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We Shall Engage Them On The Park Benches!

November 11, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

Something I thought I had posted but I can’t seem to find is my belief that getting other people to talk about whatever experience they have had in the arts is much more effective than you telling them what is so great about the arts. Perhaps I only spoke about it at a lecture or with a group of people, but my basic idea was that if you are somewhere like a wedding and you get on the topic of what you do and people mention that they have attended a performance or a museum/gallery show, you should inquire about the experience.

It doesn’t matter how long ago it was or if they didn’t particularly like it. Try asking them what they did like about the experience. What was valuable to them? What wasn’t? Don’t get too much into explaining why they should or shouldn’t have enjoyed something. This is also a conversation, not an interrogation or survey. If people talk about not knowing what to wear or when to clap, that is an opportunity to offer advice. Telling people why Mozart was the greatest may not be productive if people take it as a statement on their ignorance.

My goal is to connect people back to their positive memories about an experience and help them feel they have some ability to correctly evaluate their experience. Essentially, I want to help them convince themselves the arts hold something of value for them.

I often have these sorts of conversations around theatres with audiences, but that is essentially preaching to the choir. I don’t have as many opportunities to do so outside of a performing arts venue. Or at least perhaps I have been slow to recognize and exploit those opportunities.

My assistant theatre manager (ATM) managed to do so yesterday and I was happy to take a lesson from his example. As I mentioned, we attended a career day at a local high school yesterday. As we were leaving, a gentleman on a bench greeted us and asked what we had been up to. The ATM mentioned who we were and what we were speaking to students about. I don’t recall exactly how, but he managed to get the guy on the bench, a security guard at the school, talking about the poetry he wrote. He hadn’t written any in a long time and lost his notebooks years ago, but he did remember lines he wrote when he was in high school and started reciting them for us. He also recited some haiku he wrote.

Assuming we were professors, he “gave” us his poetry to recite to our classes feeling that college students could identify with the sentiments expressed by verses he wrote when he was their age. We agreed he was probably right about that. We encouraged him to try his hand at poetry again and maybe read it at an open mic night somewhere.

I knew within a minute of the conversation’s start that this was how we should be engaging people all the time. Certainly we don’t want to harangue people to come clean with the experiences they hold close to their heart. But if they are willing to start, we should keep them talking about it for a bit.

Marketing/PR

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Who Knew They Were Talking To Theatre Guys Today?

November 11, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

The assistant theatre manager and I team spoke about working in the arts at a high school career day yesterday. Ah, I forgot the joys of teenage apathy in the classroom! Actually, I think the lack of engagement we received was due to the design of the routing assignments the students were given. We were told that the students choose which speakers they wanted to hear. The reality was that they chose which career track in which they had an interest. We were part of the arts and communications track.

We didn’t discover this until about 5 minutes into the first session when we finished our intros and asked people about their arts involvement/interest and the response was barely tepid. It turned out that none of them knew they were going to a room where theatre people would be speaking. They had simply been assigned to the room. The same was true in the second session, only we asked earlier. Few in the room were involved in performance or visual art creation even as a hobby. Those that were didn’t seem to have a lot of confidence in their abilities and no one in the room was exclaiming that someone was being too humble and was actually awesome.

We had come prepared on selling the arts as a career, but this was going to be a tougher sell. At the same time, it was a really great opportunity to introduce the concept to people who had never really considered it. I am not sure how successful we were, but there were a couple people who stuck around after each session to ask us about our performances (we brought brochures, of course) and talk a little bit about their arts experiences.

Another benefit to speaking to this sort of audience was that they seemed to take our warnings about how tough it was to make a living in the arts seriously. There didn’t seem to be anyone who felt we were talking to the others people in the room who weren’t as talented as they. We didn’t just speak about having careers in stage, screen and art galleries but also noted the importance of creativity in the coming economy.

Next week were are speaking at the career day of another school. Knowing what we do now, I am going to contact them again and determine what it is exactly the students are selecting when they are choosing to attend our presentation. We had brought a simple powerpoint presentation comprised mostly of images of shows we had presented to give a sense of what opportunities were available. If the students we interact with next week are going to have the same level of awareness about the arts as those today did, we will probably alter the content a little to better suit our audience.

General Musings

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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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