I recently saw a documentary called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It was a movie about advertising, branding and product placement. It follows Morgan Spurlock, the director, as he attempts to get companies to fund his movie through advertising, branding and product placement. These companies were willing to invest up to a million dollars to be featured in his film. In the end the entire film was funded by these corporate investors.
This film really made me think a lot about marketing and the difference between marketing film and theatre. The major difference, as far as I see it, is that films have money to put in to marketing, lots of it, and theatre generally doesn’t .
This brings me to the great debate. ITSAZOO normally has a limited marketing budget on every production and we always spend a great deal of time debating how this limited budget is best spent. We start by exhausting every free marketing possibility – Facebook (which I find is becoming less effective every day), Twitter, our lovely blog, online listings etc. We hire a publicist and pray that we get good coverage in the form of previews, radio interviews, reviews etc. Especially reviews. Our poor PR rep always gets this email a million times “Hey, have you heard from the Georgia Straight yet? Are they coming? We really want them to see it and review it.” If you produce theatre in Vancouver you’d be lying if you told me you haven’t ever sent that email. We all have.
Beyond that we have a lot of hard decisions to make when it comes to how to spend our money. Here are some of the questions we ponder: is it worth spending lots of money on tons of posters when they get covered up so quickly anyway? Would just a few in choice locations be better? Are print ads in Newspapers worth the money? Do people look at bus shelter ads? What’s the greatest bang for our buck? Is Playboard worth the cash? Who reads it? And on and on. We come to a different conclusion with every show and it’s a constant balancing act.
I’m curious what you think. What do you see that makes you want to see a play? What do you think is the best bang for your buck? Join in the great debate.
Truth bombs!
Hey-o,
Here’s your best bet. Remember that you are satisfying a need/want. Figure out what that is, and it will show you which benefits of your productions to comunicate to your potential audience. If you want to comunicate groundbreaking-ness(if that’s even a word), than the medium you choose for publicity must be groundbreaking.
Also, keep in mind that because you are limited in both budget and current audience share you can’t try to get everyone. Average capacit 200, for 10 shows is 2000. say 10% of the people you reach with your really good ad campagin attend, that means you need to reach 20000 people withing your segment. Focus on a segment that actually may attend. I would go for 18-35, university educated, live in the downtown core, politically center-left, who watch live performances (not only theater) at least weekly. Where are you going to find 20000 of these people?
Think about that segment, what common characteristics do they share. If they all buy the same beer, or listen to the same radio station, or shop at the same grocery store then that’s probably a good spot to put your efforts.
Consider also how much time you have to deliver your message. If you want a person to get a location, date, price, name of the show, name or your company, and name of the venue out our your ad, then ourdoor ads are not effective because people only look at them for 1-4 seconds. If you want to say ITSAZOO is really cool or something simple like that, then you can use a high impact visually stimulating message via posters to get that across. For longer messages you need a captive audience, (ie radio or tv or live promoters on the bus) or you need to give the people you are trying to reach the onus of choosing to recieve the message (which means direct one-on-one advertising like a mail out).
Thanks just my take,
Peace
Thanks so much for all of your helpful comments! Definitely some good food for thought. – Chelsea
I think it is being inspired yourself about what you have to say and knowing who you want to say it to.
And of course Word of mouth is really important.
Talk about it every where.