Ariel Fielding
How does a marketing director with an audience-centered approach reconcile the growing primacy of data and digital marketing? Would it be possible for such a person — me — to collect, analyze, and mobilize data without reducing patrons to strings of zeros and ones? Would the things I love about my work — using images, language, and design to entice people to join the audience, and to give them a larger context for understanding the performing arts — would these things become less important in the headlong rush towards data? These are a few of the questions I brought to NAMPC2014, and the answers I found were more compelling, nuanced, and heartening than I expected.
Arthur Cohen’s ‘deep dive’ study of attitudes toward culture in the United States, Culture Track 2014, used extensive data to draw a vivid picture of cultural consumers by age. Cohen put a human face on two generational groups in particular, millenials (18-29) and prewars (70+), and talked in detail about the factors motivating or blocking their participation in culture. Cohen’s presentation reassured me that the thoughtful use of data could be mutually beneficial for everyone in the cultural equation, potentially informing programming and marketing decisions and increasing the number and diversity of people partaking.
From Sha Hwang’s closing keynote at NAMPC 2014
Amelia Northrup-Simpson of TRG Arts talked about taking a holistic, relational view of audiences. She recommended gathering data indicative of loyalty, then increasing organizational sustainability by cultivating the trust and loyalty of each member of the audience over the long term. Lisa Middleton of Lyric Opera of Chicago presented a strategy based on the same relational standpoint: using extensive data collection and careful segmentation, she sends customized communications to individual patrons, ensuring that they receive the right message at the right time. A forum on expanding and diversifying audiences moderated by Sarah Lee of Slover Linett Audience Research also looked at this question of right communication, but in relation to language and imagery rather than data. Participants shared their stories of breaking down the barriers between producers and consumers of culture, asking communities what kinds of programming they would like to see and listening to the answers, and building alliances with potential advocates in unexpected places.
Closing keynote speaker Sha Hwang brought together these two strands of NAMPC 2014, demonstrating how data can be a useful tool, but exhorting us not to lose sight of the unique and vibrant people behind the data, the people who make art possible: the audience.
