Saturday, March 30, 2013
A Connecticut Theater Club? Say, That's The Ticket
Courant.com: Are Connecticut theaters missing out on a new audience? New engagement? New revenue?
The thought occurred to me when a colleague asked me a simple question: How can she buy a gift certificate for someone who can then choose whatever show they want at any major theater in the state? With so many terrific theaters around the state -- and not sure of the giftee’s tastes -- she didn’t want to be tied down to selecting just one theater, one show, one time.
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3 comments:
So this is a pretty cool idea. I'm a big fan. I personally would've typed up a nice little card that would say "Pick a show, I'll pay", but this idea of a network of theaters working together to reach out to audiences in a new, innovative way sounds very interesting and much more efficient. I believe that collective initiatives like this one are the future of theater and the arts. Our world is constantly moving towards globalization via internet communication methods, and embracing it is the best way to attract customers and grow in influence and prominence.
Firstly, I think this shows laziness on the part of the gift-giver. If you don't know someone well enough to know what type of show they would like, why are you buying them theater tickets? if you're buying someone a gift, shouldn't you already know what they like well enough to be able to buy them a gift they will like? Work with what you know. Ok, rant over. Secondly, and on the point of the article, I think this sounds like an interesting idea in theory. I don't think it'll turn out to be nearly as useful in practice. Setting up a system like this would take months, if not years to set up, and would require numerous people to be dedicated to just that project. Who would pay for someone to do that type of project? A theater or group of theaters? The state of Connecticut? The project would involve a lot more than saying, "Hey, Connecticut theaters, we should create a group so we can do gift cards together!" The group would have to figure out a way for the project to work financially. Who is going to front the money to create a database? Who is going to get the money when a gift card is purchased? What happens to the money if a gift card is purchased and never used? How far in advance would the gift certificate need to be used to get tickets? Who would be the holder of all of the information that would be needed for this database? Would all of the theaters be willing to share their audience demographics and PR/Marketing information with their competitors? It's a cool idea, but there's probably way too many unanswerable questions, and way too much leg work upfront to get a project like this from paper to reality.
This actually sounds like a clever idea, at least in theory. I'm just not sure if, in practice it would work, given the concerns Jess discusses above. Also, has there been anything like this attempted on a smaller scale? Just, say, among a certain size of theatre in New York City or something? I feel like there are a great many logistic problems that would have to be discussed, and I really don't see much of an incentive for the theatres themselves to participate in something like this. While it would make things a bit nicer for a certain gift giving branch of the causal theatregoer, I'm not sure there is much of a real reason for theatres to participate in something like this.
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