Conditioning
I’m back after a hiatus in which I was really forced to put my money where my mouth is. I wrote my master’s thesis on marketing lesser-known theatre, and this summer I had to put it to the test: Marketing a Wisconsin premiere of a punk rock musical about Lizzie Borden called LIZZIE for my theatre company, Music Theatre of Madison.
I’ve been marketing lesser-known works for my theatre for twelve years, often with a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” mentality. But as of this year, I had done the official research. Here was my opportunity to prove what I’d found; to exercise what I had discovered about how to reach people about lesser-known pieces, what types of marketing work, and how to tailor a message were all successful and worthwhile.
For LIZZIE, we identified our target audiences. We were covered by both of the major newspapers in town as well as the arts blog for a local magazine. We had a 5 minute feature on a major local TV program, and another short feature on a community station. We had numerous blog posts from our blog and others that reach the UW-Madison campus in wide numbers. We were on two radio stations doing interviews. We posted constantly on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram using #slay. We featured articles about Lizzie Borden on our website. We took gorgeous publicity photos and positioned them all over town via posters, postcards, and digital images with clear, concise information about what the show was (“a rock musical about murderess Lizzie Borden” with the tag line “Sex. Rage. Hard Rock. Bloody Murder.” ) and what it was reminiscent of. We made two rehearsal videos, including a “Did Lizzie do it?” feature. We had a trailer of clips. We were on two podcasts. We sent e-mail blasts. We took information to the UW-Madison dorms and local hotels. We had great word of mouth on social media. And we got two stellar reviews. You can see all of it here.
So, how’d it go????
Okay.
Yep, just okay. Certainly not the windfall of ticket sales I was especially hoping for after I had done so much work trying to understand how to sell lesser-known pieces.
But deep down, I also knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.
At the end of the day, we actually did pretty darn well. LIZZIE featured only four people onstage and six people in the band; as is often the case with small regional theatres, family and friends tend to account for many of the butts in the seats, which means that the more people that are involved, the more tickets you sell. The show took place at an incredibly busy time, in an increasingly over saturated theatre scene in our area (about 50 theatre companies for a city with a population of over 250,000), and in the face of many quizzical looks when it was described. Considering the actual attendance numbers, LIZZIE was in fact more successful than many of the lesser-known pieces we’ve done in the past. Shows that fared comparably in our history had much larger casts of 15–20 people plus larger orchestras. They also tended to have instantly recognizable subject matter (Bonnie & Clyde) or a cult following (La Cage Aux Folles). While many people do know Lizzie Borden, I was surprised at how few were familiar with her story, even with the recent onslaught of publicity and artistic works about her.
Who wants it?
I got to thinking about something that I have always known, but tend to forget: The issue here is of demand.
Conventional business wisdom indicates that if there is not a demand for something, then it might be best to move on, either to another product for which a demand exists or to a market where people are already buying what you’re selling.
Getting Madison, Wisconsin audiences to subscribe to the concept of lesser-known, unusual musical theatre pieces has often led to me feeling like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, only to have it roll back and flatten me. Each time, I slowly, achingly pick myself back up, wait for my broken bones to heal, and start again. It may sound melodramatic, but damn if it doesn’t crush me more often than not.
But Sisyphus had no choice. As marketers, we do. We can choose to fall back on the tried and true, which makes our jobs a little easier. We can choose to say that it’s too hard and there’s no demand in our market. We can choose to leave the boulder at the bottom of the hill and go have a nice cocktail somewhere.
But when we do that, we embrace complacency, which is the death of art. So we have to create a demand for unknown, new, provocative, unusual work. And it’s a team effort.
We as arts marketers are charged with building interest and attendance among an increasingly disinterested generation. Those kids whose arts education programs were demolished in the 1980s and whose community organizations lost arts funding with the cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s are now the ones holding our country’s economic reins. Getting them to the theatre (or concert hall, or museum) when many lack an innate understanding of the value of the arts is no easy task.
Those who DO assume the value of the arts are often of an older generation who are used to a certain status quo when attending performances and exhibits. Tell them you’re doing a punk rock musical about Lizzie Borden and they don’t think it’s for them.
These are true, but broad statements. Companies like Music Theatre of Madison exist based on the fact that there is a small but mighty group of people who do still make time for theatre and arts, do understand their value, and want to be challenged and provoked by their arts experiences. The trick now is to:
- Keep doing this type of work.
- Be smart, efficient, and thorough in marketing it, using up-to-date strategies that help audiences understand the experience.
I can’t do it alone. So I’m grateful when I see companies beginning to take more risks. We must condition audiences to understanding that arts experiences are NOT about seeing/hearing the same plays, musicals, concertos, operas, symphonies, etc. over and over; rather, they are about taking risks, learning new things, and looking at the world from new angles.
It’s not going to be easy. Arts organizations lack funding, infrastructure, and resources in increasing amounts, which often leads to doing safe material. But consider the alternative: A world where in order to be sustainable as an arts organization, you must recreate one of a handful of works in perpetuity or risk being obliterated. We are edging closer and closer to that world.
So it’s up to us as marketers to keep at it, keep encouraging audiences to take risks, and keep using our resources intelligently. And it’s up to audience members to take a chance. You may get burned. Or you may be pleasantly surprised. To quote a friend of mine who rarely seeks entertainment outside of the internet, “Go see LIZZIE. I don’t do plays…but MAN, I’m glad I didn’t miss this.”
THE BOTTOM LINE:
We can tell ourselves there’s no demand for this kind of work and move on. But then audiences, especially in smaller cities, will be relegated to seeing Our Town five hundred more times before they give up on investing their time and money in the arts. Jobs and opportunities will be lost, and a couple of generations from now, community-based arts experiences will be dust in the rear view mirror. Looking to the future, we have no choice but to keep pushing that damn rock up the hill. I believe that one day, unlike Sisyphus, we will get it to the top.
