Capturelife, the innovative digital platform reimagining attractions photography, last spoke with blooloop a year ago to introduce its ground-breaking platform. The company has since continued to refine its technology by using modern solutions that drive more value for customers, with less cost, and more space for innovation.
Over the last 12 months, the Capturelife platform has evolved significantly. Firstly, the platform itself has deepened and expanded. The team continues to add new capabilities in order to support the complete customer journey from start to end.
Secondly, Capturelife has expanded to serve a more diverse market than ever before with success across three different market segments within the experience economy.
We spoke to Scott DeFusco, co-founder of Capturelife, and Rob Mauldin, board member, to find out more about Capturelife’s expanded product offering and full workflow.
Capturelife provides solutions for diverse markets
The experience economy market is broad, encompassing resorts and cruise lines, attractions and events, and professional sports. Capturelife’s technology for associating images with guests is flexible enough to provide a seamless experience; whether the venue knows who the guest is or not.
The use cases can be dramatically different, as DeFusco explains:
“We have not seen a platform that can successfully traverse the workflows required to support these varied use cases. The fact that we have marquee brands, including one of the largest resort companies in the world, premier attractions and a professional NBA team in the US, demonstrates the power and flexibility of the platform.
“We see that as a validation of our model. It is the factors that make us unique that enable us to go across those three markets successfully – and look to the future for additional opportunities.”
This capacity not only to scale up and down, but also across these different use cases is one of Capturelife’s unique advantages.
Resort photography – an agile solution
In terms of competitive advantage, the platform has an agility that enables it to scale up and down-market more easily than its competitors.
The company’s resort use case is sophisticated. It deals with hundreds of thousands of images a week through its platform and handles countless guests. Capturelife integrates with the resorts’ guest system. This enables operators to use every part of the platform.
Capturelife becomes an easily scalable system with the ability to include different workflows for multiple sites within a resort brand. Current use cases allow resorts to continue monetizing digital and print on-site.
The greatest advantage for resorts is added flexibility through Capturelife’s commerce capabilities. Resorts are now able to have any combination of pre-stay purchasing, on-site retail purchases, and post-stay purchasing for their guests. Post-stay purchasing alone has seen a more than 20% increase in sales within the platform.
Attractions/event photography – finding value and mitigating the lack of staffing
When it comes to events, one of the company’s clients is an attraction that travels around the US visiting different cities every week.
“They do automated capture on systems we’re integrated with, where you walk up to a camera and scan your QR code,” says DeFusco. “It counts down and snaps your picture with a green screen behind you. Next thing, pictures land on your phone with dinosaurs or all sorts of different scenes behind you. Kids love it.”
“They didn’t have the staff to have kiosks and onsite sales, so opted to go down a purely mobile route.”
The stats for that use case are interesting: 82% of the people that get their photos taken are viewing their photos. They’re interested in the content, and because it’s winding up on their phone seconds after they leave that station, it’s very engaging.
“The immediacy is what people want,” explains DeFusco. “The purchase rate is 42%, which, for that type of attraction, is very high: often, you’ll see rates of around 20%.”
Professional sports photography – using photos and media for fan engagement
Looking at Capturelife’s clients in the sports and live events segment the usage is very different.
“We are in our second season of working with a professional sports team here in the States and are planning a third season,” says DeFusco. “They are using Capturelife for pure fan engagement. There’s no commerce involved, just roaming photographers, engaging with fans, and taking great shots.”
“We take those picture streams off the camera through our app to our cloud, augment them with the brand overlays the team provides us, and create this great, exclusive souvenir from the game. The photos are professionally captured and of high quality.”
There is an 80%-85% trend in terms of engagement across use-cases, which is, Mauldin contends, virtually unprecedented.
“With that type of engagement rate, our client is thrilled because it’s rare that anything gets that level of fan engagement. Plus, fans are thrilled to receive these personal memories that create an emotional connection between the fan and the experience.”
Deep integration into the experience
For an in-depth example of Capturelife’s solution in action, blooloop spoke to Chris Nobels, producer of the Enchant Christmas winter wonderlands. Enchant Christmas is described as the World’s Most Magical Christmas Experience.
“Enchant Christmas is in four different cities,” he explains. “It’s a light maze, it’s a winter village, it’s a kids’ area with Santa and it’s ice skating. It’s a magical, wonderful place, bringing Christmas to the markets throughout the US.”
