Earlier this week I had the honor of being a part of TedxBroadway. The video from the event is still forthcoming but for now I wanted to share the text of the talk.
It's called the The Power of a Gift
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For the past seven years I’ve had the opportunity to show artists and arts organizations of all types how marketing can be used to connect their work to an audience. Because it has been such a big part of my life, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a lot of artists and people who work in the field for the first time.
When the inevitable “what do you do” question comes up and I tell them, I get a lot of responses, including two very interesting responses.
The first response is that people’s eyes go dead and you can feel the energy leaving their body. In that moment I’ve gone from the incredibly cute, charming and loveable man I was a second ago to a snake oil salesman. I have become a Don Draper type that is skilled in using all sorts of tricks and tactics to get people to buy things they don’t need. Because, to them, that’s what marketing is.
The second response comes from people who are way too happy to meet a guy like me. They see marketing as a magic potion and me as a mad scientist. They want to know how the alchemy of marketing can turn artistic lead into gold. They want to talk about their social media traffic. They want to talk about butts in seats. Because to them, that’s what marketing is about.
I understand both of these responses. Marketing is a powerful force and we have a love/hate relationship with it. But one of the side effects of that power is that has caused many of us in the field to shrink our vision. We look out into the world and we see two types of people. We see people who can pay for our stuff and people we really want to pay for our stuff.
We know the world is much bigger than that. So let’s think about the people outside of those two little circles and how we bring impact, meaning and joy into their lives.
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Here’s a story. We are on a road trip and we encounter some kids on a basketball court. The kids are all emulating the moves of their favorite players. One kid is Lebron and he’s working on his jump shot. Another kid is trying to pull off MJ’s free throw line dunk even though he’s like this tall and another is going real old school and working on Kareem’s skyhook.
These kids clearly love the game.
Now imagine if one of the people with us was a marketer. Imagine that he worked for the NBA. His eyes would light up. The potential for commerce has arrived. He would work actively to try and sell these kids, or at least their parents, a ticket to a game.
But I never told where this game was. It’s in China. And for a thousand valid reasons those kids will never, ever see a NBA game – the art – happen live.
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You guys are smart people so you’re already seeing the parallel. There are people right outside this building who will never enter our performing venues, our museums, our concert halls, our art galleries.
And it isn’t because these people are uncultured, or even unaware, it’s because of very simple, very human reasons. They can’t afford a ticket. They can’t get a babysitter. Or they just feel more comfortable engaging with other forms of entertainment.
Traditional marketing and engagement tells us that these people, these millions and millions of people, are invisible. But what if they were not?
What if we created a third circle? People who see our stuff, people who we want to see our stuff AND people who may never be your space but still love and appreciate what you do?
The central question we are here to consider is what is the best the arts, Broadway and beyond, can be?
The best it can be is designed to impact those who never sit in a seat just as much as those that do.
The thing we offer doesn’t scale very easily. If a theatre holds 1,000 seats then that’s the most that can see it, maybe a little more if we don’t sweat the fire code.
But meaning scales. Emotion scales. Values scale. Those are things that are passed from one person to another all the time.
Now you guys are very smart people so you may wonder “How can we impact those who never come to see the work?”
Not entirely sure about the answer but I have a hunch.
The answer, or at least one of the answers, is marketing.
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Around 1983, Lewis Hyde published a book called The Gift. In the book he talks about generosity and how gift giving was the foundation of many societies, with the notable exception of our modern society. He saw a world where people are constantly guarding themselves against the commercial and the transactional and that one of ways to cut through that and reach a person’s heart was by giving a gift.
I believe that marketing, fully realized, is a gift. It is something that can offer a little delight, a little joy and a feeling that you are connected to something meaningful. It’s the beauty of a well-designed souvenir or the warmth you feel from a staff member. It’s an ad that makes you laugh, or a video that turns out to be a little unexpected which teaching you something in the process.
I’m not in the snake oil business, or the butts in seats business, I’m in the gift giving business. So are you.
And when you are in the gift giving business you stop thinking about selling and you start thinking about using your marketing tools to teach and inform.
You stop sweating your return on investment because we are offering art, not sugar water. Instead you see your marketing as a vehicle for delivering joy.
And as we give those gifts to people they pass them to others, including those – maybe especially those – who will never have the chance to see it live. And this is vital because people may not always love your art, but everyone loves a gift.
I believe if we do this enough, with some of the passion and aggression that we put toward selling this third circle starts to become a thing.
The people who come, the people we want to come and those who may never come but still love and appreciate what we do.
You may think this is all impractical until that third circle activates. It may all seem silly until the next time NEA funding is up for grabs and this circle rises up and says that the arts matter to us too.
It may seem like a waste of time until a young lady becomes the best viral marketer you have ever seen, telling the world about your show even though she may never get a chance to see it.
We have all sorts of different people in this room but what we all share is a desire to be relevant. We want to matter, we want our work to matter and we want to touch as many people as we can. Seeing marketing as a gift allows us to break the barriers of our venues and to engage so many more people.
This third circle is there and it is also available to us. When we have it we will develop a new type of power. When we have it, that’s when we will be the best we can be.
