grab bag blog

Marketing the arts can be a confounding experience. Some events seem to sell themselves, some you can’t give away tickets for it. When a show sells well, it can seem like the show sold itself. Other times you put in long hours of sweat and toil, but audiences jsut aren’t interested. This is why marketers are always experimenting.

Granted, experimenting with your marketing plan can be hard. In science, when you want to test something out, you control for all of the other variables so you can see the change that happens when you manipulate just one single thing. You generally can’t do that with arts marketing because there are so many variables you can’t control, like competing events, weather, or the fact that you are always producing different shows with different casts and messages. What works once might not work again, or a reliable marketing tactic might not work this particular time. But this is no excuse to not try.

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For a performing arts organization, programming a season is tough work.

It usually starts at the beginning of the year, sometimes late in the previous year. Stakeholders in the company gather to petition for this show or that show. There is a lot of conversation about what fits the company mission, what is artistically challenging, what audiences want. But one of the biggest considerations is always: what will bring in the most cash.

And, inevitably, this will lead to some form of compromise where the company programs a number of splashy shows that draw the biggest audiences so that they can take a loss on their more “artistic” programming, those shows not as many people come to see. It’s an artistic compromise.

I get it. I’ve been involved in enough season planning to understand it. But it’s ultimately not a winning strategy in the long-term.

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If I hand you a picture of a delicious-looking steak dinner and tell you that if you buy it now, it’s 40% off, how likely are you to jump on that deal?

What if I put the meal right in front of you, so you can see it and smell it and hear the fresh-from the grill sizzle? I take you into the kitchen and show you how it was prepared and let you meet the chef. I walk you through the garden where the food was grown. Then I bring you back to the meal and tell you the price. Are you going to buy it now?

The first tactic is traditional, old, stodgy marketing. It’s a commercial of a car on a highway with an attractive lease offer. The second tactic is content marketing.

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We can all agree: overly controlling clients are the worst. How many bosses or clients have we collectively had who tried to design something for us by giving us overly prescriptive briefs or feedback? Who told us where to place elements, how large to make them, what colors and fonts to use? Or as a marketer (who is a designer of communication), how many times has a boss dictated a message or a visual element to you and told you to just implement it as-is? Sooner or later, we all run into these bosses.

Design is a deceptive profession. It takes a lot of training and practice and insight to know how to do it well. It involves knowing how not just to be aesthetically pleasing, but how to communicate information in the most effective way possible. We aren’t assembly line workers. We aren’t mindless pixel-pushers. We are designers and marketers. The skills for which we are hired call for good judgment. Real design is a hard skill learned from training and experience.

But before we just blame our employers for being stupid and controlling, let’s look at our roll in this problem. We do a lot of our work alone, at our computers, in our heads, in silence. All of the research and experimentation and iteration work happens below the surface, and the only thing others see are the final drafts or finished pieces. We don’t communicate how we do the work to others.

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This isn’t much of a secret, but I love movies. I love the experience of movies: the big screen, being immersed in a storytelling experience.

So when I moved into a new condo this summer, it seemed a great opportunity to upgrade my TV to something big and immersive. I’d had the same 32″ TV for the past ten years (and it is still going strong, props to Samsung), so I was ready for a big change. I did my homework. I researched new TVs to understand UHD, 4K displays, screen sizes and viewing distances, refresh rates — all of it. Everyone online said nobody ever regrets going too big, only too small. So I grabbed a deal on a 55″ screen and had it promptly delivered and set up.

I returned it several days later.

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