Play All Day!

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I have been talking to my assistant about sprucing up the theatre website over the summer in preparation for next year. In my quest to make the website a welcoming point of contact, I would like to add some fun fact type links to each of the events. The point would be to add some interesting fact about the band, their instruments, place the came from, how the musical form developed, etc. Perhaps the tidbits will help people make decisions about attending shows with names and terms they don’t recognize.

While I said I didn’t want to have look like a website for kids, I did comment that many of the presentation techniques and design elements those websites used were similar to what I was thinking about.

I didn’t visit those websites myself of course having lots of important and serious work to do. I did have to walk behind my assistant many times today though and just happened to see some interesting things over her shoulder.

Many of the websites she visited had some fun online activites for kids like the Chicago Children’s Museum (love the build a bug!)and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. (some really excellent educational pieces)

Others had activities families could do together at home like the Lincoln Children Museum.

WXPN radio’s Kid’s Corner is sort of fun and inviting too

Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis didn’t have Flash driven activities, but they do have a scavenger hunt contest that encourages kids to explore the entire webpage and offers a free ticket to a show as a reward with the chance to win in a drawing for additional prizes.

I was really surprised that other children’s theatres like those of Seattle, Birmingham and Charlotte didn’t have webpages that were more exciting to kids. The same with the Boston Children’s Museum. While their kids’ activities are educational, they are a little serious and not really geared to get ’em coming back for more. Even more surprising was the Please Touch Museum which had a bright graphic, but was otherwise kinda sterile.

Sure, parents are the ones who have to do the driving and make the decision to go to these places. But kids start surfing the web around 8-10 years old and there is a good chance they might type children and their town name in to Google. Having an exciting webpage that makes them nag their parents can help get people in the door.

My favorite web page hands down then is —Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Right from the beginning it has a fun chicken you can make dance around. The sublinks “For Kids” “For Parents” “For Educators” and my favorite title- “For Museum Geeks” have been specifically designed to be appealing for those groups.

The kid’s link has lots of funny images and loud goofy noises and links that lead you to all sorts of fun stuff. The parent’s link is a bit more sedate, but clearly communicates that this is a place that will be fun for your kids and of course has many more links than the kid’s section to answer all those questions adults have.

The educator’s link is actually a chalk rendering of the museum with gold stars for links. Maybe not as exciting as the previous sections, but certainly has an appropriate motif. The museum geek section is the most sedate, but has all sorts of trivia along with facts and figures. Still, pretty dang interesting and informative.

Fun with Music

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I am still rather cranky about my technology problems mentioned in yesterday’s entry. So I leave you with some light, entertaining thoughts and images.

The first is this article and picture of notes streaming both figuratively and literally like water.

Second, a quote from Yo-Yo Ma in Time magazine. When asked what section of the orchestra was most likely to contain the most egomaniacs, he chose to diplomatically opine on the most fun sections. According to the cellist it is the percussion, lower brass and bass players. I seem to recall that Drew McManus over at Adaptistration played the tuba. I wonder if he would concur.

Actually, to continue on this fun with music theme–check out the San Francisco Symphony Kids page. Even if you are only a kid at heart, it makes learning about music a lot of fun.

Technological Advances?

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There is a fairly famous economic law out there–some guy has it named after him even, that says that technological advances will make the production of materials more efficient and less expensive. I have been searching for over an hour to find the exact wording and name of the law even though it only has a passing relationship to this entry and I CAN’T FIND IT!! So anyone who know, please tell me.
(Took me two years, but I found the answer-Baumol’s Cost Disease)

Anyhow, this mysterious law has often been invoked when it comes to explaining why doing live performance is so expensive. While other sectors become more efficient, live performances are produced much as they were after the Restoration of the Charles II. We pay the increasing cost of using outdated, inefficient methods. Set construction hasn’t started to employ any new revolutionary materials, costumes are still made by hand, performers still need about the same amount of rehearsal time before the product is finished.

Sure nail guns, power saws and sewing machines have made things faster. However, except for recent advances in moving lights which allow you to use fewer instruments to create the same effect (though they cost more than the old ones) live performance is lagging behind in the efficiency department. (Actual the digitization of sound has really been a boon. Not only can it be stored easy, but laptop computers can replace 20 foot long sound boards)

I mention all this to give a respectful nod to the old inefficient methods. The past week has not been good technologically for me. Our computerized ticketing system stopped printing tickets and no one has been able to revived it. Loading the software on a new computer and borrowing a printer from another theatre hasn’t solved the problem either. It doesn’t help that the ticketing software company has gone out of business. So for show this week and the one coming up in a month, we will have to have printed hard tickets.

