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Bye, Bye Patio

November 9, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

For me, one thing that would make Mad Men better is if their efforts to market products took a bigger role and the behind the scenes drama took a smaller one. I would think Don Draper was as big a cad if he slept with 1/3 less women. It is around the time of this show that marketing started to transition toward the needs of the consumer. Prior to this the focus was either on: Production- If I make a lot of a high demand product, people will buy it; Product- If I make a high quality product, people will buy it; Selling- If I take an existing product and use different techniques to sell it, I can sell high volumes of it.

It isn’t until around 70s that conducting market research to ascertain customer tastes and designing the product with that in mind came into practice. This is a great simplification of what the different approaches were. What I have wanted to see is the company evolving toward new approaches as competition for business pressed them. The show is still pretty enjoyable in any case.

There was one episode this season, episode 4, “The Arrangements,” whose subplots resonated with me. The main one revolved around the commercial for Pepsi diet soda, Patio. The Pepsi representative wants an ad that inserts their product in a reproduction of Ann-Margaret in the opening scene of Bye-Bye Birdie (seen below). The guys at Sterling Cooper recreate the opening flawlessly, so much so I imagine there would be intellectual property lawsuits had it run without the movie studio’s permission. In the end, though everyone agrees the commercial is exactly what was requested, the Pepsi representatives say there is something wrong with it. They just can’t put their finger on it. After the clients leave, one of the ad men points out what is wrong is that the woman in the commercial isn’t Ann Margaret.

For me it was illustrative of the problem you face when trying to jump on a popular trend. If the original does well, you can only fail in the comparison by trying to copy it exactly. The best you can do is put your own original spin in something and even that may fail. Most attempts at recreation and revival are made after the impact of the original has started to fade from people’s memories.

The whole idea of riding the coattails of popularity is still new to the characters in the show they are puzzled when their attempt fails. Even though it is disappointing to them, it sort of excites me to know there was a time when advertising wasn’t as slick and calculated as it is these days. In truth, there are still areas where advertisers are stumbling today. This Friday on the On The Media radio program, there was a piece responding to a New York Times article about how DVRs are actually helping to improve the television ratings used to determine advertising rates because people AREN’T skipping commercials as everyone, including the people selling the machines, assumed they would. Shows are actually getting better ratings three days after airing than they did on their air date thanks to DVRs.

Ann Margaret

Mad Men Ad

The other part of the episode that connected with me was where a young guy comes in wanting to promote the sport of jai alai. He has a lot of money to spend and some grand ideas about how to promote it. Personally, I didn’t think the efforts would be successful, but figured maybe they were appropriate for the time period. Turns out, the ad guys figured they had a fool from whom they would soon part his money.

The thing that struck me was that as he left the meeting, the potential client said “If jai alai fails, it will be your fault” to which one of the ad guys said something to the effect of “everyone believes that.” It brought me back to a couple places I worked where the attitude was when the show did well, it was a good show but when the show did poorly, it was because the marketing department did a poor job. The truth is, there are some things the public isn’t interested in seeing. The world record audience for jai alai was set in 1975 with 15,500 people. As of today, the Philadelphia 76ers have the worst average home attendance in basket ball with about 12,000 people. The Minnesota Timberwolves which falls at 15th of 30 teams in attendance averages 17,600 people. (Source: ESPN website)

And by way of comparison, in their 1975-76 season, the 76ers averaged 12,400 in home attendance. In 1964, the year Mad Men is currently, 76ers average attendance was 4,300 (NY Knicks were about 9,200). I am sure there was a lot of promotion and work done to make basketball more popular since 1964. The presence of players like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell probably helped excite the imagination of crowds in ways jai alai players didn’t. It is intangibles like the structure of a product and the personalities associated with it that create an interest in it that a lot of money can’t buy.

Well, okay, there is a lot of money being spent today to bring personalities and products together. But back then and in the trenches of arts organizations today, lots of money thrown into marketing can’t assure success. (Which assumes there is a lot of money to throw into marketing.) Actually, I can go full circle with this. The fictional ad the Sterling Cooper boys put together for Patio soda didn’t work because they didn’t bring the correct personality together with the product. The real Patio did capitalize on the personality of brand identity and became Diet Pepsi in 1964. The other Patio flavors were later phased out “because soda consumers were primarily interested in brand-name products.”

Arts in an Age of Technology, Marketing/PR

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Bootstrap Conducting

November 4, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

Continuing on with the theme of young artists forging places for themselves, I was recently reading about a young conductor, Alondra de la Parra and couldn’t help being impressed. The interview I read was in the Arts Presenters’ magazine, Inside Arts. I don’t know what the general consensus of her abilities is in the orchestra world, but that hardly prevents her bootstrapping efforts from being inspirational to other young artists and administrators.

Apparently the transitional moment in her career came when the Mexican consulate asked her to put on a concert and she ended up as a one person “manager, press agent, producer, presenter, fund raiser and conductor” for the event. She describes the experience as a nightmare and had decided to go back to school. However, so many people saw the event as a success and told her she had to continue on. That is how she ended up founding the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas which describes its mission as “a laboratory for artistic expression, embracing our responsibility to support promising young performers, composers, instrumentalists, conductors and all kind of diverse artists from Latin America and beyond.”

