. And that allows you when you're off cycle in North America, there's so many different options, territories, and places that you can take the tour.
LP: Yeah, that's got to make for some fascinating conversations with the rights holder or with the partner. They're sitting behind sort of a dashboard of information that is much different than what they had a decade and a half ago. They can answer questions now, whereas the answer used to be, "Well, let me call Scandinavia and get back to you in three weeks."
How do you think about parents? And I mean that through a few vectors. There's the funny vector, which is, a lot of these things are earworms and things that if you get, if you sit a bunch of parents down over dinner and say, what do you think of Blippi? They're like, "Oh my God, my kid loves—Blippi drives me nuts," or "I love Blippi." It's not necessarily their entertainment choice, but it is their choice because they're participating with their kids and they care about what their kids are doing. But how much of what you do in terms of crafting the creative or keeping the creative fresh, how do you think about the parents in terms of the actual show? Because they have to want to go, or they can't dread going.
Stephen Shaw: No, they can't dread going. Music becomes a big thing with our shows. We do limit narrative and script. We do limit dialogue on stage and drive music as the key focus of the entertainment product. What comes from that are happy kids, kids dancing in the aisles and singing and jumping around. What comes from happy kids? Happy parents. Parents can sit back, even if they can't stand Blippi or Paw Patrol or whatever, any kids content or animated TV series that's out there. But if they can sit back and relax, their kids are having a great time because they're engaged and entertained for ninety minutes. Then that's a success right there.
LP: Then we're that much closer to bedtime.
Stephen Shaw: Yeah.
LP: How do you reach parents these days? I mean, you must have the same challenge that every other media and entertainment or even product marketer has at this point, you have a fragmented ecosystem, digital and social is not everything that was cracked up to be. Can you take me through the anatomy of a marketing campaign, or at least talk to me a little bit about how are you turning those parents into ticket buyers?
Stephen Shaw: Listen, I think that there's—I don't know exactly what you meant by it's not cracked up to what it was or what it is supposed to be on digital and social. That's a huge part of our marketing strategy. Every day the allocation between at-home and digital becomes more lopsided. Digital marketing for us has been very effective. We work with the venues and promoters very closely. We've sold other types of events in this space to the same parents.
Pass-by lists are huge. Mommy blogs are huge. Facebook groups are big for us. And getting the word out that this is coming, because ultimately, the parent has the final decision. A kid can pull on the pant leg of the parent and say, "I want to go see Blippi," but they're not really going to know about it unless they see a big billboard in that market. It's the parent who's got to see that it's coming. And usually it's messaging through comms from the venue or the promoter, we've sort of been successful at getting to them through digital means.
LP: Generally speaking, I mean, this is something that was sort of a surprise to me years ago working with a sports entertainment client to find that regardless of whose butt's in the seats, it could be dad taking the kids, it could be the whole family going, mom was really the one you wanted to access from a marketing point of view. Mom was the decision maker about what the family was going to do. Do you find that to still be the case, that you're trying to reach moms in particular?
Jonathan Linden: I think that's still the case. And I think we've been fortunate to have a number of successful tours where we can track and see who's coming and follow the trends. But the other thing is obviously with some of the popular brands, you have the kids, as Stephen says, sort of pulling on the pant leg because they follow Blippi, they follow Sesame Street, they like Peppa Pig. And so they want to see it.
And I think you also gain the benefit from a digital perspective. And I think we've all been through this of the weekend's rolling around. You're not a hundred percent sure what to do with the kids. They want to be entertained. And so you're looking around and Googling what to do in New York this weekend. And we still get a decent amount of walk-up fans, because I think particularly with young kids, you never know if they're going to change what brand—in the concert world, you can buy tickets six months, nine months ahead of time. And with preschoolers, you don't know if they're into the same brands or if they're going to be sick or have T-ball practice or whatever else.
And so you often wait until a little bit closer. And then as you get closer, there's a lot of times where we're gaining the benefit of the digital ecosystem, being able to serve up in an attractive way, what's happening in your market that weekend.
LP: I want to hear a little bit about the exhibition business, but I also want to hear a little bit about the role of technology and sort of the wow factor and what are the pressures there on you and on your creative team, both to continue to provide those sort of surprise and delight moments in the course of a show, but also can you talk a little bit about, is tech just always a rising cost in terms of production, or are you seeing tech allowing you to do more exciting things at a more efficient cost?
Stephen Shaw: I'll start by saying that at our core, across every show, whether it's kids and family or exhibitions, we're doing the same thing. To tell a great story, to have a really exciting event, to have something that people are going to see and walking out and getting on their phones and they're texting their friends or posting a photo—that's it. People walking away and saying, that was two thumbs up. I want to tell everyone I know that they should go see those.
