Thursday, February 04, 2010
How Marketing Directors Kill New Work
Arts Marketing: "In the past couple of weeks, two things have impacted my work as a marketer--I was extraordinarily fortunate to attend a convening of Black playwrights as part of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage, and I finally got around to reading Outrageous Fortune, the new report put out by TDF about new play development. Via both contexts, I heard numerous complaints about how institutional theaters market new work."
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3 comments:
I think the marketability of theater depending on productions is really interesting. I'm taking an entrepreneurship class in which we're studying a lot about finding your consumer market and projecting the potential revenue and I can't imagine doing the for theater (maybe for big broadway shows where you could expect a large tourist market, etc) but when it comes to marketing a production that is really original, new, innovative like 'Outrageous Fortune' that could possibly have an audience that is multigenerational, has completely different interests, all ages, all walks of life with the one thing being in common that they would buy a ticket for a production that pushes the "theater" envelope, it seems like a harder statistic to grasp. In a way, it could be seen as really beneficial, because if I were doing a SWOT of a very original and controversial new production, it would seem like a great opportunity, like 'who wouldn't want to see this!' but it seems very hard to translate into fiscal measures.
Like Grace, I am also taking a marketing class, called Consumer Behavior. In general people like familiarity, subconciously and conciously we are drawn to things we recognize. That is why revivals are so frequent and do so well on Broadway. Yes, the largest number of theater goers on Broadway are tourists, and tourists are more likely to go to see a show that they have heard about forever than that new show. It's sad but true. The recent large amount of albums and movies being turned into musicals is in part because of that familiarity.
I think it's really important that marketing directors find a way of promoting all works of theatre. I think that there definitely are a lot of shows that don't have an obvious marketability, but I think that if you look deeply enough into any play, there is a way to market it. Even if something seems to controversial to market, you can just market it by showing how controversial it is, I think that there are always a group of people who want to be a part of something controversial. I also think that there is always a way of finding the group that is going to relate to a play that many people might think would be totally impossible to relate to.
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