The brakes went out on the cargo van we intended for luggage transport duty while I was on the way to the airport. Fortunately no one was hurt (and fortunately they didn’t go out while my assistant was following my new car!) Granted this is more a matter of technology getting old than being new but it added to my frustration.

For the last few weeks we have been having trouble with our dimmer racks (they control theatre lights). The lighting system is about 2 years old so it is as state of the art as any equipment with a computer in it can be. Being computerized, it is very flexible and able to give feedback about operations.

Including about things that aren’t happening.

These “smart” dimmers have decided they are overheating and turn themselves off. However, the air in the dimmer room is 72 F and the insides have been vacuumed so often to remove any offending dust, the equipment vendor has commended us on how clean the racks are.

The reason they go out is a mystery so we often wire around that quadrant for shows so they don’t go out in the middle of a performance. The whole episode has made the technical director nostalgic for the old Strand dimmers which would chug along ignoring anything short of a direct hit by artillery.

The worst part is, attempts to tell the computers in the dimmers they aren’t “smart” and can’t decide if they are overheating hasn’t been successful. They still think they can and will shut down. (Even worse, they are so smart, the error code they give with the overheating isn’t in any of the troubleshooting manuals.)

I am sure many people have similar stories about their encounters with technology where the “improvement” gives you more worries than the trouble it is supposed to be alleviating. For example, in newer cars, if you don’t close your gas cap tightly enough, the “check engine” light comes on–and won’t go out for 48 hours after you tighten it. Makes you wonder why there isn’t a “tighten your gas cap” light and a reset switch for it.

Voodoo Advertising

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Have you ever, especially recently, been to a conference/retreat/seminar on marketing or advertising and thought you just hadn’t learned any new techniques or strategies in a long time?

You ain’t alone. The New Yorker had a story this week about the troubles Madison Avenue (though few ad agencies are located there any more) are having persuading people to show interest in the products they are touting. Successful advertising seems to be more and more a function of having no idea why something works but doing exactly the same thing that worked the last time and being happily surprised if it works again.

Why is no big secret. It used to be that you would go to an agency and they would put together a campaign that would be televised on the three networks and you would reach 80% of the US population in a week. Today not are there hundreds of television channels, but a great portion of the public are ignore them for the internet and other pursuits. (As I pointed out in an earlier entry, today’s top ranked shows draw the same percentage of the total audience watching television as the #40 ranked shows in the 1970s.

People quoted in the New Yorker article talk about the need to differentiate yourself in a sea of sameness. However the article also acknowledges that people are becoming savvy (or gaining the tools) to allow them to avoid being exposed to said flurry of promotional efforts. Says one, “It’s easier for Toyota to figure out a new way of producing cars than it is for McCann-Erickson to figure out a new way of persuasion.”

Of course, ad agencies still are fairly successful at creating a need people don’t know they have.

“It encourages people to buy all sorts of products, from shampoo to automobiles, for reasons that do not always make sense. (Why do city-dwellers drive Hummers?) Keith Reinhard, who … wrote the “You deserve a break today” campaign for McDonald’s in 1971, a classic of manipulation which Advertising Age named the No. 1 jingle of the twentieth century. “The consumer was not looking for a better hamburger,” Reinhard explains. “They were looking for a break.”

This may be where the arts are lagging in marketing themselves. They are being too straightforward. They are saying they are all about entertainment, intellectual stimulation, economic benefits to the community. Bah! I can get my entertainment online (erm, let me rephrase that, I can order DVDs and play games online), I don’t need to be intellectual! Dumb is in!

Perhaps an ad campaign needs to borrow from McDonalds and show people escaping the hectic pressure of city life and finding solace and sanctuary in a museum.

Another point of the article underscores what I have said in numerous entries–you gotta track and assess the data about your consumers.

Jim Stengel, the global-marketing officer for Proctor & Gamble, … said, “I believe today’s marketing model is broken. We’re applying antiquated thinking and work systems to a new world of possibilities.” Agencies, he said, needed to produce advertising that consumers ‘want to stop and watch,’ but also to collect better information about consumer behavior. (My bolds)

While there is much about the article that is interesting, it is also heavily about the owner of a particular ad agency. If you are looking for information on trends, a quick scan past the biographical stuff will help you cut through the length of the article. (Though if you ever wondered how the AFLAC duck commercials came to be, it is an interesting and entertaining read.)

One note to undermine my impression yesterday that the popularity of shows like 24 is a good sign that some people have good attention spans-

Network dramas and situation comedies have more sex, more action, more urban appeal. Susan Lyne, the former president of ABC Entertainment, says, “Anything that is complex narrative storytelling – one-hour dramas, narrative miniseries, character-driven movies for television – advertisers don’t believe there is an audience under fifty for these kinds of shows.”

Drat!