Sky Zone Doubles Audience Reach and Gives Business a Big Bounce

The Challenge

Sky Zone is the US leader in indoor active entertainment, with 270 parks serving more than 500,000 members. With a goal of driving growth at each park location through birthday party offers, Sky Zone faced challenges optimizing marketing performance across a variety of digital channels given that most conversions (ticket sales) occurred in person at park locations.

Could Sky Zone develop a scalable marketing infrastructure to drive online reach, measure offline activities, and accelerate awareness through hyper-personalized offers? Could they do this with a future-ready solution that could scale and support new capabilities for measurement and AI?

The Solution

Sky Zone expanded the rollout of their birthday package programs with hyper-localized and highly personalized offers. They partnered with Acadia, a marketing and analytics consultancy, to rebuild their customer segmentation, targeting, and measurement infrastructure from the ground up on the Snowflake cloud.

Acadia is a LiveRamp partner with deep expertise in both Snowflake’s data warehouse as well as LiveRamp’s cloud-embedded identity resolution and audience activation capabilities. Using LiveRamp and Snowflake, Acadia could unify audience data and marketing measurement data on a scalable platform that could handle the rapidly growing network of Sky Zone franchise owners.

Rebuilding the Audience Foundation

Acadia reconstructed Sky Zone’s existing audience segmentation and customer models.

Prioritizing the safety of Sky Zone’s customer data, Acadia used Snowflake’s secure data sharing to open protected access to Sky Zone’s customer records for analytic work. Acadia then used LiveRamp’s embedded identity resolution to unify the data. Designed to execute natively within the Snowflake cloud to deliver high performance with no data movement, LiveRamp also pseudonymized the data and removed any sensitive customer identifiers, creating a more secure work environment for analytics, modeling, and potential future AI-powered enrichment.

LiveRamp enabled Acadia to connect Sky Zone’s customer touchpoints into a top-to-bottom marketing funnel. This unified view of customer journeys drives more accurate segmentation, targeting, and measurement of marketing performance.

Jumping to Hyper-Personalization

Sky Zone’s previous marketing strategies relied on geographic targeting. Their efforts layered on more comprehensive consideration by adding customer types.

Acadia used their new unified audience data foundation to identify specific high-value customer segments that lived near Sky Zone locations and were particularly likely to host a party at the park. Acadia’s data science team used Snowflake’s cloud-hosted analytics to derive optimal segments for hyper-personalized outreach across both regions and customer types.

Acadia also designed custom landing pages specifically for Sky Zone’s birthday party bookings, optimizing the pages for conversion tracking and featuring targeted messaging, clear calls to action, and a seamless booking process.

Measuring Success

Acadia implemented robust measurement tools to monitor the effectiveness of Sky Zone’s marketing campaigns, relying on LiveRamp’s activation network to increase audience reach and to associate impressions and responses accurately. This allowed Acadia to better optimize performance across channels and enabled continuous improvement for Sky Zone’s campaigns.

The Results

This data-led transformation made a remarkable marketing impact:

• Return on ad spend (ROAS) improved by over 100%.
• LiveRamp activation doubled audience reach compared to a cookie-based approach.
• Conversion rates increased by more than 20% on custom landing pages for birthday parties.

The bottom line results were even more exciting:

• The website drove a double-digit increase in birthday package sales.
• Sky Zone delivered year-over-year business growth despite broader consumer softness.

A Playbook for Success

Sky Zone’s partnership with Acadia exemplifies the power of scalable, cloud-hosted data infrastructure for cookieless marketing.

1. By rebuilding customer segmentation, targeting, and measurement capabilities on a cookieless foundation, Acadia immediately helped Sky Zone’s marketing initiatives achieve significant growth and profitability.
   
2. By using LiveRamp’s person- and household-centered identity and activation, Sky Zone unified customer touchpoints, unlocking full journey metrics to guide enhanced performance across all key media channels.
   
3. By building on an extensible cloud data warehouse, Acadia can plug in even more functionality to Sky Zone’s solution. For example, Sky Zone is currently integrating Google Store Sales for deeper offline measurement support. It is also investigating the benefits for unstructured sentiment analysis and personalization through Snowflake’s Cortex AI platform.

Sky Zone reached new heights by leveraging open data foundations, targeted marketing strategies, and collaborative partnerships that unlocked audience insights for their brand and customers.