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The ROAR Podcast: Lauren Adams · The ROAR Podcast

• Lauren: When the final whistle blew at World Cup matches in New Jersey this summer, fans weren't ready to go home. The energy was electric. But the stadium was rigged with parking. So the party went somewhere else, miles away, to Times Square. The researchers who tracked that movement have a name for it: Afterglow. They argue that every bit of it that drifts away from the venue is dwell time and goodwill left on the table. Today, Adams sits down with Lauren Adams, Global Director of Lifestyle Research at Gensler, and lead author of The Phandom Effect, Sports Urbanism 2026. It's a three-part study from the Gensler Research Institute, Oxford Economics, and ROAR. Research looked before, during, and after the tournament. They surveyed nearly 6,000 fans across the US and Canada, tracked fans' posts tied to every host stadium in real time, went back to host city residence once the last match was played. What they found matters to anyone building a sports anchored district. Fans use words like we and us 70% more often when posting from the plazas and streets outside the stadiums than from inside the stadium itself. When they researched for words like goosebumps and electric, the collective language jumped 189%. And Lorne puts it public space that inspires awe equals belonging. They dig into where the experience breaks down. Starting with the entry line, which Lauren calls the off-rezone, to get into why super fans cluster in their venues, why locals and families want completely different things from the same district, and what designers should build now for stadiums that will look like very different in 10 years. It's a conversation about loneliness, design, and why crowds outside the stadium may be the most valuable part of game day. I'm Brice Clinton, and this is ROAR Podcast. Adam Grossman: Welcome to the Road Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Grossman. With me today is Lauren Adams. Lauren, thanks for joining the podcast. Lauren Adams: thanks for having me, Adam. Adam Grossman: Yeah, well we're here to talk about the paper that you were the lead author and Rohr played a role in creating, but let's talk about it. So what is the paper? What did we do and what in particular what did Gensler just publish today? Lauren Adams: So today we launched and published a paper called The Fandom Effect Sports Urbanism 2026. And that is a three-part mixed method study where we did a baseline survey before the World Cup started to understand how do people use the sports venues and districts in their community. how often do they visit? What's their feeling about them? What role does it play in their lives? And what would they want from them in order to visit on non-game days? So we did that in April when the World Cup was like not, you know, foremost in people's consciousness. And then during the World Cup, you know, the part that we did with you, we did a social media listening study where we geofenced all the stadiums to be able to follow the fan conversation. as it was happening across the full tournament. And we did all kinds of cool AI-powered language analysis and other ways to sort of turn quantitative data or qualitative data into quantitative data. and we learned some really fascinating things through that conversation. And then, as a follow-up, we surveyed every World Cup host city to understand. What was the impact of the World Cup on that city? Did you know if people went, what kind of experience did they have? What drove them to attend a match? How did they watch if they didn't go to a match? And ultimately, like, did it change their feelings about soccer or sports or or gathering or whatever? So it was, you know, it was really great to have this before, during, and after to understand how a flagship event or, you know, sort of a peak experience might change a person's mind or Change a city. Adam Grossman: Yeah, and I think the mixed method and the ability to to look at the different narratives And bring them all together is really interesting. The idea of looking at the before, during, and after, using different approaches, really trying to understand what people are talking about and saying, I think was a really it's a novel approach. And I think the way that the Genser team in particular put that all together in a clean narrative that had this temporal component, I think is really interesting and compelling. And we'll get into more of the actual study itself, but one of the top line things that we wanted to explore and Gunser explored is the idea. idea of community gathering and how sports can bring people together and what is a potential loneliness crisis that exists in America. Can you talk about that as the overarching frame for the idea of this paper? Lauren Adams: absolutely. I mean, the loneliness crisis is a thing that I've been writing about and thinking about for several years. It's kind of a real pet challenge of mine and one where I think designers have a very, you know, clear role in creating places that will bring people together. there's already a lot of isolation happening in the media landscape, in the cultural landscape, and then Post pandemic, I think it got, you know, even more exacerbated. And so when you started to see this massive, you know, explosive interest in live events, where you get, you know, Taylor Swift changing the GDP and all all of these things, it was very clear that people wanted a way to be together. There was so much pent-up demand. and that's really where I feel like. Designers really do have a role to play because we can make