The team
Andrea Beach
As Founder and CEO of BeachFront Technologies, Andrea Beach set out to use her decades of success in both human behavior and consumer engagement technology solutions for the world’s biggest brands, to shape the vision for BeachFront as an experiential technology firm that activates consumers for increased participation & revenues to venues and brand marketers. Her vision, that created the OPTIMUS Venue Network and the Marketing & Promotions Network that layers on top of it, has been acclaimed as a breath of fresh air in an industry that sorely needed disruption, and is now setting a new standard for the rest of the market.
“Andrea Beach has extensive experience in rethinking and transforming the guest experience for venues, reshaping consumer behavior and delivering significant, measurable, new sources of profitability for companies.” Corp Trends Global 2019
Brian Murphy
COO & Partner - Brian serves as the Chief Operating Officer of BeachFront Technologies, and is responsible for executing the strategy & establishing the operations of the company. He was one of the original pioneers that created the concept of experiential programming & branded entertainment through his work at Time Warner & Fearless Entertainment.
His groundbreaking work included creating the first ever cross platform programming on MTV Networks that helped brand and relaunch MSN & Expedia. Brian, just prior to joining BFT, worked with MGM Resorts to consult, develop, build and manage MGM’s outdoor venues in Las Vegas. His ability to take new ideas and turn them into reality made him the perfect partner for BeachFront, as he compliments the technology and brand activation side of Andrea’s background.
Bernie Gilhuly
CFO & Partner - Bernie Gilhuly has 25 years of financial and operational management expertise. As founder and managing partner of LL Business Management, he oversees an array of accounting, business management and financial consulting services for high net worth and celebrity clients. Prior to that, Bernie was a Senior Vice President of One World Networks, a $30 million direct marketing distribution company based in Los Angeles. There he was involved in managing and directing all aspects of the company’s business affairs including negotiating many of the key strategic relationships and contracts such us product licensing agreements, celebrity endorsement agreements, promotion and sponsorship agreements, celebrity website agreements, website licensing agreements, merger and acquisition transactions, capital funding programs, etc.
Greg Ballard
Greg Ballard serves as the Chief Strategy Officer for BeachFront Technologies, focusing on strategic initiatives and corporate development. Ballard’s last operating role was as the senior vice president of Social, Mobile and Emerging Platforms at Warner Bros.
Over his distinguished career in the gaming, entertainment and multimedia industries, Ballard has served as President and CEO at Glu Mobile (NASDAQ: GLUU), a publicly traded company that is a leader in the mobile games business, and CEO at 3Dfx Interactive where, over a three-year period, he grew the company from $4 million to an annualized rate of more than $400 million.
He previously served as CEO for Warner Custom Music, a division of Time Warner, Inc. Ballard has served on the Board of Directors for DTS, Inc., and on the public boards of THQ, Pinnacle Systems and IGN. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of Turtle Beach (NASDAQ:HEAR)
He holds a B.A. from the University of Redlands and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
The vision
Coming at it from different angles…
For over 15 years, Andrea developed and implemented award-winning consumer activations for global brands and live events that included The Super Bowl, NBA All Star Weekend, Rock in Rio and The Essence Festival, to name a few. She noticed that regardless of the venue brands were activating at, technology solutions were brought in from outside vendors, making consumer activations disjointed and expensive, while circumventing the ability of the venue to monetize their assets sensibly. At the same time, when her clients had to activate programs at mid-tier market venues, most did not have the technology infrastructure in place to handle the programs, so ad-hoc solutions had to be generated on a venue by venue basis.
The Big Idea…
Andrea took that foundational idea and spent the next two years designing an in-line system that would benefit venues and event producers, but soon came to realize that mid-tier markets would benefit most by the implementation of what is now known as The OPTIMUS Venue Network.
More importantly, she took her decades of knowledge in human behavior and networking and applied it to the venue model she was building. She correctly observed that mid-tier markets are where the most rapid growth is occurring across the US, and where consumers can afford to frequent their favorite venues more often than their big city counterparts. This is where Americans “Live, Work and Play” – and as such, Andrea intuitively knew that this network would be immensely appealing to the major brand marketers she had worked with throughout most of her career. It was at this point that she reached back out to Brian and asked him to join her in building out The OPTIMUS Venue Network. Together they set out to build, along with best-in-class hardware and software providers, the most future-forward ecosystem of consumer engagement technology available, including…
Smart Wi-Fi
A stable, scalable, lightning fast and top-security enabled Wi-Fi solution supports the entire foundation of the venue and user experience. The world has evolved: No longer is Wi-Fi an amenity, but rather now it is considered a utility, and expected by both guests and brand sponsors. OPTIMUS can work with existing infrastructure already in place, or we can install the entire end-to-end Wi-Fi solution for venues – to ultimately deliver the passive revenues of Wi-Fi sponsorship.
Interactive Signage
All types of digital signage, including jumbo-trons, directory signs, kiosks, individual tablet screens, LED walls / dioramas, ribbon boards, and more are all parsed and fed content specific to the fans, guests and consumers near it. Some screens may be touch-enabled, while others are trigged by motion or proximity (beacons/sensors) – but all of them are designed to better serve dynamic content in the most compelling way to individuals and large crowds.
Mobile Apps
A venue-branded mobile application will be customized to provide not only the basic features one would expect of a venue app, but also several optional enhanced features/modules; all aimed at providing new revenue streams from brands and community partners. Guests are incentivized and encouraged to download your app as they participate in Wi-Fi, contests and games, ordering food or merchandise, wayfinding, parking and more. The advanced profile, location-tracking, and behavioral capabilities of this sophisticated ‘smart app’, and one-to-one marketing & communication channel it brings, makes it a clear choice for venues.
Location Tech
Our ‘secret sauce’ rests in the ability to track and communicate with individual users, across several modalities (mobile device, Wi-Fi, signage, etc.) over an array of different venues/locations – even while they are at home or at a competitive venue. This ability, coupled with our personal content engine, ensures that users are delighted with the personalized messages and content they receive – thus enhancing guest attendance, dwell times and per-person spend. Not to mention the new incremental sponsor revenues derived from this advanced capability.
Andrea and Brian met while working together on a joint venture to bring technology solutions to sports & entertainment venues, to maximize the operational efficiency of the venues and the customer experience for the various events. At that time, as a venue management consultant and executive producer, Brian was continually frustrated by most venues’ lack of technology infrastructure. There never seemed to be a unified approach to meld the technology needs of production, POS, brand activations and guest experience. That JV dissolved. However, developing a way to streamline the most fundamental technology components for a consumer destination, and provide a better way for venues to monetize these assets, became the motivating force behind the creation of BeachFront Technologies.
The technology alone was cost prohibitive to all but the largest, well-funded venues, and had no ROI to accompany the costs. But as consumers and brands were steadily increasing demand for these technologies (Free Public Wi-Fi especially), it became apparent that a new financial model was needed for the system to succeed. Bernie Gilhuly as CFO. His work developing a NO Up-Front Cost / NO Cap-Ex solution provided a rock-solid financial model for all of our venues, that makes it an easy decision for them to say yes. This was critical because Andrea realized that a single venue alone would not be able to deliver enough benefit to major brands, but by creating a network of ‘Smart Venues’, all leveraging this next generation technology, the aggregate effect would yield enough impressions to attract even the most demanding marketers.
This completed a virtuous business circle, as these marketers would deliver the revenue required that to allow venues to recoup their investment costs, and convert what historically would be a line-item expense into a revenue generator for members of the OPTIMUS Venue Network!
News and insights
BeachFront Technologies announcements, insights, updates, and more…
