“We want something never before seen.” Almost every client conversation I have starts this way. I understand the thinking; it comes from a genuine desire to excite and impress. But in my experience, that’s not what people are actually looking for. What audiences want isn’t something they’ve never seen before; they want something they will never forget.
People connect with the familiar. They respond to things that spark a memory, feel recognisable, tap into something they already love, but presented in a way that feels fresh and surprising. The goal isn’t to alienate your audience with novelty, it’s to make them feel something real.
Demographics matter, cultural context matters, age ranges matter, but if you’ve spent any meaningful time creating shows, you’ll know that’s just the beginning. The harder, more interesting question is: what does this audience need from this experience, right now, in this specific place? It’s the why, not the what.
That’s the question that drives everything I do at Pop Up Global. I design entertainment for theme parks, cruise ships, leisure venues and major events. The single biggest lesson I’ve learned is that great entertainment isn’t always the most complex or spectacular idea; it’s the idea that fits the people and the moment.
Designing for your audience has become more challenging, and more important, than ever. We’re living through a fundamental shift in how people consume entertainment. Everything is available instantly, on demand, in an endless scrollable feed. People are conditioned to decide within seconds: stay or scroll.
That behaviour doesn’t disappear when someone walks into a theme park or a cruise ship atrium. Live entertainment is moving towards short-burst, high-impact experiences – moments that hook immediately, deliver quickly, and don’t overstay their welcome. If your show takes four minutes to find its feet, you’ve already lost a significant portion of your audience.
This isn’t a dumbing down of the art form; it’s a recognition of the world your audience actually lives in. On a cruise ship, your audience hasn’t chosen to watch your show. They’re on holiday, cocktail in hand, thinking about the midnight buffet or recovering
from a day on the beach. A deep, story-driven production might be a triumph of creative ambition, but it won’t connect. What will connect is something that feels familiar and gives them a story to tell over breakfast the next morning.
Compare that to a theme park, where guests stumble across your entertainment. They didn’t plan to stop, so you have about 30 seconds to earn their attention and maybe five minutes before you need to give them a reason to stay or release them to their day. A short, punchy performance, something visually impressive or Instagrammable, will outperform a beautifully crafted narrative that takes three minutes to warm up. The format has to serve the footfall, not the other way around.
The physical environment shapes the show as much as the content does. Sightline, gathering points, how long people are likely to be standing; these aren’t production logistics, they’re creative considerations. I’ve created entertainment that has to work on escalators, in shop doorways, around moving vehicles, on stages the size of a dining table. Each one of those constraints isn’t a problem, it’s a brief.
I once created a show for a luxury car brand that told the story of how their iconic engine was made – a subject that could easily have alienated an audience with complex technical language. Instead, I let the setting lead me. The venue was built around thrill seekers, so I translated that into the concept, kept technical detail to a minimum, and delivered the key information through short high-impact moments that made it memorable rather than educational. With guests from all over the world, I leaned into
music and visual media rather than spoken word, so the story landed regardless of language.
The commercial case is straightforward. When guests have a meaningful experience, they stay longer, spend more, and come back. A short performance piece we created for a major sportswear brand drove a 400% increase in sales on the day. On another project, we attracted 171,000 people, broke venue records, and when audiences took to TikTok, it broke the internet, too. People tell people. They post about it. Get it right and the commercial outcome is guaranteed; get it wrong and you actively damage the guest experience and the venue or brand you’re representing.
Audience-first decision making starts long before the first creative idea. It means asking the right questions immediately: Who are these people? What state are they in? Are they primed and expectant? Or passive and half-distracted? Do you need to land across three generations simultaneously? What format will actually work for this audience – a 70-second pop-up, a 15-minute sit-down show, a roaming performance, a parade? And then being willing to let those answers lead the creative, even when it means setting aside an idea you love.
Which brings me to the most important discipline in this process: setting your ego aside. As a creative, it is dangerously easy to design for the audience you wish you had, or for what you personally enjoy, rather than the people actually in front of you. I’ve seen brilliant work fall flat because the creative team fell in love with their own concept and stopped listening to the room.
Audience-first design requires a genuine willingness to set aside your own preferences in service of the people you’re there for. The audience doesn’t know what you creatively sacrificed; they only see the end product and will judge it based on how it made them feel.
The experiences that stay with people are rarely the most ambitious. They’re the ones where someone understood exactly who was in front of them and designed every element with that person in mind; Not the audience they imagined, not the audience they hoped for, the audience they had.
That’s the job. And when you get it right, there’s nothing quite like it.
Photos: Pop Up Global
