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Extremely Difficult Copy Tips for Arts Marketers
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m not much of a “helpful tips” kind of guy. I find most tips lists to be shallow and ineffective. If you follow arts pros on Twitter, for example, you’ll be...
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It’s Time to Stop Promoting the Arts
I’ve been thinking a lot about promotion and persuasion recently and I’m convinced that the reason the arts are losing audiences is that we don’t understand the difference. The culture of arts...
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How Nice Is Your Package?
Chloe Veltman has an interesting post over at Artsjournal.com this week called “Of Angry Waiters and Oblivious Arts Managers” about the relationships that some arts institutions maintain – or fail to...
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Should Arts Marketers Emulate Superbowl Ads?
Superbowl ads are a lot of fun. I didn’t have a chance to watch them in real time but I’ve been getting a kick out of the post-game analysis to see whose ads were dubbed the best and whose stood the...
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A Pop Quiz on Persuasion for Arts Pros
As I’ve mentioned often on this blog, strategic persuasion involves knowing what our audiences want and then using that information to describe how our products will make them happy. The more we know...
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Do New Audiences Think You’re Nuts?
The ubiquitous Twitterer Howard Sherman called me out the other day for claiming that arts organizations don’t do research. Many do conduct research, of course, so it’s terribly unfair of me to have...
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Do Funders Think Engagement Will Replace Marketing?
I filled out a municipal grant application not too long ago for a choir that sang mostly classical works from European sacred music traditions. The application kept asking how I planned to allocate...
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Super Sexy Symphony Ad
My friend Jason Nicholson at the Austin Symphony Orchestra sent me this ad the other day. I think it’s an incredibly good ad and a great example of what we’ve been talking about on this blog. My...
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More Good Arts Marketing From Texas
As promised in my last post, here’s another ad from Jason Nicholson at Austin Symphony. I don’t know if it’s a good ad yet because we don’t have numbers to go on. It was developed for the local daily...
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Us? Them? What’s the Right Balance?
My post from early last week, Super Sexy Symphony Ad, elicited a really interesting question from reader Kyle Clausen, who asked the following: “I wonder what your thoughts are on the right balance....
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Six Big Data Predictions for the Arts
The era of big data is upon us. If you’re an arts administrator who doesn’t know what that means, you might want to find out because big data has the potential to be one of the most productive – and...
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Tweeting Mahler, Graham and Stoppard?
I once did marketing for an old vaudeville theatre-turned performing arts center that had amazing acoustics. One day I was walking past the telemarketing room where I overheard a young salesperson...
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Why Did You Put Your Conductor on that Brochure?
I read about another financially troubled symphony orchestra yesterday, this one in America’s heartland – in a world-famous music capital, no less – where folks are finding it difficult to pay for...
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Monumental, Explosive, Heroic, Epic, Awe-inspiring Fail
Here are a some adjectives taken from just a few pages of a current season brochure published by an American orchestra that made news recently for its fiscal difficulties. Monumental, epic,...
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Engagement’s Great, But Can Development Departments Handle The Workload?
Like many arts professionals, I’m watching the funding community’s pro-engagement push with great interest. I agree that community engagement is where we’re heading and that funders should be...
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Engagement: The Ultimate Market Research
Bravo to Doug Borwick for his great post on marketing/research today. Doug and I don’t always see eye to eye on the the details of the engagement-marketing interface, but on this one we agree 100%. If...
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Can Amateur Marketing Rescue Professional Art Forms?
History may tell us that one of the greatest tragedies in the arts was that our generation gambled away the survival of professional art forms on the promise of amateur marketing. Classical concert...
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Are You Selling What New Audiences are Buying?
My Twitter friend @jamesdoeser mentioned a few weeks ago that research often tells us that the product we think we’re selling isn’t the one our customers are buying. And he offers up this example: “You...
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Filling the Empty Seats First
It’s 7:59 PM at a one-hundred-seat venue and a show is about to begin. Seventy-five seats have been sold since the on-sale date. The first tickets were sold to buyers who were eagerly waiting for the...
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Selling the Empty Seats First – Part 2
In my last post we talked about the last seat sold, the empty seat next to it, and how important it is to know what the person who didn’t show up and the one who did show up have in common. We in the...
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