the places where this happens. And so this is something that I'm super passionate about personally. so with that framing, you know, one of the things that's so interesting about sports is that it really is kind of the the ultimate unifier. You know, people and and particularly soccer. it's you know, it it defies boundaries of class, of race, of income. Of gender, like soccer is so universal. And so to be able to, you know, have this naturally occurring experiment where there was this opportunity to see what gathering on a global scale was going to look like, we felt like, okay, this we have to study this. And the idea that that that the stadium could become the New Town Square was kind of driving part of our thinking. Adam Grossman: we'll talk about that particularly in the new town square, but we keep talking about global and the scale of what we were working on. can you talk a little bit more about the global scale and the scale of this project? obviously there's a large scale survey analysis, large scale social media analysis. We looked across the entire tournament, but can you talk about just the size of the analysis and what we were looking at? Lauren Adams: Sure. So the baseline survey was conducted in North America. It was about 5,600 people. And then the world and so that was limited to US, Canada. And then the World Cup obviously, you know, caught everyone in that social listening experiment from wherever they were. And When we put up the Voice of the Fan dashboard where we let people see those posts as we were seeing them, we made sure to keep every post in its native language, and then we provided translation tools for that. So we were able to get a much better read on the global perspective from the voice of the fan social listening research. And then in the follow-up, we We kind of decided to do that follow-up survey at the last minute. It was not part of the original research plan, but it felt like the opportunity was too good to pass up. So that that survey surveyed about 2,600 people. So not quite the same scale as the baseline study, because we just needed to make sure that we got those findings as soon as we could after the World Cup was over and then we had to close the survey and start publishing. So that's, you know, where those numbers come from. Adam Grossman: Yeah, it's always publishing that gets in the way of all this good research. well, Lauren Adams: Yes. Exactly. Adam Grossman: one of the things I did and and this is something you and I talked about, and I think largely driven by you and the Gensler team and I mentioned this briefly, but and you mentioned with the voice of the fans. So from the social media listening side, we looked at every single game at every single stadium and looked at the conversation about the district and about the stadium experience. And I think, benchmarking that across the actual tournament as it's happening every week we published updates to the voice of the fans. So we had a publicly facing dashboard that had all the social media conversation. The Gensler and Rohr team worked together to make sure we could identify which posts were with specific venues and it's specific districts and then use that as a foundation for the analysis and some of the headlines that we'll talk about a second. But I do think it was ambitious to do that. to do that at the scale and speed that we were able to do that collectively, I think is really noteworthy. And also, some of the use cases, we're talking about the live experience and that will be the focus of this conversation. But one of the things that we find interesting is the intersection of the live experience and artificial intelligence and technology and using artificial intelligence to drive design, to drive live experiences and drive the real environment. Again, it's something we you and I talked about a lot, but it's also something that I think you did a really good job showcasing in the Lauren Adams: Yeah, it was it was amazing to be able to have those tools at our disposal, especially because the language analysis of all of these posts reveals some very interesting things. I mean, this is what people are saying, unprompted, no one is surveying them, it's nothing to do with how you wrote a question. This is something that they are generating themselves on their own Steam. And, you know, presumably these are their actual thoughts as they're happening. So it really gave us. a very unique window to see, you know, not just what people said, but how they said it, where they were when they said it. Adam Grossman: So and then let's talk about that. What did they say? What wha how did they say it across all both the with the ROAR stuff and everything else? Lauren Adams: So yeah. So I think the most fascinating finding from the ROAR study was that people are much more inclined to use collective communal language like we and us when they are posting from the public realm. I think they're 70% more likely to use that language, we, us, than they are when they're in the bowl. When they're in the bowl, they're Their narration of their experience is pretty much from a first-person singular point of view. So that was a fascinating finding to me that when people are out in the public realm, that's really where they feel and act like a community. The other thing that was fascinating about this language analysis was that when people used words associated with awe or wonder, like goosebumps or epic or electric, then They were 189% more likely to use collective language. So as a person who's in the business of making spaces that bring people together, this was like the best thing I possibly could have heard. Adam