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When HiPPOs Attack

June 5, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

Being the voracious consumer of arts administration theory and philosophy, I jumped on the slide deck Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman put together for their session at the Association of Arts Administration Educators conference.

The topic they covered was “Effective Data Driven Decision Making,” which may sound uninteresting until you realize that the main thrust of their session was providing guidance for dealing with a major barrier to progress in an organization, the HiPPOs.

In his post on Adaptistration reflecting on his conference experience, Drew expresses some surprise that conference attendees hadn’t heard of HiPPO decision making before. I suspect people are familiar with the practice, but just don’t know that particular term.

HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

I am pretty sure everyone has had the experience where they put a lot of effort into developing a plan/proposal, supporting it with research, surveys, etc., perhaps going through multiple layers of people to get their buy-in and approval only to have the final decision maker summarily nix it.

Usually the rejection is based on a personal opinion or gut feeling about what should be done, despite the fact that the people they pay to do research, analyze data, and be subject matter experts say otherwise.

This slide from Drew and Ceci’s presentation summarize it pretty well.

Accompanying this and other slides in the presentation are scads of notes Drew and Ceci graciously supply. Including the following tips about HiPPO behavior:

How to tell if you’re a HiPPO (or work for one). HiPPOs ask:

How much traffic is coming to our website?

What are our conversion rates?

What are the top exit pages on our website?

How many average monthly leads do we generate?

What is the average site visitor time on site?

What are our click-through rates on the homepage slider?

In short, if your data requests sound like grant applications, you have yet to establish a positive data culture.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking about effective data driven decision making in terms of having to collect even more information for reports no one is going to read. Think about this in terms of creating a work environment in which data analysis and expertise is honored across the whole organization (Drew & Ceci also address siloed decision making) and acted upon rather than disregarded on one person’s word.

Basically, the goal is to reduce how frequently you utter the phrase, “So what did I do all that work for…” at work

Go check out the slide presentation and accompanying notes.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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Could You Benefit From Sharing Your Ticket Revenue With Four Other Theaters?

June 4, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

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.

Arts Facilities, Audience Relations, Business Models, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Cross Cultural Appreciation Is A Start

May 30, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

Pacific Standard recently pointed to a study conducted in Portugal that indicated some positive outcomes using the music and culture of immigrant groups to help reduce prejudicial attitudes.

It reports schoolchildren around age 11 who learned about the music and culture of a faraway land expressed warmer feelings toward immigrants from that country than those who did not. What’s more, those positive emotions were still evident three months after this exposure to the foreign culture.

“Music can inspire people to travel to other emotional worlds,” writes a research team led by psychologist Felix Neto of the University of Porto. Their work suggests songs can serve as an emotional bridge between cultures, revealing feelings that are common to both.

Their study, published in the journal Psychology of Music, featured 229 Portuguese sixth graders, all living in greater Lisbon. Two-thirds came from blue-collar families.

The students in the experimental group participated in twenty 90 minute sessions across six months. At the end of that period, their prejudices were reduced compared to the control group and that attitude persisted when the experiment group was surveyed three months later.

Learning of this study lead me to recall something mentioned in a keynote address delivered by Jamie Bennett where he cited an anthropologist working with drumming circles at the Field Museum

As I wrote in that post,

He goes on to say that this was based on observations of immigrants and first generation Americans living in Chicago who participated in drumming circles. As each performed drumming particular to their own cultural background, the group bonded. Bennett says this observation is important because it potentially illustrates that arts and culture is a pathway for integrating society that doesn’t involve assimilation–“I don’t have to become more like you to become more closely bonded.”

Thinking about both of these situations started me wondering if this effect is underappreciated and ineffectively employed to constructive ends. While I am obviously against positioning music and other cultural expressions as prescriptions to cure racism, the impact of cross-cultural exposure is well recognized.

Of course, what has been somewhat controversial in the U.S., at least, is that this impact has often manifested as borrowing/”discovery”/appropriation by people outside of the cultural group who go on to popularize it. Or people have borrowed the appealing elements of cultural expression while avoiding the daily challenges faced by members of the source culture.

