The Mission Paradox Blog

Making the Case For Your Art

It was my second year of law school.  I was preparing to do oral arguments for a mock trial.  A mix of laziness and arrogance caused me think that the case was open and shut.  I believed that the side I was arguing was so clearly right that the ruling would go in my favor.

Of course, the day of the arguments I got crushed.  When it was over my professor gave me some sage advice:

"Remember, there is always another side."

For every reason why you should get something, there is another set of reasons why you shouldn't.  If you ignore those reasons, or invalidate those reasons, trouble is coming.

That experience informs my arts marketing approach.  When I'm tackling a project I begin by coming up with all the reasons why someone wouldn't come to see the work.  I become downright cynical.  I tear the project to shreads.

Then I start making the case.

I look at all the reasons why someone wouldn't come see the art and try to mount a counter argument. Then I try to incorporate that argument into my marketing.  Here's an example.

My day job is producing a theatre piece entitled Proof.  It's a good, solid, piece of theatre.  That's part of the problem.  I knew that a core argument against coming to see it was "I've seen this thing before, why see it again?"

That's a fair statement.

We constructed a counter argument.  The counter was that the location of where we were doing the piece (the University of Chicago/Hyde Park Neighborhood) would help to create a different experience worth seeing.  The argument made sense.  The author went to school here.  The neighborhood matches the setting of the play.

Then, as we created marketing for the piece we created videos and articles talking about the author and the academics in the play.

Instead of ignoring the argument, we went straight at it.  Was it a perfect answer to the argument?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the key is that we didn't just try to wish it away.

We live in busy, cluttered, complicated world.  No one is going to pick your work just because you tried hard to create it.  You have to be willing to advocate for your art.

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Reminder:  This is one of the topics we will be covering on April 20th in Chicago at my arts marketing workshop.  Be there.

 

 

Know Thyself

You can't market what you don't understand.

You may have misread that sentence.  You may think I was saying that you can't market what they (the public) doesn't understand.  That's true.

But confusion starts at the source.  If the public doesn't understand what you are offering it's because YOU don't understand it.

Good marketing requires a bit of objectivity.  You need to be able to see what you have clearly and being very close and/or emotional about your work can cloud your vision.  

To deal with this it helps to have marketing advisors.  These people don't need to be marketing experts. In fact most of them shouldn't be experts.  It should be a group of people whom you respect and trust. Ideally these will also be people who don't have high stakes in the end outcome.  

Your advisors are the people you should show your marketing.  

Let them look at the emails, let them see your visuals and then demand honest feedback to these sorts of questions:

Does this make sense?

What message are you getting from these visuals?

The answers will help you discover what you are good at and what you need to avoid.  The answers will also help you clarify what you are offering to the public and that will take you a long way.

Ownership

Marketing is about leveraging assets.  The trick is that in order for something to be an asset, you have to own it.

For example, you own the emails and direct mail address that were given to you. Obviously you don't own the trust and permission that comes with those things, but the actual addresses are yours and you can use them when and how you want.

By contrast, you DO NOT own your Facebook friends.  They belong to Facebook.  You don't own your Twitter followers.  They belong to Twitter.  

These social media sites essentially rent you access to these people.  The rent doesn't come in the form of money, it comes in the form of them having access to the people as well.

This is the paradox of social media.  It's powerful.  It has a very low entry point.  It makes perfect sense for anyone to make it the centerpiece of their arts marketing strategy.  But it isn't yours.  Thus having 100 people who will actually open and read your email means MUCH more then having 1,000 people who passively digest your tweets.

The value of having access to email, text and direct mail is going to skyrocket because these are assets.  Social media tools are rentals.  There is a huge difference.

Start placing an emphasis on email, text and direct mail addresses.  Work hard on gaining the permission and trust necessary to get the most out of them.  You'll see the benefits quickly.

Reminder:  We are about a month away from April 20, which means we are about a month away from my live arts marketing workshop, The Gift Sessions.  If you're interested sign up now.

 

The good old days . . .

 . . . never existed.

The days when people had fewer options for their time and attention were not better days for the arts. Easier days, maybe, but not better.

The days when you could market your work through a steady stream of paid advertising certainly made life simple, but not better.

In our world, a sense of longing for the past can be dangerous.  It implies both that the past was better and that the future is unbearable.

Neither of these things are true.

There is great opportunity ahead of us in the arts.

But if we keep clinging to what was we will never discover it.

 

 

The Exposure Checklist

I'm very fascinated by the recent discussion of working for exposure/free that has kicked up.  This is a particularly vital conversation for the arts because so many artistic fields rely on a consistent stream of free or low paid labor.