Grossman: Ha ha ha. Lauren Adams: You know, it's it's we crack the code. It's public space that inspires awe equals belonging. That's that's where you're going to get belonging happening. And that was it was so gratifying to be able to pinpoint, okay, this is the exact role of design. in this process of bringing people together. The role we have Adam Grossman: Can you talk Lauren Adams: to play is very clear. Adam Grossman: Yeah, can you talk about that in more detail? What does that mean from a design perspective in terms of particularly those who are thinking about designing these new spaces? we'll talk about it a little more at the end, but obviously that is a really interesting idea using the we and the collective language and the awe-inspiring language. What does that mean to you from a design perspective? Lauren Adams: I think in terms of public space, there are some things that you can do to create environments that really feel heroic, that really feel iconic. And I'll use this as an example from my own life. So a couple of years ago, I had family in town over the winter holidays, and people wanted to see the Tree Rockefeller Center, which is like my nightmare experience as a New Yorker. That is not a thing that we willingly Adam Grossman: Okay. Lauren Adams: do. But I said, okay, okay, we'll go. And so we are wading into this throng of people. You know, it's nighttime. It was a crowd that was so packed. It was like potentially panic-inducing. And I understood why everyone was there, because Rockefeller Center is the perfect example of an awe-inspiring architectural public space. Like that's that is it is clear that it was designed to make people feel. A sense of awe, a sense of inspiration. There's literally a shiny object in the middle of it in the form of this tree. But, you know, the unity, the scale, the way that the views were composed, you know, I study this stuff for a living and it still worked on me. I still felt that way. And Adam Grossman: Yeah, right. Lauren Adams: and so, you know, there are there are concrete things that you can do. I think making sure that that space is very recognizable. that, you know, if you saw Even a flash of an image on somebody's post, you would know where it is. That sort of the sense of an iconic design, a recognizable design, and something that is sort of uniform enough that when you step into that zone, you know where you are. Like you've left the real world and you're now in this other world of heroism and excitement and you know, in the in in this case, you know, a place where sport is celebrated on a very large scale. Adam Grossman: we talked about this in terms of community and this idea of building a community in these spaces. how do you think about, turning this collective experience into a community building experience? you talked about already, but how do you think about that in terms of, achieving that objective of moving from loneliness to community? Lauren Adams: So I think that there are a couple things. There's at the at the level of urban planning, I think that there's making sure that there's a level of connectivity to the rest of the city, whether that is, you know, it's easy to get there by transit or it's completely woven in to the rest of the city, making sure that, you know, people can get there easily. Habitually, they can just, you know, make a choice to stop by. that's the kind of access that we're talking about being you know a key part of this. And then the other piece is how it's programmed. So on non-game days, what is there for people to do there? And I think that there are a couple things. One is to sort of expand the program beyond sports. So you know there's there are layers of things that that people could interact with or do. So I think you want things on the level of farmers markets Everyday kind of things. You want things that are more special or seasonal, you know, like holiday events or food festivals. And then I think you also want a pretty wide mix of price points. So, you know, you want to be able to have the higher-end experiences for people who really see this as a destination and they want to build a whole day or evening around it. But you also need things that are more, you know, a lower price point, much more accessible, so that you can start to activate it with lots of people all the time. And so the idea is if we get, you know, all of these different pieces of the program across that spectrum, you're giving people things to do and reasons to be there always. And when this place becomes the habitual place to visit, that's when, you know, in the event of something like a World Cup. It's even more, you know, charged with a sense of strong community. Adam Grossman: that's something ROAR and Seregh, focuses in on and using data driven decision making to help create programming recommendations. and also using the type of data that we used here in terms of looking at organic conversation, but looking at behavioral based data to drive decision making. Something we can talk about a little more detail, but I do want to focus on the first part of what you said from a traffic entry ingress perspective. we found holistically across the study, That that was really the only negative part was people getting to the game and getting in into the state of game. Talk a little bit more about that and what the learnings can be from a design decision making perspective. Lauren Adams: Yeah, so I think that there are a couple things there. you know, this was a tournament that was held in the summer. so it was very hot and there were long cues. Adam Grossman: Yeah. Lauren Adams: this shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. So I think being able to deploy temporary infrastructure for things like shade protection would have been something that Cities probably should have engaged in. There are other issues around security screening. That technology is getting better every day. I expect that to become more and more seamless. But in the moment that it's not, there are other ways to repair people. So there's a bit of a service design element at play here as well. And then I think that there's the ability to create more of a sense of welcome in those moments where you know you're going to be receiving people who are potentially in the most stressful point in their journey, which is getting in. you know, we saw that in the ROAR study too. That was actually the one place, I think, across the entire fan journey where people were not using language associated with awe and wonder. It's just like an awe-free zone right there Adam Grossman: Yeah. Lauren Adams: at the portal where you want somebody to feel absolutely embraced by this heroic place. So That's you know a thing that I think is something that is really worth studying. And and the other piece of this is one of the things that we found in the other part of our of our study was that issues of perceived safety were things that were keeping people away from these venues out you know, outside of a targeted game moment or keeping people from exploring the district around the venue. So people want Places that clearly feel safe. That that primarily means great lighting. It means activated storefronts, so there are eyes on the street. You know, this is kind of basic city design, Adam Grossman: Yeah. Lauren Adams: city planning stuff, but the fact that it's in a a sports anchored entertainment district or mixed use district doesn't make those principles invalid. You know, they're probably even more valid than ever. It's a microcosm. Adam Grossman: I think we want to talk about the delta almost between the venue and district experience. But first we do want to talk about the venue experience. Can you talk about what the findings and fans were experiencing when they were inside the venue and how both during the event and after the event. what were some of the things that you saw just about their game day experience when they were inside the venue and how they thought about their in-venue experience? Lauren Adams: So i in venue, I think as soon as they cross the threshold from public realm to in the bowl, you know, as I mentioned before, you see people turning into first-person documentarians of their experience. And they're really, really focused on the match. You know, they're that's when they're talking about their experience less. They're not, you know, analyzing it, I guess, as they go along and and watch that match. We saw the people were almost entirely not posting about their food, for example. And you know, people love to post their food on social media. That's that's something that, you know, we we all know and we were shocked to find that people weren't talking about those things. They weren't talking about concessions. They weren't talking about like, ooh, here I am up in the luxury box. It was just full-on whistle to whistle. This is what I can see. This is what's happening on the match. Here's what's happening on the field. My sight lines are great. You know, these were the things that people were truly focused on. And then as soon as they left that bowl after, they switched into another mindset entirely. Then then they either went into celebration or mourning mode as they, you know, stay some of them stayed around. And and we called this phenomenon afterglow. I think it was a huge part of the World Cup experience was that there were these extended parties that spontaneously erupted. after matches. And you know, whether the venue accommodated those people and gave them a spot to gather really determined how long people stayed in the vicinity of that district. So, you know, that's another design piece as well. I think back to your question about how do you design for community. We need to make sure that we're giving people gathering spaces that are really just adjacent to that bowl so that as soon as the final whistle goes off, there's a place for them to go. And when there is that place, we saw that they stayed, they lingered, and they continued to spend time with each other. They continued to celebrate. Adam Grossman: can you talk more about, what is Afterglow? What does it mean? Why did we decide to look at it? Because I do think that, one of the things that we talked about and you focus on in the report is extending the game day experience both before and after the match or before and after the event. we talked already a little bit about the before the match and the anticipation and what that part of the fan journey is like. But now that we're talking about after the match and people still have this desire for celebration and community. Can you talk about, what we've looked at, how we came up with Afterglow and what are some of the core findings in more detail? Lauren Adams: Sure. So we actually had a question from a reporter. Brett Adam Grossman: Well, Lauren Adams: McCormick at Sports Business Journal actually specifically was recounting to us his own experience after some key matches, where you know, he he said, Well, when I was in a stadium ringed with parking, there was no party afterward, even though it was an amazing match and you could tell people wanted to celebrate. Whereas in a different setting, He said that the the party stayed there and it raged on and it was amazing energy. And you know, he said, is that