How are we talking to arts audiences
There is much talks in arts circles right now about audiences. In as much as you can ever fully understand audiences (people do not behave as one homogenous mass) there has been a huge reliance on getting to grips with what people want from the arts. Those who go to the theatre, art galleries, festivals and the like will have been subjected to surveys that ask them things like whether they’ve been to the venue before, how they got there and what their post code is (a suprisingly important piece of data, especially when you are asked to focus on the socio economic breakdown of audiences). Those surveys are compiled and provide a data driven understanding of how your audience got to you and whether they liked you.
Crucially, however, most surveys fail to provide real insight into how they heard about you. Audiences, generally, can’t remember. They’ll say word of mouth, social media or don’t know even if you hand deliverd the double page G2 spread of the exhibition to their house, paid for a billboard at the end of their road and sent them an email to the private view. The idea with arts marketing is that it shouldn’t just be one thing that makes people attend. You have to puncture the everyday experience. Be in someone’s general line of sight. This does a lot to breakdown the boundaries of those who feel the arts is not for them but it also makes it feel like a natural thing to do, like buying a sandwich for lunch.
Post Covid, it’s a little harder to judge. Audiences are frit. Not all audiences, not all of the time. But there’s trepidation. It isn’t surprising. People have felt confident and concerned at different times. Everyone’s lived experience of Covid is at once the same and different. Everyone’s Covid legacy is different. Some people are carers when they were not before, others remain shielding while they are immune suppressed. Some lost loved ones and partners and, frankly, cannot face returning to the cultural event that will remind them of the life they had before. These things are all entirely understandable.
The numbers back it up. The Stage reports that theatre audiences are slower to return that cinema audiences. Theatre audiences are 71% of the pre-pandemic figure, with 38% of adults having attended a play, drama, musical, pantomime, ballet or opera in 2019/20. A quarter of adults surveyed between April to June 2022 said they had attended a live music event, which accounts for 69% of pre-pandemic audiences. Cinema audiences in April to June this year were at 80% of their 2019/20 figure, while exhibition audiences were at 86% of their pre-pandemic figure.
There are issues around demographics, programming, financial situations, travel situations (hello, tried getting a train recently?) working from home situations that mean there is not going to be one simple thing that answers why some audiences are not returning to the cultural activities they once did.
But I do worry there are two major aspects, specifically related to arts marketing, that we’re not reflecting on.
How are people finding out about things? If we’re talking press then there’s a huge reduction in the amount of coverage in local press. Of the arts activity I work on throughout the year in the city the size of Liverpool we’ve lost three major outlets since pre-pandemic, including arts programming, dedicated arts coverage (ie a role) and the much missed Bido Lito! That doesn’t include the regional titles that have gone. There are some very very good titles online that cover arts and cultural activity and are working as hard as they possibly can to cover more and more. But one title only covers one audience a lot of the time. The lack of local and regional coverage to hit, say arts curious audiences, music audiences, non-white audiences or LGBTQ+ audiences is greatly diminished. There’s very little print. Older audiences tend to pick up print. Audiences that discover art through other cultural activity (a gig, exhibition etc etc) tend to pick up print. Arts press is focused heavily on digital. That might cut into different segments but it’s one audience.
The national arts press has always been a difficult beast for regional arts. Many do their very best and are committed and passionate. But when you get 3000 emails in your inbox a day and only have a limited number of spots, time, words to write a day what are you going to do?
Podcasts, I’m not sure they’re geared up for every arts PR in the country pitching them yet. And too many PRs still blanket pitch the same thing to everyone. If it doesn’t work with a gnarled arts editor with twenty years under their belt who is used to your shit, it certainly isn’t going to work with someone who set up a podcast out of a hobby and isn’t sure what you’re talking about.
So if we’re struggling to get things under audiences noses, how far are we making sure they know where to find things? It’s online, mainly, isn’t it? Which needs to be dealt with with the utmost caution. Having 10k followers doesn’t mean 10k see your tweet. Impressions doesn’t convert to ticket sales. You see around a third drop off of people attending an event that has free tickets. I think it’s around the same with any Facebook event. Those 300 people that clicked attend aren’t as invested. Highly motivated Instagram fandoms do convert, but Instagram is a content hungry platform that will shadow ban (limit your reach) if you have too much copy or repeatedly use the same video or image. And what’s your budget for content creation, by the way?
Similarly do audiences know their digital experience is different from their parner’s, their neighbour’s, their children’s? Open Google Chrome with your partner and see what stories get pushed to you both. It’s a unique experience that reflects your online behaviour. You might have gone to the local orchestra or theatre before Covid but if you’re not searching for them, following them, reading stories about them, or interacting with them, an algorithm doesn’t know you used to go.
Is it a bit much to tell audiences they have to follow us everywhere, sign up to everything, so that they will know what we’re doing? Audiences like to be passive until they have to be active, ie buy a ticket or physically turn up. Is it asking to much to tell them that their digital behaviour has to be part of how much they see the work we’re doing? I haven’t cracked the messaging for that yet and I’ve been doing this donkeys.
There’s fewer marketers, and we know that rounds of austerity tend to hit marketing temas even more. So those who have had experience of digital audiences and returning physical audience are likely to diminish in number even further by 2024. If there’s no one doing the outreach, where does the understanding about audiences go? And don’t get me started about what we do when young people become an audience segment but have had zero arts education and at 18 have no experience of going to a gallery, or theatre. Plenty already don’t but arts education from primary school to secondary is a major part of teaching people what art is. A generation not knowing what art is will generally assume it is always for someone else. School visits are slowly returning to venues. It has never been every school, it has never been every child. It has always been along socio-economic lines. But you do feel those thresholds for entry are going to get higher and higher.
Audiences and arts organisations have changed post Covid and to understand each other again we need to know our relationship has changed. That takes time, dedication and commitement, something that we are all in short supply of right now.