Let's start here:

In any field the real enemy is being invisible.  So if the choice comes down between some level of exposure versus your work not being seen at all . . . then you should lean toward exposure.

But here's the key, all exposure isn't equal.  And the line between exposure and exploitation is thin.  So here are some things to consider:

1.  What sort of exposure do you need?  Every decision to work (paid or unpaid) should be a strategic choice.  So how does this particular opportunity fit into that strategy?  If you wanted to just be "exposed" then you could walk outside naked, obviously you are looking for something more.  You probably want a specific type of exposure in front of a specific sort of audience.

So what is it?  What do you need to make this free or low paid gig worthwhile?

Let's use an example.  Consider a band being asked to perform for free.  For the gig to be worthwhile I would suggest they need an audience willing to do one of the following:

 - Download (and pay) for a song

  - Hire them for other paying gigs

  - Sign them to a record deal

  - Buy band merchandise

If they aren't in front of an audience they reasonably believe could do one of those four things then we are headed toward being exploited, not exposed.

Next part of the checklist:

2.  Can the person or group offering me the exposure provide me what I'm looking for?  This is a question you must answer for yourself, don't take anyone else's word for it.

3.  If I do get the right exposure am I ready to take advantage of it?  If you're an actor and you get the exposure but your website is poorly run then that's a loss.  If you do the band gig but you don't have the materials to sell ready to go and a strategy for selling them then that's a loss. 

4.  Is association with the brand alone worth your time? - There is a reason people do Ted and Tedx for free.  For better or worse, Ted has a strong enough brand that it is worth being a part of it.  Is that true for the place offering you the work?

Now you may decide none of these four things are true and do the work anyway.  Maybe you just like the organization and what to volunteer.  That's fine.  But you shouldn't have any expectation that the work is going to advance your career.

 

Principles over plans

Arts marketing plans have their purpose, but I have found that having a set of specific marketing principles is much more useful.

For example, at my day job, here are our some of marketing principles.

1.  Emphasize pre-sales of tickets.  We have benchmarks about how much ticket sales revenue we want before the first preview of a show and before a press opening.

2.  Fill up the preview houses.  This goes hand in hand with point one.  If we are going to do some sort of discount or special offer it will be for those performances.

3.  As much as possible tell the story about the production, not just what the play is about.  So for our upcoming show we are talking a lot about the neighborhood the play is set in and the role that math and academics have in the work.

4.  Target a defined audience.  We try to go after audience segments that we can identify by name.

5.  Prioritize long form content over short form content.  So our blogs, program articles, etc. are longer then what is "normal" for the industry.

These principles are specific to the organization I work for.  If I was at a different place, or working for a client as a consultant, I may put together a whole different set.

Having a defined set of principles can help you stay on track when unexpected things start to happen. This is important because unexpected things ALWAYS happen.

I've also found that principles are useful when you have a team doing the marketing.  I manage a full time staff of five and a part time of 5-7.  Many of them work remotely either from home or in the box office.  When you have a team that is spread out like that they have to make a lot of decisions on their own.  If they understand the principles then they can make smart decisions.  They might not always be the decision I would make but that doesn't matter, they are still correct decisions.

Take some time today to consider your own marketing principles.

 

The power and peril of planning

Plans (marketing plans, business plans, etc.) are useless.  Yet, you must plan.  Let me explain both those statements.

It is cliche, but true, no plan survives contact with the real world.  At my day job I've been in charge of the marketing for almost 30 separate productions.  I can honestly say that things went according to plan maybe 8 - 10 times.  

The rest of the time, something unexpected happen.  Sometimes it was great, sometimes it was horrible, but it always NOT accounted for in the plan.

So if plans have limited value, why do it?

You do it because the planning process helps to improve your thinking.  A good planning process, as compared to thoughtless one, should help to present holes in your thinking.  It may reveal to you that you financial assumptions are out of wack, or that you are targeting the wrong audience, or that you missing certain tools that you need to achieve your goals.

All of that is extremely useful information which can reveal through a planning process, not matter what the outcomes of the actual plan are.

The key point here is that you should always think about what you are doing.  I know that sounds obvious.  It has been my experience, however, that a lot of marketing (and other) efforts fail because they were putting together without serious consideration.  Many plans are just rehashed version of old plans.  

That's the path that leads up to the worst of both worlds.  You get a useless plan AND you don't get the benefits of considered planning process.

So here's the best marketing advice I can give you today.

Stop.

I know life is busy and all that but just stop, walk away from the computer and think about what you are doing.

What marketing assumptions are you making?  Trust me, you are making plenty.

