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Test Driving Seats Without The Pressure Of Performance

by:

Joe Patti

I had purchased tickets from the Straz Center in Tampa, FL as a gift for family members earlier this year so I ended up on their mailing list.

This week I received an email inviting me to a sort of open house they are hosting (below) in a couple weeks where people can “test drive” seats they want to sit in at Broadway shows.

I would be interested to see how many people attend the event. I am sure there are quite a few people who are seriously invested in where they sit, but there are also likely to be quite a few people who will take advantage of the opportunity to wander through the hall without the pressure of needing to push through a crowd to find their seats before a show.

I offer this as an interesting marketing tactic others may want to emulate in some degree.

However, on a personal level I will say that I had a difficult time and faced so many barriers in purchasing tickets, including having the staff offer solutions and then contact me the next day to rescind that solution, offer an alternative and subsequently rescind that offer the following day. The recipient of the tickets also needed to navigate some hurdles.

I rarely complain aloud about an experience I had on my blog but the issues I faced were so bad that I am doing so. If other customers faced problems similar to those I did, I feel like this test drive offer isn’t going to create better relationships with the audience. Their time would be better spent on fundamentals like tightening up policies and procedures before employing an approach like this.

Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

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Will Cultural Prescriptions Come To NYC?

by:

Joe Patti

Earlier this week Hyperallergic had an article about the cultural plans of two candidates for NYC mayor, Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani. From the article, it appears Lander has a more detailed plan, though polls of Democratic primary voters are more favorable to Mamdani and former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Part of Lander’s plan includes ““…cultural prescription program” that would allow doctors to “prescribe” art to promote holistic health. I have written about similar programs in Canada and Europe before. These programs generally take the form of passes to organizations and places.

Lander also wants to create more funding for smaller organizations and marginalized communities and create a deputy mayor for the arts and culture

He also wants to improve lease terms for creative spaces to address displacement; increase the membership of the Cultural Institutional Group (CIG) receiving funding from the city, which currently includes primarily major museums and organizations; and boost public school art programs.

Source

Mamdani is similarly focused on providing better accessibility to spaces for artists and organizations:

Mamdani emphasized the importance of affordability for artists in the city and reiterated his plans to build more affordable housing. Mamdani also said he would prioritize preventing New Yorkers from being “priced out” of the arts and securing more funding for arts education in public schools. 

Source

I will confess that my initial inclination was to wonder if these were just idealized plans and if the candidates had any concept of how they would be paid for. But then I was reminded that Lander is the NYC Comptroller so he is actually intimately familiar with the city’s budget and how it is spent.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Government Relations, Leadership, State of the Arts

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These Are Not The Fans You Are Looking For

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin recently made a post about fans which can sort of hit close to home for arts organizations. His observations also serve to illustrate that the relationship dynamics experienced by arts and cultural organizations are not exclusive to that sector.

He states not every fan of an entity, product, or franchise necessarily contributes to their continued success. He says the cranky fans:

And the cranky fans, who know that they have found a place where they will be heard, and who use that opportunity to split hairs and find something to be disappointed with. They are cranky because they care, but they’re also cranky because it gives them power.

They’ll happily pirate the software, argue about a launch strategy, demand comp tickets to the event and reserve their conversations for other insiders, instead of spreading the word.

[…]

“I’m your best customer” is what they might say, when they’re not at all.

Source

One of the reasons I used the term franchise before is because Godin seemed to be pretty much describing the fans of so many superhero and sci-fi movie/tv series..

But when he mentioned these fans reserving conversations for insiders rather than spreading the word, I realized that there can be a lot of overlap with insiders at arts and cultural organizations.

The bigger realization I had was that while these groups may be speaking passionately and at great length about arts and cultural organizations they may not be spreading the word. And that is probably running counter to our best interests.

Godin says as much in the penultimate paragraph when he emphasizes the importance of choosing your fans. What he describes is cultivating a relationship with and for fans rather than taking a transactional approach:

…some creators and small businesses respond to early fan response by doing things to the audience (cashing out) as opposed to working to do things with and for them (leading). It puts some fans on the defensive, even if this particular creator has made the difficult decision to stick with the mission.

[…]

At the same time, I see small businesses and creators that I care about struggling, simply because their fans are not only taking them for granted, they’re becoming entitled and insular as well. When fans commit to a movement and help it grow, they benefit.

Source

Audience Relations, Leadership, Marketing/PR

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Understanding The Importance Of The Conductor

by:

Joe Patti

This weekend someone posted a video of Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic in a rehearsal of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony 13 years ago in the nextfuckinglevel sub-reddit with the title “The importance of a conductor.”

It brought me great joy to read some of the comments from people who could see the difference in the performance Dudamel was getting from the musicians. The top comment on the post was to that effect.

A guy with the username DanTheDrywall wrote:

Wow what the hell it totally makes sense now. I actually sometimes go to a classical concert but am a complete noob enjoyer. I have always wondered about the role of the conductor. That was a great example!!

Source

As part of that discussion thread WorryNew3661 wrote and delo357 responded:

Not knowing that is why most people, myself included until this post, either don’t see the point or openly mock the position. Really happy to have learned something new today

I’m not afraid to say im jumping on the learned something new today train

Source

Someone else posted a video from about 14 years ago of Simon Rattle conducting students from six Berlin school orchestras making a similar observation about the difference in the performance between 1:37 mark compared to the 19:25 mark.

While a lot of the conversation on social media sites can be pretty abrasive, pretty much every comment on this post was praise for the performance, cheering from Dudamel fans, and folks saying they have a much better understanding and appreciation of the process than they had before.

The posting also illustrated the value of letting people discuss their experience through their personal lens and amplifying that rather than depending on the organization’s marketing messaging. Obviously that approach has its hazards because it can come back to bite you.

Not to mention people may not operate on the schedule you want. Both the videos cited in this discussion are over a decade old. I didn’t see any provide a more recent example of a conductor getting a more compelling performances across hundreds of comments on the topic.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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