What's Wrong with SeaWorld?

SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment reported this week that its attendance continues to slide . The good news for the theme park chain is that its earnings are up, thanks in part to a combination of guests spending more in the parks and the company cutting budgets where it can. But falling attendance isn't the biggest problem around SeaWorld at the moment. The big problem is that too few people seem to understandattendance continues to fall.

Over the past few years, SeaWorld has elicited more lazy reporting than just any other subject in the theme park industry. According to the dominant media narrative, SeaWorld's attendance is falling as the result of bad publicity from the movie Blackfish. It's an easy story to tell — the so-called animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] bombards news organizations with anti-SeaWorld press releases on a regular basis, ascribing every drop in SeaWorld's attendance to Blackfish and PETA's ongoing campaign to publicize the film. The narrative's even a little bit attractive to SeaWorld itself, as it allows the company to attribute its attendance decline to an outside influence, a public relations campaign that it believes is easily refuted.

For an overworked journalist, this is easy stuff. You've got two sources feeding a narrative; it fits a classic conflict/resolution model; write it up, and you're done.

There's an old saying that "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." So perhaps it is understandable that people in the news business see everything within the context of PR and publicity. But while SeaWorld's recent attendance decline coincides with PETA's anti-SeaWorld campaign, people ought to remember another old saying — one from my old field of statistics — "correlation does not imply causation."

The most damning fact that counters the dominant media narrative is that SeaWorld's attendance decline began in 2010 — three years before Blackfish. SeaWorld's attendance started dropping not because of a publicity campaign, but because of changes in its parks, the themed entertainment industry, and society in general that have left SeaWorld unable to make as convincing a case for visitors' time and money as other vacation destinations have been able to make.

What happened in 2010? Two things within the industry: a tragic accident that claimed the life of a SeaWorld trainer, in February, and the opening of "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" at Universal Orlando, in June.

Vacations are supposed to be fun — not reminders of horrible things, such as a death. But it is interesting to note that another major theme park resort suffered an employee fatality the previous year. A monorail driver at Walt Disney World was killed when another monorail train backed into and crushed the pilot's compartment of his train. Yet Disney World did not suffer any significant attendance loss due to news reports about Austin Wuennenberg's death. So what made the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau have such lasting significance for SeaWorld's attendance?

During the investigation into Dawn's death, SeaWorld pulled all of its trainers from the water during orca shows. Federal court rulings later made that change permanent. As a result, SeaWorld parks are no longer able to offer its visitors what used to be the parks' most iconic moment — a trainer launching 30 feet into the air off the nose of a breaching killer whale. It was a thrilling spectacle to witness — something no other entertainment destination could match.

As SeaWorld was limiting the spectacle it provided its guests, one of its closest competitors was becoming a "must see" destination for Orlando visitors. The opening of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter launched the Universal Orlando Resort to record attendance gains, partly at the expense of SeaWorld Orlando. While SeaWorld and Universal Orlando's theme parks once battled to become the "extra" day for visitors coming to see Walt Disney World, Harry Potter made Universal the clear number-two choice in the market for theme park fans. In fact, thanks to Potter, many Florida visitors started making Universal their primary destination for an Orlando vacation. Without its most iconic moment to offer, SeaWorld had little hope to compete.

SeaWorld Orlando's attendance still hasn't recovered to what it was before 2010.

Across the rest of the chain, societal changes began to take their toll on the SeaWorld parks, too. The Great Recession of 2008 crippled the travel and entertainment industries, along with the rest of the economy. But as the economy began to recover in 2010, fans' tastes for entertainment continued to evolve. Sold in 2009 after its owner Anheuser Busch was sold to InBev, SeaWorld and its private-capital owners did not change the company's focus from non-fiction-based entertainment that was becoming more and more unpopular with fans.

When George Millay, Milton Shedd, Ken Norris, and David DeMott opened SeaWorld in San Diego in 1964, America was a very different place than today. The modernism of the 1950s still influenced much of popular culture, reflecting an optimism in science and a curiosity about exploring the natural world. That optimism was the result of the general prosperity of the time, when a post-war boom and strong labor movement built a growing middle class in America. SeaWorld tapped into that by bringing exotic marine animals within splashing distance of visitors, creating thrilling spectacles that inspired visitors with the sight of trainers interacting with these animals.

