Kaya Stanley-Money shares a really intriguing story on Arts Professional about how five London theatres presented the same performance and then pooled the ticket revenue.
…the five London venues to present Yvette for two or three nights at each venue over a two and half week period, sharing the box office income equally after the artist guarantee had been paid. This meant that venues at the start of the tour would benefit as much as those at the end, removing all competition and encouraging a genuine collaboration.
The performances were marketed as a London run, which enabled us to establish a comprehensive press strategy and offered the opportunity to build audiences for Urielle’s work in five different London boroughs. This was particularly important to reach a much younger audience who are typically less likely to travel far and have deeper geographical roots than your average London theatregoer.
Above all, this model offered Urielle the invaluable opportunity to build a relationship with all five venues, capitalising on their support for emerging artists.
I was especially drawn by the mention that this arrangement provided an opportunity to reach a younger audience in five London boroughs. This might not normally be possible because the venues typically insist a performance not happen within a certain radius of their venue. Since each venue stood to benefit if a partner was more successful than they were it made some sense to waive that clause.
I was interested to read that some of the venues were already exploring share box office arrangements. I know that theatres partnering on a production will often agree to share production costs, but this was the first I became aware of theatres engaging in box office sharing.
As part of the shared marketing effort, each venue contributed equally to the advertising spend and each provided links to the performances of all five venues on their respective websites.
Apparently the partnering venues were optimistic about the revenue potential because they agreed to a 60/40 artist-venue split rather than the typical 50/50 split.
In the end, this may have benefited the artist most. She established relationships with five venues. She was able to have a denser saturation of exposure across London than she would have had radius exclusion clauses been in place. Potentially, she may have received more money than she would have with longer runs in fewer venues.
As Stanley-Money notes, this revenue sharing model can be beneficial when presenting new works or emerging artists because it mitigates the risk a single venue might undertake by pooling promotional expense as well as the revenue.
I am hoping that Stanley-Money follows up with a report on how successful they assessed the plan was.
For example, if a performance is in one or two places across 15 days, it may take awhile for the audience to build up as word of mouth builds and then the audiences may trail off. I would be curious to discover if that may have happened as the show appeared at five different venues. If the audience peaked at the second, third, and fourth venue, it isn’t a big problem revenue wise since all the venues are sharing.
However, if people don’t generally travel out of their borough to see a performance, there may be some exposure concerns at the venues with lower attendance. On the other hand, if they find that people who missed a local performance traveled out of their neighborhoods based on good word of mouth, it makes the cooperative partnership model look even better.
I would also be interested to learn just how easy it was to get all the venues to agree on promotional and operational arrangements. I have had experiences with groups with long histories partnering on many arrangements but could never manage to agree on promotional efforts. The fact this production was more of a second space event rather than a main stage event may have minimized the resistance.