Watch the video here to learn more about their philosophy and the way they are involving school children in composing music for the orchestra.

One of the benefits of having had gone through that initial trial by fire is that Alondra feels “it makes me relate to almost every person that goes into a symphony orchestra, from the PR director, to the stagehands to the librarian.” Reading Adaptistration all these years, this is apparently a rare quality among musical directors. She says as much in detail in a 2008 NYT article. (2nd page, 3rd column)

At the end of the Inside Arts piece, she is asked what she would like presenters to know about orchestras. She makes the oft mentioned points about demystifying the music so that people don’t feel they need to know every detail about the piece and the composer–and of course the appropriate time to clap–to enjoy the performance. At the end she comments, (my emphasis) “When you go to a rock concert, nobody is going to ask you do you know who the band is and do you really know their first album in ’82. Nobody cares as long as you yell and jump and enjoy it. The next time, you’ll know the song. You’ll sing the song.”

I would like to think that there is a chance for orchestras if more leaders like her start emerging. There is a lot of excitement surrounding Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic. El Sistema has come to the US and will perhaps manage to transform the lives of young people here as it has in Venezula. (Is it my imagination, or does Latin America seem poised to save classical music?)

As I read about the Honolulu Symphony facing bankruptcy, and the problems other orchestras are facing it seems that the excitement generating can come none to soon.

Audience Relations, Leadership

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“Creativity Is Time-Consuming”

November 2, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

Last week I received an email from a Patricia Martin who was apparently trying to spread the word about a survey of American Life and Culture she had recently released. I get a lot of these emails but don’t often feel the subject is relevant to my blog. This time it was. What I liked about the survey results is that they are written to convince people to involve culture in their business whether it be in regard to employees, part of their customer relations or both. The format is easy and quick to read and every page has a “take away” for that section in the margins.

Since I had been reading about the feeling that the youngest generation of arts professionals didn’t have a good work ethic in the Americans for the Arts leadership salon, I was encouraged to read the following and hoped the methodology of their survey made it true.

“We found some 60-year-old bloggers held the same opinions as 24-year-old poets: they are willing to work hard in their creative endeavors. Content creators say they spend a lot of their time producing and spreading their creative expressions. They don’t spend time gaming online.This may be because creating original content is demanding—as is mastering and maintaining a social network online. Creativity is time-consuming. The time demands of a creative life, no matter what age a person is, require allegiance to one’s art.”

Other sections talk about this group valuing education and living within one’s means. I understand that there are always going to be at least some people who match these descriptions. I am hoping the percentage of those embracing these philosophies is high. I look around and it doesn’t seem it is so. We hear all about how young people are using social media technologies to spread the word about their passions, but I haven’t seen it yet. Or rather, I haven’t seen it done effectively.

The cast of the show going up in two weeks has Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube pages set up for the show. I have been keeping an eye on them and except for the Youtube page, none of them are very well developed. This isn’t a case of their approach not appealing to me. This is a matter of there not being even the most basic content on the pages to make people interested in the performances. The twitter page more or less says “going to rehearsal tonight” over and over again. They are handing out flyers with all the social media page addresses on them but there is nothing there to see. My hope is they are actually handing out the flyers we printed up with information about the show along with them.

It is said that very few people create online content and the majority consume it. I suspect that just like everything else in life, there is only a small percentage of those producing who have the capacity to create something worthwhile. The idealism of the millions exercising their creative powers doesn’t hold up to reality because a lot of them are playing video games rather than investing the time to hone their skills.

Perhaps I haven’t come across those dedicated to becoming effective because they are off working on getting better.

Arts in an Age of Technology, State of the Arts

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Talkin’ Bout Emerging Leaders

October 29, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

Okay special double blog post today. Since my other entry was dealing with education and arts people following their passion, I felt I needed to call attention to the Emerging Leader conversation that has been transpiring in a special blogging salon on Americans for the Arts website. It started October 16 and just finished today.

There are a lot of great entries on the blog, including ones that question the definition of Emerging Leader in terms of age and experience. American’s for the Arts defines Emerging Leader as “either new to the field, with up to five years of experience, or are 35 years of age or younger.”

Ian Moss’ post on Generation Y and Entitlement garnered a long series of comments and is worth reading if have any young people working for you or ever plan to. Other participants add to the conversation like Ruby Classen’s entries on why jobbing hopping by a younger generation seeking a broader skillset can be viewed as lack of loyalty by long time arts leaders.

What was also interesting was reading that a number of veteran arts leaders were contacting people involved with organizing Emerging Leaders at Americans for the Arts and 20UNDER40 who saw these efforts as a storm the Bastille and kill the old folks.

Just as great to read the rebuttals from the veteran leaders too both as entries and comments. It shows that people from many stages in their careers are aware of these issues and engaged in these conversations.

It was also a little disconcerting to learn that because of the internal politics of some organizations, people who wanted to participate felt they had to remain silent.

People share their stories about lack of confidence they have had about their career choices and direction. This includes difficulties in finding jobs in the first place, of course. As many entries as I have linked to, it ain’t near all of them. If you have any interest in arts administration at all, bookmark the site and resolve to spend a couple minutes everyday reading a few entries until you have gotten to them all.

Leadership, State of the Arts

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