Nobels wanted to expand the Enchant Christmas photography program and make it more robust. From listening to customer feedback, he realised people wanted access to their photos beyond the event. At this point, having decided to explore outsourcing, Nobels came across the Capturelife platform:
“It ticked all the boxes. It allowed for instant download, it allowed for watermark images and it allowed for going into and linking to a print store, or to printing images on blankets, throws, cups, Christmas cards, ornaments: all the things that you want from your Christmas photo. In addition, it allows for downloads after the fact.”
“The developers worked extensively to make sure that the systems talked to each other, and that there was no delay or lag. From the customer standpoint, they were none the wiser that they were moving from one platform to another. It became a seamless operation.
“From my perspective, it was something that both our team and their team worked on collectively. It made for a very easy, collaborative session.”
This last has proved to be very popular:
“Post-event, we sent out an email and had significant downloads. Then, for Valentine’s Day, we sent out another email, and, again, had significant downloads. It became that one-stop-shop of being able to meet not only all our in-event needs but pre-and post-event needs as well.”
Trusted partners
The impact on sales has, he says, been remarkable. Enchant Christmas was able to reach purchase rates of 78%.
“Due to the demographics of each of our locations, we found that there are different buy-in patterns and different needs. One of the things that we’re working on with Capturelife going forward is how to customise the platform, retargeting their existing tools to make them the city-specific tools that we need. We’re also developing some new things along the way, in partnership.”
For the future, Nobels says:
“We are still working through details, but we’re planning to continue to partner with them in the future. We’re expanding the program to capitalize on what worked in each one of the markets, to learn from anything that didn’t. Then we will morph the program so it’s city-specific, as opposed to one-size-fits-all.”
In short, he adds:
“It could not have gone better. Not only from a technical and customer standpoint, but also just because they’re great people, and nice to work with. It always makes any project easier when you enjoy picking up the phone and calling them.”
Supporting the entire customer journey – bridging the physical and digital
Capturelife is unique in that it takes a holistic view of how guests and fans engage with its clients’ experience in the physical and digital world, and how these businesses can leverage memories from the experience to drive value before, during, and after the experience.
While it can easily facilitate selling souvenir photos to customers, Capturelife goes further. It sees these photos as captured memories and strategic assets that deliver significant value by driving more engagement, brand recognition, and revenue.
DeFusco says this concept partly comes from the experience of Mauldin who previously ran the imaging group at Disney:
“Disney’s photo operation is, essentially, the gold standard for the holistic approach that we embrace. It’s an approach we’ve learned that when you put the focus on the consumer and connect to the larger experience ecosystem, it unlocks untapped value for companies in engagement and economic value.”
Capturelife takes the end user’s perspective as a starting point from which it identifies and then exceeds expectations.
Mauldin says:
“Capturelife converts media from a souvenir into more of a strategic asset. Memories create emotional connections, through which a brand can build and strengthen loyalty, and an intent to return. That is the type of strategic framework that Disney looks at; it’s all about a focus on creating emotional connections to the brand and a seamless guest experience.”
The Capturelife platform enables anyone to have memories being captured at an experience see more value as a souvenir, and as a way to create more emotional connections that can be bundled into the overall experience.
Capturelife delivers a seamless on-site experience
Guests’ captured memories have much untapped value, beyond their core function as souvenirs. Through Capturelife’s solution businesses can engage visitors with meaningful content at all stages of their journey: before they arrive, throughout the visit or event, and afterwards.
In terms of the on-site experience, DeFusco says:
“We enable the capture and association of media to the guest or the fan attending the venue or event. We approach the market with an open architecture because we know that integrating with ticketing or guest management systems allows for the seamless association of images with people.”
It is the quality of flexibility that makes the platform unique. For instance, there are many different situations where a customer may need to set different pricing models, different ways of checking out, or different currencies. These are functions that Capturelife has built into the platform so that it can work for global customers.
In addition, when it comes to flexibility for the consumer:
“Everybody is walking around with their phone. If they can’t get into the photo retail store, or maybe they don’t want to go into the retail store, they can always shop on their phones. We have a mobile version of our retail store kiosk,” Mauldin explains.
He adds: “Leveraging a mobile device as a point-of-sale system, I think, is where companies need to be. It is where today’s consumers expect the experience to be. But it has not been addressed broadly in the market, and that we feel is one of Capturelife’s key differentiators.”