something that you guys can look at? And so we immediately sprung into action. And actually, Adam, it'd be great if you talked a little bit, I think, about how we did that, like what were the mechanics of what we studied. But we immediately started to, you know, create this way to measure. How long were people staying around? And we called this phenomenon afterglow because it really was the extension of that party. so you know, if you maybe want to talk a little bit about how we measured afterglow, because it was we made some really interesting maps that measured where and how the afterglow happened. sometimes it did stay at the stadium, as Brett observed and as we all observed, but then sometimes it happened. downtown many miles away in a city. So the party wants to go somewhere, you know, it's very Adam Grossman: Yeah. Exactly. Lauren Adams: clear that that that the party is gonna go somewhere and it's really up to us to control where that party goes. Adam Grossman: from a nuts and bolts part of this, this is something where overall we looked at, a hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred thousand posts about the World Cup across all these different matches. And it was based on what Brett mentioned to us. And what we were looking at was the intensity and distance. So like how far away is something. and we wanted to look at a bunch of different variables. Did winning make a difference? Did the temperature make a difference? obviously suburban versus urban if the stadiums or venues were in a place that was urban or suburban. But we wanted to look at a bunch of different factors because if we could identify things that People would generally think, people will celebrate if the home team wins. In this case, whoever the home team, obviously if it's the United States or otherwise, there were a lot of matches where there could be more fans from another team. Was that an issue? Or was there an issue with the weather? if it's a nice day outside, then the people will celebrate. If it's not, then people are less likely to celebrate. And what we found consistently is we could isolate and those variables really didn't have who was playing, what time the game was, what the outcome was, if there was some temperature issue, if it was a suburban versus urban environment. We really didn't find anything from an intensity perspective, but really it was if you could pre-design people want to celebrate, they want to be part of a community and they'll go where they organically celebrate. So if there were places where you could organically celebrate in and around the venue, that's where people were going and that's where the celebration was happening and that's where typically the higher score venues were. which was really interesting. So New York was number one. Clearly New York, New Jersey, the games were happening in New Jersey, but the celebration was happening in New York. So the intensity of the celebration was high in terms of people wanting and desire to celebrate, but they weren't celebrating necessarily near the stadium or in the district. They were celebrating somewhere else. And this is something that you can talk about also is what does that mean from a design perspective? Lauren Adams: Right. I think, you know, we it's very clear that the fans are bringing this energy. And it is entirely a design decision to to make sure that we accommodate that energy. Otherwise, you know, that energy is gonna go somewhere else. It will not stay in this place. So, you know, I think when you look at the example of New York, New Jersey, it's actually a great example because it it tells you a couple things. One, the biggest Afterglow, you know, epicenter was around Times Square, which is a place that people are totally accustomed to gathering. So there's this element of habitual, which goes back to the things that we were saying earlier about the New Town Square. You've got to establish your venue as a place of habit. And then I think when you look at the magnitude of that New York, New Jersey afterglow, just think of what was left on the table. Because that stadium was ringed with parking. Think about how much afterglow could have happened there if the design allowed it to happen. And it makes me think anyone building a ground up stadium, if they're not designing an afterglow catcher's mit into their Adam Grossman: Right. Lauren Adams: plan, you know, it's they're really doing themselves a disservice because they're losing out on so much dwell time, but also goodwill. I mean, that's the that's the thing that was really, I think, just amazing to me about this study was how much people loved this event, how much it drove their desire to have more events like this. I mean, that's kind of what we heard in the press. That's what we heard from our friends, but then we saw it in the data too. People had, you know, this sparked something in them that made them want more. 63% of people we surveyed said that the way the World Cup made them feel made them much more likely to participate in another big flagship sporting event or or other entertainment event really. They wanted that feeling of collective effervescence again. And you know, now that the World Cup has ignited this and people have tasted it, it's something that they want more of. Adam Grossman: I think from a design decision making perspective, obviously you and I are focused on sports venues, sport venue design in the mixed use district around sports venues. And the idea of taking advantage if you want sports and entertainment to be the anchors, they have to be the anchors of something, right? And you were talking about programming. clearly parking