Are those assumptions true?  What makes you think that?

Does your plan make sense given what you know about your organization, your audience and the world in general?

It's amazing what you can do if you just ponder those sorts of things for 30 minutes.

Or you can just keep running around and doing things.

Your choice.

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If you're looking for a space to stop and think I highly recommend my arts marketing workshop happening on April 20 in Chicago, The Gift Sessions.  

The inspiration behind the Gift

Here's my the video of my TedxBroadway talk.

Reminder:  The early bird deadline for The Gift Sessions my arts marketing workshop in Chicago, ends tonight at midnight.  Use the promo code Paradox to save an additional $5.

 

 

Research, Observation and Arts Marketing

Here's my #1 rule when it comes to market research:

Never ask a question if you aren't willing to accept AND act upon the answer. This is a particularly relevant set of criteria for those of us in the arts.  Let me explain why through a recent conversation.  A few details have been changed:

Organization:  We want to know what our audience thinks about our work.

Me:  What if they come back and say they loved that big, splashy, expensive performance of Swan Lake you did?  What if they want to see more of that?

Organization:  We can't afford to do more of that, plus it would go against our mission.

Me:  So don't ask.

A good artist or arts organization can not and should not always give an audience what they want. That is what puts tension into the research process.

Research implies that you should just find out what people want and give it to them. In some cases that is true.  In others, it isn't.  It makes a lot of sense, for example, for you to ask your audience how they hear about your work and then consider adjusting your marketing plan.

It may make less sense to ask what people think about a particular artist.  What if they hate him or her?  Are you going to fire them?

If you aren't willing to accept and act, don't ask.

Here's another way of gathering information that can be particularly efficient and effective:

Observation.

Even the most savvy researcher or pollster understands that what people tell you can be inaccurate.  Think about how much money and time went into a getting an exact answer to a binary question like:  Who are you voting for to be President?

People can tell you anything, but what they do is the truth.

Some of the best information can be gathered by learning to watch people.  This is not a natural skill.  It can be very easy to go through life in your own head and not pay attention to what others do.  It takes some practice to really start noticing things.

Example:  I know an organization that actually managed to pull some sponsorship money out of a luxury car dealership.  This dealership had no formal giving program and had never given money to an arts nonprofit.

How did it happened?

A staff member was taking a smoke break in the parking lot and noticed a high number of luxury cars in the lot.  This pattern kept up over a few nights.  One day they took a photo of the lot and walked over to a friend who worked at a dealership.

They showed the photos and basically said "you want to promote your cars to luxury car buyers, here are a bunch of them, sponsor us and you'll get access to them"

Sold.

They noticed something.  They didn't make it happened.  They just noticed what was happening and tried to take advantage of it.

That's so much of what marketing is.  It's noticing the 100 interesting things that are happening around you and then trying to figure out how to tap into those things. This is also why box office staff, ushers and volunteers are so important.  They can be key observation points as long as they know that is a HUGE part of their job and that their observations will be taken seriously.

You want to be a more effective marketer?  Pay attention.  Observe.  It can lead to magical things.

Reminder:  The Gift Sessions, a live arts marketing workshop, is coming to Chicago on April 20.  Details here.  Early Bird deadline is midnight on Monday.  Use the promo code Paradox to save $5.

Very special things happen when a group of committed people come together to consider how to marketing can be used to connect art and audience.  I don't do this often.  Don't miss it.

 

Who Pays?

This is one of the most subtle, and difficult, parts of the marketing process.

A key to success is not only knowing your audience but also knowing if that piece of audience you selected is willing to pay for your stuff.

Case in point, a theatre company I know really wanted to attract their fellow artists (performing, visual, etc.) to their work.  They figured that the art would be elevated by having an audience full of smart, engaged artists.

Good thought, in theory.

The problem was that a lot of the artists they wanted don't like to pay (or pay much) for theatre tickets. This was a group used to getting in via various complimentary offers.

They love art, but they aren't really willing to pay for it.  Thus the idea was dead on arrival.

Another example.  You're a painter and you want to make a good wage from your paintings.  Say they cost $1,000.  To be successful you need to find an audience that has shown some willingness to pay that much.  The best indicator is whether they have paid that amount for other art in the past.

Now remember, I'm not talking about ability to pay, I'm talking about the willingness to pay.  If you approach an audience that isn't willing to pay for art at your particular price point you either need to change the audience or change the price point.

Reminder:  Speaking of ability to pay, we know that arts organizations are willing to pay for marketing workshops.  That's helpful because I working with the good people at 2amTheatre to do a workshop on April 20.  Details here.  Early Bird Deadline expires soon.