Something strange seems to be going on at Universal Studios Hollywood
The theme park has managed to attract a kind of customer not normally associated with the attraction: millennials.
Jeff Glueck, CEO of Foursquare, published a post on Medium discussing the company's analysis of amusement and theme parks, an $18 billion industry.
It found that the category overall has a pretty slow growth rate of just over 3% this year from Foursquare's US data.
Universal Parks & Resorts, the Comcast-owned company that operates Universal Studios Hollywood, is growing much faster than its competitors thanks to new attractions and innovations targeted to the millennial generation.
Foursquare found that in the last two years, millennials made up almost half of Universal Studios Hollywood's entire attendance.
When the theme park opened The Wizarding World of Harry Potter three months ago, millennial visit growth for the opening week was 63%, leveling off the following week to 58%, higher than a baseline week before the attraction opened. When The Walking Dead attraction launched just two weeks ago on July 4, the zombies drove a 35% surge in millennials compared to the week before.
"We can predict at least a 10% growth for the SoCal park this year," Glueck said.
As millennials are now the world's largest demographic, building relevant products to get them "off the couch and into theme parks" is key, according to Glueck.
"More broadly, Universal represents a case study for companies hoping to reach this critical demographic," said Glueck.
Foursquare, the company behind social-media check-in app Swarm, has had success with predictive insight in the past with its own unique set of data. The tech company used foot-traffic data, which includes explicit "check ins" and passive location trails to accurately predict footfall, and therefore sales, at McDonald's, Chipotle and Apple.
In the case of Universal Studios Hollywood, the company found the fewest crowds and cheapest pricing through the remainder of 2016 to be in early December. If that wasn't precise enough, it pinpointed the single best date to be December 8, 2016.
For summertime visitors, weekdays during the second half of August are predicted to be the best days to visit.
The service offered by Foursquare is evidence of the growing use of "alternative data" on Wall Street. This world comprises obscure data sets that can be turned into tradable information. The sets range from weather reports and web traffic to satellite imagery and social-media data.
Alternative data is increasingly being used by traditional long-short, quantitative, hedge, pension, and mutual funds to track industries ranging from construction and retail to tech and real estate.