And so that's creating authentic experiences. As it pertains to technology, obviously technology has allowed us to do a lot more. With our kids and family touring, we're doing all the sort of big set pieces, big scenic pieces, and we tell this sort of scene-by-scene story through giant LED walls. In our exhibitions, yeah, we're using projection mapping and AR technology and great video design and a lot of different elements that have allowed us to create really exciting experiences.
But the rise of technology, yeah, has allowed us to do more with what we're producing for sure. It's a balance between what's cost-effective, which will deliver what type of results, but however it was, for us, it's such a benefit. That we're getting to the point where a lot of this type of technology, as I said, massive LED panels, projection mapping, all of that AR technology is becoming bigger and bigger, there's better prices. And so that's allowed us to keep our costs under control with what we're producing. But at our core, we don't start and say, "Hey, let's create some sort of advanced technological experience." At our core, we're saying, "Let's tell a great story and create a great narrative for our audience."
LP: I find the exhibition business so interesting because I forgot how you said it earlier, Stephen, but it was something like maybe it was a sleepy business or an overlooked business. I forgot how you referred to it, but I still have that perception. I feel like there's a lot of exhibition-like things going on. I think even here, you can go to the science center or you can go to, again, a repurposed armory or whatever it is. And there's all kinds of now VR things and lots of different experiences like that going on.
I can never get a real sense of like how big is this business. It doesn't feel mainstreamed in the live entertainment business or in the entertainment landscape. Like you still have to explain to people after you go to one of them like, "No, like I went to this one, it was a VR trip through the space station. And it was really amazing, but the marketing didn't really convey very well what it was." And so as a result, you're almost relying on like, how do I get some people in the door and then get them out there talking about it? How do you guys think about the exhibition business? Is it an interesting business? Do you have to be careful about what you pick?
Jonathan Linden: I think you always have to be careful what you pick and you want to find things that are global and have wide appeal and you can have as many opportunities as possible. We had that with Formula One, obviously the Rolling Stones as well. There's so many different regions and territories of the world and if you commit the capital and the time and energy to creating something, and it's going to have appeal in a variety of different territories and countries.
And I think it's, as we said earlier, it was a little sleepy and underserved, but as more and more of them come along, and as we take shows into venues that have had similarly situated projects previously, there's more of a heightened awareness amongst consumers. And some of the shows that have come along that have been non-IP things like Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream or even Van Gogh, which was all screen-based, they contributed to the space. Some of them turned out to be a bit more time-sensitive or a bit more of a fad, but it awakened consumers to going into a slightly unconventional space, walking around, paying a little higher average ticket price than you anticipated.
And so I think it's certainly building and we think it's scaling where more and more people have an understanding. I went to the F1 exhibition. It was really amazing. The next thing that comes through—it's a similar venue, it's a similar type of footprint and experience. There's a heightened awareness amongst consumers of what they're getting.
LP: How do you think about that, navigating that world when it comes to like a true IP-based property versus something that's like public domain and protect—I mean, what happened in the Van Gogh space is just insane. Are you looking for branded properties that you can build a protective wall around?
Stephen Shaw: Yeah. Yeah, we are. We like the IP business. For us, obviously, it's a little more expensive, paying royalties and minimum guarantees. But we also like to fall against that brand to say, "Hey, listen, if you're a fan of F1, you can go watch the twenty-four races a year on TV, and if you're lucky enough, you can attend a race for a lot of money. But if you want to connect with us on a deeper level, then here's an experience for you."
And that goes for all of our shows. We create these experiences that people can engage with, that people can interact with and learn more about. And we're targeting, obviously the avid fan base for each of those respective pieces of IP. And we're seeing results from that. But to your question earlier, you have to be careful with the IP we choose, whether it's an artist, whether it's a sport league, whether it's a film franchise, we have to be very careful to know, "Hey, listen, there's an international market here, there is an avid fan base in all international territories, and we can create something with that IP owner that will be a great activation for the brand." For marketing side for them, but also, from the commercial side and the core of our business, trying to create those great events.
LP: What's going to be out on the road or do you think we'll be launching, say, between late Q4 into Q1 of next year?
Stephen Shaw: So the exhibitions, we've got Formula One running currently in London. That runs right through till March 2023. It's a phenomenal show. Absolutely phenomenal. And it's getting great reviews and ticket sales are strong. And we're really excited about and proud of what we've created on that side.
From the touring side, Blippi's on the road right now. It's going to run through North America until right up till December fifteenth. We're doing a month in Canada on this tour, which is great. Canadian audiences love it. Sesame Street Live is also on the road, that will run through till Christmas as well. Both touring products will take a break over the holidays and then go back out in mid-Q1 for another spring tour for each of those shows. Then on November third, we have Nitro Circus Live, the arena tour that launches. We're doing thirty dates in North America, all arenas. Sales are strong and that will run for sort of five, six weeks up until the Christmas period.