The challenge therefore is 1) Opening people to experiencing expressions of cultures that are not their own. 2) Ensuring that the peoples of other cultures are able to retain ownership and identification with their expressions as people come to appreciate it.

Even after that, there is still much work that needs to be done. A reduction in prejudicial attitudes doesn’t equal the elimination of prejudice. A person is more than just the external expressions of their culture. There can be a gap to bridge between appreciating someone for their skillful exhibition of their culture and appreciating them as a whole person.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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Classical Music As A Prescription To Cure Social Ills…And To Sell Perscriptions

May 29, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

A couple weeks back there was a piece by Theodore Gioia in the Los Angeles Review of Books that started out talking about the history of weaponizing classical music. You may be familiar with this practice where classical music is loudly played in public places like train stations, shopping malls, parking lots, street corners, etc with the goal of chasing away undesirable elements like teenagers and the homeless.

If ever there was a practice that reinforced the idea that classical music is for people other that yourself, it is people pointing it at you in the hopes you will go away.

As I read on, I realized that Gioia was tackling a frequent theme of my blog posts – placing value on the utility of art rather than valuing art for its own sake. After noting the use of classic music as a social disinfectant, he goes on to note how often classical music is separated from the context of an entire work and used to sell things.

Uproot “O Fortuna” from a Latin cantata, so it can be grafted onto a Domino’s Super Bowl spot. These transplants produce jarring mashups that trigger another insidious side effect: by always quoting works out of the context the public forgets that they have a context. The spectator forgets that “O Fortuna” could be glorious in its original context because it’s absurd hyping Domino’s Pizza.

[…]

A prime example of classical music’s conflicted position in our capitalist culture is Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. Dubbed the “Things Just Got Classy Song” by one columnist, the two-minute composition has been deployed for an astounding array of causes. IMDB lists 73 credits, with a résumé featuring primetime mainstays Smallville and ER, ad campaigns for Healthy Choice frozen broccoli and Pedigree dog food, and big-screen flicks ranging from Elysium and The Hangover Part II to a brief cameo in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

[…]

Where does this leave the prelude — and, by extension, classical music? From awakening Megasharks to selling Cadillacs, Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 has been drafted to support many causes. But one cause it seldom supports is itself. After being pressed into the service of so many outside agendas — advertising, film, and police work — the prelude loses its identity as an independent work of art, demanding to be taken on its own terms. It is difficult for the prelude to provide any modern audience with a genuinely “pure” listening experience.

There are no easy solutions to the quandaries this raises. Gioia doesn’t make any suggestions for a path forward and I don’t really have any ideas myself.

You want people to be exposed to art so it becomes familiar. However, if you start dictating which modes of expression are appropriate and which are not, you end up placing it on the pedestal that reinforces its elite status.

People often cite the use of classical music in Bugs Bunny cartoons like “What’s Opera, Doc” and “Rabbit of Seville” as constructive ways in which the general public was exposed to the music. I am sure there were enough people who were opposed to the concept that the cartoons would have never been had it been left to them.

Any suggestion of not presenting a piece out of the context of the whole can be a non-starter when you factor length of many compositions vs. the public’s attention span.

Of course, there are plenty of organizations who transmit art for its own sake through diverse modes of expression and media. But that brings in the long debated issue of relevance and effectively forging connections with the community.

The only admittedly vague route I can see toward appreciation of art in its own context is connecting with the instinct to want to know more. Since people have had so much exposure to some works via overt and background placement, people might not be driven by a new, novel encounter to seek more information.

For those that are curious enough to do research, a campaign to have ad agencies or advertisers credit the original composition online might help a little.

For example, the ad below uses “O Fortuna” to sell beer and there are credits for all the personnel who helped create the ad included in the YouTube notes. No mention that they were spoofing Carl Orff though.

Apparently the Carlton Draught has a tradition of using classical music in their ads. This one does credit “Nessun Dorma” as the source of their parody.