has to be considered. There has to be parking lots, but what we're getting at is organically creating design elements to if you want this anchor and people to come to the game and then celebrate after the game, they need somewhere to go. and parking lots are a challenge, but figuring out the best way to balance parking, transit, ingress with egress, celebration, getting to places where you can take advantage of all the excitement and energy is something that, obviously I think people intuitively know, but having data to back that up is really helpful and valuable. Lauren Adams: Yeah, that that was really in some ways the best part of this. was being able to point to real data and say, Yes, this thing that we believe in our hearts, it's real. Adam Grossman: I think the parking lots are an example of one element where how we think about parking could be at least changed, not just from this study, but from other studies as well. But there were some other Lauren Adams: Right. Adam Grossman: deltas between the in venue experience, you mentioned safety potentially being one of them. But what were some other things you were seeing, between the deltas between or the gaps between the in venue and the district experience from the data? Lauren Adams: So the other thing that was really interesting in the data, and this was primarily what we found in the pre-World Cup survey, was that people were seeking family experiences. And even among respondents who didn't have kids in the household, people, this majority of people still said, I would be more likely to buy a ticket if this was a family-friendly experience. So to the extent that family friendliness is a proxy for safety or for welcoming, you know, it's interesting to think about it that way. But the other thing that we found very clearly is that the two biggest users of sports venues, people who had the most repeat visitation or you know, people who were spending the longest amount of time in the districts, if there was one, were both the people who live nearby, so people in the neighborhood of that place. And I'm going to take a little left turn for a second because among the people who live near or live or work near a venue, people who identify themselves as superfans are way overrepresented. if you lived or worked near the venue, you were 30% likely to say that you were a super fan. But if you didn't live or work near the venue, you were only 13%. That's like more than twice as many superfans are reporting that they live or work near the district. And You know, someone asked me recently, well, what's the direction of causality? And I would say it doesn't matter. Because either you now have a demonstrated desire of super fans to want to live near a venue, which has all kinds of implications for how you design Resi, where you put it, how you market that Resi. I mean, you've got a built-in sales pitch right there, right? If that's the causality. If the causality is the other way. And that people who live near districts become super fans, again, it's a win-win situation. So, you know, the other thing Adam Grossman: Yeah. That's really good. Lauren Adams: that we found was that the more people visited a district, the more they were attached to it. And that idea of, again, building habits, building rituals, you know, familiarity in this case does not breed contempt. It breeds it breeds the opposite. it, you know, it breeds closeness. So so there's there's that piece. And the other, you know, sort of heavy user of of the venue are families with kids. And actually, they're the people who are the most excited about the district as something to pin a longer day on. they and they want to do all the like, they want to go to the Hall of Fame, they want teams, team stores, they want sports-related restaurants. But then they also want, you know, things that are a little bit less expensive so they can really make a day of it. we found that the people who live near the venue are actually looking for higher-end things. They're looking for more nightlife, they're looking for fancier restaurants, and they're looking for things that they can do every day around, you know, their own fitness and wellness. They want gym offerings and and other things that sort of feel like they mesh with The premise of a sports district. So it was interesting to see that the two biggest users of these districts have completely opposite desires in terms of what they want there. And that, you know, says to me that we have to be very careful about how we put that program together. But I think that there are also other ways to do it so that it feels coherent. You know, if you if you create zones where there are anchors that attract these different audiences, they know that that's the zone for them. So then you don't have, you know, kids in the line for the beer with the young guys. Like you keep the people with the people they want to be with, but everyone knows that there is something for them there. Adam Grossman: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting analysis and really interesting idea, right? developing idiosyncratic programming based on, but different behavioral, demographic, persona, psychographic, things that you can use to drive traffic. To your point about the more people come, the more they want to come back. I think the more you can drive traffic using idiosyncratic programming is a really interesting idea and another good design takeaway. Lauren Adams: I think that idea I we mentioned earlier, you know, you need to make a catcher's mitt for the afterglow energy, but you kind of need to make a catcher's mitt for everything you want there. Because when