Recently, I returned from a trip to Singapore and Macau, where I discovered that images of The Fortune Diamond, a signature attraction in the lobby of the Galaxy Casino Macau, have become ubiquitous in the two years since my company, Entertainment Design Corp. (EDC), created the Diamond with The Galaxy Entertainment Group’s deputy chairman, Francis Liu.
Sending its message of potential riches and good fortune, the Diamond is front-and-center on advertising that promotes the Galaxy. We saw it on the side of a bus, in the airline magazine, at the high-speed railway terminal on the mainland, and inside a Hong Kong subway car. I was happy to learn that the Diamond is living up to its mission and fulfilling the promises we made to the client about its potential as the branding icon of the casino.
The Story Of A Diamond
In addition to being a branding icon, The Fortune Diamond is the centerpiece of the Galaxy atrium lobby and a free spectacle for guests, setting the mood for entering the casino. Surrounded by four columns, the 22'-diameter Diamond goes through a 6.5-minute show sequence every hour on the hour, with lavish fountain effects, theatrical lighting, music, and sound. In between shows, it’s a favorite photo backdrop for guests, exactly as it was meant to be.
The show sequence culminates with the Diamond receding from view to be replaced by good luck symbols that morph into a giant, spinning roulette wheel. Music, light, and sound build to a climax, suggesting the arpeggios of an enormous slot machine payoff. This hands a reassuring constant to the guest: even if you don’t win at the tables, the uplift of the show and the symbolic payoff at the end will be there. You can always get the blessing of the Diamond, even if you don’t win a jackpot.
Marketing-wise, as an instant, unmistakable symbol of wealth, luxury, and living on a grand scale, the Diamond helped the Galaxy overcome a primary challenge for Asian casinos trying to attract mainland Chinese. Gambling and casinos cannot be advertised per se on the mainland, but a casino can put up a picture of the Diamond with a message to visitors to come to the Galaxy and be treated like royalty.
Making It Happen, Making It Bold
The success of The Fortune Diamond was not accidental. In its dual role as branding symbol and free, location-based entertainment, the Diamond exemplifies how the right attraction in the right place will help to recoup capital investment in a subtle but surefire way. If the investment for an attraction supports designing something that is kinetic and embodies many changes, it will lend itself to many marketing opportunities, and it will indirectly pay for itself, and more.
In other words, an attraction is not just a pretty face—not just a vanity investment or something to increase guests’ dwell time. It can be much more than that, with the right planning and investment.
Our job as designers and concept artists is to be bold and to guide project investors to make bold, yet appropriate, choices. That is what leads to successful attractions that gain the notice of the press and public. That is what makes those attractions worth any and all of the subsequent headaches of operations and maintenance that may arise as the operator fine-tunes the facility. As Asia, especially, surges ahead in the attractions market, there are great opportunities.
However big, bold, and iconic the attraction, its show should be short and sweet. We’ve had plenty of practice telling a story in 30-60 seconds doing TV commercials. In attractions, we get a little more time, about seven to 12 minutes, to grab them and touch their hearts before sending them back to the gambling tables.
Time And Kinetics
When your attraction is bold and breakthrough, your success can be too. The Place in Beijing, a high-end retail/lifestyle center that opened in 2007, was ranked #1 on a USA Today Travel 10Best.com list for shopping in Beijing and is on many lists of the city’s must-see stops. Its iconic attraction: the EDC-provided Sky Screen, where custom shows play on a vast, overhead video projection surface measuring 250m long, 30m wide, and 30m high (820'x98'x98'). Because of it, The Place became the only private venue that the Olympic Committee allowed to be a viewing location for the 2008 Games in Beijing. It is said to be the longest screen in Asia (and almost certainly, it is). It was modeled after the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas, which we also designed, that spans four city blocks at 1,500' long and was the first of its kind.
It is difficult to quantify the success of an attraction until it is up and running, and you can observe how guests, media, and press respond. But as soon as the Galaxy Macau opened, we could see the brand being born. There were crowds around the Diamond’s every show, holding cellphone cameras, generating hundreds, if not thousands, of images that found their way onto social media, in addition to the images used in formal advertising campaigns and mainstream news coverage. The Diamond is always ready for her close-up, and that’s part of the plan.
We design attractions with the camera in mind. If it changes color and moves, it will be picked up by TV media (and posted all over YouTube). If it becomes an icon, it will be used in movies and video games. The Fremont Street Experience became the icon of downtown Las Vegas, and key to its rejuvenation as a tourist destination, while providing nightly, free location-based entertainment. You know an attraction has reached icon status when it is used to define a location in movies and even in video games (it was a major set for Grand Theft Auto in 2005).
Having A Plan
We carefully identify the locations for all of our attractions and think about how they will function at each to build the experience. Each attraction is a particular kind of tool, telling a particular kind of story in terms of way-finding, branding, marketing, and/or entertainment, the region, and the visitor demographics. This is how we create an attraction master plan.
Three attractions we provided to Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore offer examples of attraction master planning. Crane Dance is the huge, super iconic attraction; Lake of Dreams is the big, fat spectacle that says “you’ve arrived,” and Hall of Treasures, transformed by theming, is no longer an escalator but a magical ride into the casino. Each provides a level of differentiation to help take people out of the ordinary world into a new experience. And they are all “free.”
It works for retail/lifestyle centers, as well. The sense of being within the borders of a special, exclusive place, removed from everyday existence, serves to increase dwell time and softens the edges of shopping. The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas is one of the places that proved the concept in retail, creating a series of zones, each defined by a different attraction; one was the animatronic fountain EDC created in collaboration with Dougall Design.
Attractions are meant to attract, entertain, make people stay longer, make people remember, tell a story, and bring in the press. Remember in the 1990s, when Steve Wynn first built an erupting volcano at The Mirage on the Las Vegas Strip? The volcano became synonymous with Las Vegas. It was followed by the Sirens of TI with a sinking pirate ship, The Fremont Street Experience, and the Bellagio fountains. Developers looked to the successes of Vegas, and duplicates sprang up around the world. Attractions work. In the seven years we’ve been doing business in Asia, we’ve seen this proven again and again.
Entertainment designer Jeremy Railton has made a career out of creating many of the “biggest” and “firsts” in themed entertainment, all in the pursuit of wow. His career spans design in theatre, dance, film, TV, concerts, spectacles of Olympian proportions, retail entertainment, and architectural projects. His company, Entertainment Design Corporation, can be found at www.entdesign.com. 