Today, people feel very different about our collective future. What economic growth we have is slow to trickle down to a shrinking middle class. Economic mobility is more myth than reality. And global climate change has made the natural world a politically divisive, uncomfortable, and, frankly, pretty depressing topic. In entertainment, dystopian fantasies rule the box office and bestseller lists, as a dispirited public looks to superheroes, wizards, and rebels to show us the way from our too-often depressing existence toward a more promising future.

In moments of great stress, we often turn to fiction to allow us to access thoughts and feelings too intense to address directly, via non-fiction. Watching Katniss Everdeen rebel against The Capitol allows people facing unemployment or crappy pay, crushing debt, failing relationships, or just growing up in communities they feel to be oppressive or conflict-obsessed, to address those frustrations while they also feel the exhilaration of hope that might be missing from their own lives. The Hunger Games and other dystopian fantasies resonate with people who feel concern about their futures. They acknowledge our pain, and give us a cause to cheer.

It's become a cliche that on a theme park attraction, "something goes terribly wrong." As Universal Creative's Thierry Coup explained, "it has to. It gives us a chance to be heroes, and to try to save the day."

When we spend our hard-earned money on entertainment, we want to spend that time in the presence of those heroes. We want, if just for a moment, to be those heroes.

The two most successful companies in the theme park business — Disney and Universal — understand what's happening. In the 2010s, these companies have focused on creating attractions that feature fictional intellectual property [IP] — characters and franchises where heroism in the face of despair is on display. We are getting Harry Potter, Star Wars, Avatar, Frozen, and Transformers — experiences that allow us the opportunity to spend time with characters who have overcome desperate situations.

Meanwhile, at SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, we are getting the same sort of experience that the parks offered a generation ago — experiences grounded in non-fiction, in animal shows and real-world destinations, often delivered with the earnest lectures about the world around us.

But where is our hero? Where is the person who is going to fix this mess of a world we've gotten ourselves into?

Saying that "we are the hero" is a cop-out... we need to see a ally, a teacher, a role model, someone who will show us the way that we can meet our challenges — someone who will help us to become the hero we long to be. Everything SeaWorld does in education and animal care and research might be helpful to society — but it doesn't thrill and inspire people to spend their time and money to come visit them on vacation.

Until SeaWorld can give us something that does that again, many of us will continue to spend our money to visit the other parks that do, instead. This has nothing to do with a PETA PR campaign. It has everything to do with our collective need for inspiration in a dispiriting world.

Here's the thing about PETA. PETA is to animal welfare what the Church of Scientology is to religion. It's an organization that makes itself appear far more prominent than it actually is, thanks to Hollywood spokespersons, incessant PR campaigns... and aggressive legal threats. (Let's face it: the vast majority of Americans are not vegans, are okay with the use of animals as food and clothing, and are completely supportive of keeping animals as pets. Unlike PETA.) Like the Susan G. Komen Foundation was criticized for its breast cancer campaigns, PETA faces criticism that is works as much on raising attention and money for the organization as making any progress on the cause with which it is associated in the public's minds.

PETA needs targets for its fund-raising appeals. It needs something to rail against to get into newspapers and on TV broadcasts. So consider this way of looking at it: SeaWorld is not suffering because of an anti-SeaWorld PR campaign from PETA. PETA is mounting an anti-SeaWorld PR campaign because SeaWorld is suffering. Just look at the timeline: PETA's PR campaign followed the start of SeaWorld's problems.

On Monday, new SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby says that the company will announce a new attraction for SeaWorld San Diego. "We can do a very effective attendance-driving, return-generating attraction, and I'm actually very excited about the alternatives we're already coming up with," Manby said in a conference call with investment analysts.

If SeaWorld is to deliver on Manby's promise, it will need to show potential visitors a vision of of the company that focuses less on the good that SeaWorld does for animals and more on the good that SeaWorld does for its visitors.

Tell us a story. Thrill and inspire us with heroes, fighting to improve an imperfect world. Take us to a fantastic "sea world" where global warming and pollution never happened, or to a futuristic one where it happened but we fixed it. Tell us tales of the animal world, where our imaginations can dream of the heroes in the sea. Don't be afraid to take us where "something goes terribly wrong" — just show us the way to be the hero that we all long to have in our lives.

Better publicity won't save SeaWorld. Only a better, and more emotionally fulfilling, entertainment experience can do that.

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