people see a target that feels like them, they're going to go there. And people like to be told, you know, subconsciously where you want them to go. And that's easily a choice that we can make. through design, through programming and through service. Adam Grossman: And you mentioned collective effervescence as something we talk about. one, what is that just as a definition, which we probably should have said earlier, but two, you're talking about idiosyncratic element. How does idiosync syncratic elements then play into this collective effervescence? Lauren Adams: So collective effervescence is a curm term coined by a social scientist whose name I'm not remembering it right now. But Adam Grossman: You can check out on the Seregh website we have it as well. Lauren Adams: it's it's this sense of you know extreme joy that people get when they are experiencing a collective moment. So that's you know a crowd feeling, it's you know, everyone doing the same thing at the same time makes people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves. And that is a great feeling. You know, that that social sense social scientists describe that feeling as peak joy. It really is the time that people are happiest. So if you can make a place that creates a front door for lots of different kinds of people and in the right moments they are on their own. But then you put them all together in that bowl, then there is that sense of collective effervence effervescence that makes all of them feel good. You know, that's that's a thing that we really we want that distributed as widely as we can distribute. Adam Grossman: I think the World Cup has been a definition of collective effervescence. I think that was very and it seemed to overcome some of the earlier Lauren Adams: Absolutely. Adam Grossman: challenges. Like you said, people didn't really mention the price of tickets or any kind of price, but it was overall seemingly a collectively well received experience and I think we were we saw that in the data. either talking about that specifically but what are some of the other takeaways that you think you're going to take away from this study that can impact Gensler's work going forward either from design, community building, or a collective effervescence perspective. Lauren Adams: Mean one of the first things that it made me want to do was go look at the downtown stadiums of places that were not part of the World Cup and start to target, well, where are some examples where we could really make a difference? Can we go to that city or can we go to that team and say, you know, we've learned all of these things about how to make a better experience, drive repeat visitation. you know, elevate how people feel there, create a sense of safety and welcome. These are these are the elements, these are the pieces. so let's figure out how to put them around this venue that you have. I think that that's one thing that's very clear. I think that the other thing is that I mean it tells me that host cities probably want to be going after and auditioning for these flagship sporting events. And if they were on the fence about it, you know, I can tell them that almost 90% of the people that we surveyed said that the World Cup left them with a better impression of that host city, that they felt like it really elevated its image. And, you know, I don't know what the ROI is on that. Maybe that's our next study, but Adam Grossman: I was gonna say, yeah. Talk about what other things we want to look at, yeah. Yeah. Lauren Adams: But, you know, that to me says cities should be seeking this out because there are these intangibles that start to weave into the overall mood, the overall use of downtowns, you know, all of this stuff are things that we can impact by drawing the right kinds of events and by building on the momentum. I think if Anything, the World Cup created a momentum that we should now all be, you know, full steam behind that momentum to try to make sure that we can wing every ounce of value out of sports for making great places, for bringing people together, and as as a you know, business value too. This is one of these cases where a thing that is great for the bottom line is also great for people's psyche. And, you know, it that just seems like You know, we should just be all in for that. Adam Grossman: one thing and we're getting towards the end and there's a couple of questions I wanted to close on. But one is, and this is something we are going to study in the future, but the World Cup is clearly a one time event that is of global scale. districts as you've talked about and we've talked about are designed for the everyday experience. What are some of the takeaways that even an event, a one time event on a global scale, that you think would be applicable or are applicable to the everyday experience or the more common, sporting events that happen more frequently. Lauren Adams: So, I mean, I think that there are a couple ways to think about this. One is that the one-time event, and particularly one with this level of success, you know, has left this halo effect. So now people feel good about that place. They have a very, very positive emotional association with that place. So you've already put, you know, you've put the first breadcrumb down to getting to that town square. I think that what you also see is that an event of this scale and magnitude is like a pressure test. If this place can function with this amount of activity, and I think that you mentioned that you know, some of these some of these districts were receiving something like 12 times the number of people that they normally would. So there's there's that