HowlRound: As marketers of the arts, we are frequently confronted with questions about who our audiences are and how to reach them. Who will enjoy our production? Who is most likely to be willing to pay for a ticket and invest their time and energy? Who is most likely to be a repeat attender to our venue? How do we reach new audiences, or individuals that don’t typically go to theatre?
3 comments:
As I am doing a research paper on how race and wealth influence the effectiveness of theatre as a form of protest, this article was really interesting for me. I like the idea about how the art affects a person's life being one of the most important factors in what shows they go to see and how they find out about them. The idea of making art to sell tickets had always bothered me. I understand the importance of making a living, but I have never liked making something just to please people so that they would buy a ticket. However, I think work like this can be applied in a different way. One that allows us to reach out to the people we are trying to get our message to, not just the people who will buy tickets. I think broadening the reach of theatre both in audiences and cast/ crew members is always a noble pursuit and should be sought after always in our work.
The juxtaposition is interesting because I feel like having a diverse audience is important but how diverse can every audience truly be. Big glitzy musicals even about sports might not appeal to every person. A theatre is a conduit for information and even if the genre and style changes it doesn’t mean that more people or different people will like it. There might be some new audience but I don’t know if changing the content or style would actually do any change. I too am surprised about how the results came out that demographics didn’t seem to affect results. I wonder how many of these specific theatre marketing style surveys are created by theatre advertisers because I’m curious to see if the demographic changes depending on the scope of theatre. Do broadway audiences prefer social media marketing to print marketing or is it the same throughout? This article overall showed how much more alike we all are rather than how separate we are from each other.
The research the author did was what I attempted to do in my senior year in undergrad. And my discovery was that doing survey to the audience is extremely difficult, and that, like the author said, there is no clear trend in the demographics. Most theaters hang the survey questionnaires on the subscriber seats because subscribers are the people who come back and may have more eagerness to contribute to the theater. But when you don't have the support of the theater, it becomes really difficult to do the demographics survey. I used boards in the theater and handed out stickers so people can indicate which demographic they belong to, and what motivated them to come. Being an educational theater, the biggest demographic was friends and family of the actors and production team. Also the biggest motivator was to support family or friends and for class assignment. Surveys in the audience are tricky because it is hard to motivate them, and sometimes giving out surveys may give wrong impression that the theater is under some pressure. But the audience demographics surveys are extremely valuable to the theater in every direction. I would love to see more surveys and survey results about it if possible.
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