Capturing missed opportunities
Often when people are selling images or videos of an experience the transaction ends when the guest leaves. This, the Capturelife team feels, is a missed opportunity. There is powerful emotional content on the guest’s phone. The company helps its customers leverage that connection to the guest on their mobile device in a couple of ways.
One is by continuing to market to those guests. According to DeFusco, organizations see purchases continue to the tune of 15% to 25% additional revenue after the event.
The other way Capturelife helps companies leverage the connection to guests’ phones is by staying engaged with visitors. There is intelligent in-app messaging built into the mobile app. This means that if people re-engage with their content, even months afterwards, the app can trigger a message. For instance, it could be a discount on an upcoming trip; or, a reminder that the event is coming again to their town soon.
Contextual messaging keeps the guest engaged, and the brand front and centre.
“A key phrase is ‘customisable through configuration’,” says Mauldin. “The Capturelife platform is easily configured. It doesn’t take any custom coding to match how you want to run your business.
“If you want to have an onsite digital and print sales business model or if you want to drive it to the mobile phone, you can do that. If you want to deliver mobile digital photos to someone’s mobile device, inclusive of your experience, you can do that.”
Integrated into the native experience
Capturelife’s solution can easily be implemented into a brand’s native app. This is another area where Rob Mauldin’s experience has influenced Capturelife’s approach.
Disney chose to move its photo experience into the main Disney park app, and it immediately became one of the top engagement functions in the app. With Disney Cruise line recently bringing its photo operations in house, it will be interesting to see when Disney Cruise Line will follow suit and when others in the cruise industry will follow.
“The fact we can embed inside a native app means we can optimise it, and be part of the whole experience. We skin it to make it feel like it’s just a part of the native experience. You’d never know it was Capturelife in there, enabling that experience for the fans and guests,” says DeFusco.
Capturelife is a cloud-based platform, so there is a strong backbone behind the system. Its ‘kiosks’ are browser-based and can be run on many standard machines, including Windows or Mac touch screen units. This provides a lot of flexibility and is economical for people to deploy. No proprietary equipment is required.
“When we push a new update, you refresh the browser, and you have that update. This is instead of – as happens with other systems – staff having to go around installing software on machines separately.”
One final use case – Capturelife in action
At the other extreme, the company works with smaller venues and start-up businesses as well. For instance, it is working with a company in the UK, Arts Photography, that has recently entered the attractions and events space under a new brand, Photappio. This shows Capturelife’s unique ability to go down market as well.
The Capturelife platform is instrumental in facilitating the growth of Photappio, as it evolves in exciting new directions. Charles Gregory runs the company, which specialises predominantly in school and nursery photography in the UK but is now expanding into new markets.
Gregory came across Disney’s photopass service while on holiday with his family four years ago:
“I’ve got two kids. We were running around chasing photographers, getting amazing pictures. Then we were downloading them through the Disney app with this prepaid photopass concept, which was amazing. I investigated and found out more about Capturelife.”
Scalability supports growth
Gregory had experimented with software that associated photography subjects with a QR code. He found it eliminated much of the work involved with traditional methods. This is when he realised the Capturelife platform had the potential to be transformative.
“Working with Capturelife, I can drive the customer directly onto their devices instantly, with images that we have just captured. It drives curiosity and is, I think, the next phase of high-volume photography.”
Working with Capturelife, I can drive the customer directly onto their devices instantly, with images that we have just captured.
“About 18 months ago, I went with my family to The Alnwick Garden. I saw an opportunity to capture beautiful family portrait photography at places like that, driving customers directly to their images on their mobile devices. It would be all about giving the customers a great experience, having lots of fun, but also driving high margins because it’s all digital.”
Capturelife’s scalability will be an asset, he feels, as his business evolves and develops. He has plans to expand by building a significant business around high footfall tourist attractions:
“It’s very much a work in progress now, but it’s hugely exciting.”
Capturelife looks to the future
Capturelife started with a simple premise – to make it easier and more rewarding to capture life’s key memories and experiences. Now, following this intense period of development, the Capturelife team are poised to help clients across these diverse segments boost guest engagement like never before.
With the Capturelife solution, operators can make every moment count, giving their guests a seamless way to share and treasure their memories for years to come.