issue too that we can learn from. How does this perform? When it's at its absolutely most taxed or most stressed. And then I think that there is whole element of what happened in the public realm during this tournament, where you saw all of that collective language, you saw people using those words, and you saw people engaging in the cultural exchange that they were able to have because. Of the audience that the World Cup attracted. You know, just because you don't need the World Cup to set up the conditions for that kind of exchange and that kind of community. You know, the other thing that we learned through the study was that the kind of anticipation phase of the fan journey. I mean, one of the things that looking at all those social posts help us do was define what are those stages of the fan journey. And there was a very clear you know, they're very clearly common stages. The first one was anticipation, and that was the most under-leveraged of all of those stages of the fan journey. So, you know, that thing that we were talking about when we were saying, you know, once you get in the bowl, you're not you're not paying attention to the experience anymore. You're focused on the match. That anticipation time is when people are probably the most receptive to doing more things. So, you know, establishing events or activities or you know even the way you market it in terms of before the game. I think you can extend with Afterglow if you've created the right design solution. And you can extend in the beginning too in terms of experience if you plan for that. Adam Grossman: Yeah, and one of the things that we talk about is, one of the things that's common for teams and properties is extending or expanding their fan base and extending expanding the fan base, particularly to target opposing team fans from an anticipatory perspective, given the use of we language, awe-inspiring language, taking advantage of people wanting to extend the anticipation and the afterglow before and after. There's an opportunity to really take advantage of that from a both an interest engagement and monetization perspective. So you can expand Lauren Adams: Right. Adam Grossman: the universe beyond your core fan base into other fan base, let alone tourists, visitors, locals, residents. And that's something that we would highlight and focus on. But I think it's a it's a very good point. and the last question I had, and you can feel free to comment on on what I just said also, is one of the things beyond just the here and now. part of what we're looking at is what does design look like five, ten years from now? So what is the new town square, what are these stadiums, what do these events look like? Clearly the World Cup is one event and this was one moment in time. So we're definitely not gonna hold you to this from a prediction perspective. Lauren Adams: Yeah. Adam Grossman: But from what you think, how do you think this changes what this design process, what the town square, what this collective effervescence community building, what does that look like based on these types of events? Lauren Adams: I think it's interesting to think about what is the right combination of universal, timeless, simple human truth stuff. You know, when you're talking about collective effervescence, this is something that people are hardwired to experience. And it's a simple human truth, and people have been feeling this way in the right settings for probably 10,000 years or however long we've been talking. So there's an element of timelessness and of understanding basic human nature that designers need to be considering. But then there's also the idea of planning for flexibility and planning for change. We know that things like security screening are going to change dramatically. We know that digital technology is going to change dramatically. So I think that there's the piece of it, which is about creating a toolkit of deployable. temporary elements that are done in a way that they don't feel temporary. You know, it doesn't feel like a stanchion, it feels like something else. I so I think that we need kind of a toolkit of those things. And then I think that we need to make sure that we design for flexibility where we're not we're not putting permanent elements in a place where we know that we should be expanding or contracting. Based on what we know about how things are changing. So for example, with you know, we can anticipate that when security gets more seamless, the amount of space that a queue takes up is going to shrink dramatically. So let's not put something permanent in that makes people cue in a certain way, because then that forecloses other possibilities, particularly around using that space for afterglow. So I think it is really the the big balancing act of Timeless, simple human nature stuff versus temporary and ephemeral, and the and you know, deliberately planning for change where you can. Adam Grossman: that's really interesting and something that we'll have to explore in five to ten years when we have you back on the podcast. Lauren Adams: That's correct. Adam Grossman: Hopefully we'll have you before that, but also five to ten years from now. But I think that's Lauren Adams: Okay. Adam Grossman: a really good place and it's a really interesting idea and really interesting insight. So Lauren, thank you for being on the podcast. It was great to work on the paper with you and excited for people to take a look at the study and see all the things that Gensler and ROAR but Gensler as a whole put together. Lauren Adams: Thank you so much, Adam. It was great to be here and talk about this and it was so fun to work with you.