Americans for the Arts

Deborah Obalil

It's been interesting to read various marketing experts and pundits over the past year or so declare the death of marketing as we know it in various forums. And, of course, we've all heard the platitudes of social media experts regarding the “customer being in control” and “it's all about them, not you.”

It is true that the traditional interpretation of the Marketing Ps (product, price, place, promotion) may feel outdated in a world where people engage as often virtually as they do physically. And social media has definitely been a game changer in regards to customer relationships and communications strategy.

While I often find little to argue with in the details of these various exhortations, the conclusion that all of this means marketing is dead or vastly different at its core from what it was ten or more years ago confounds me.

I have always understood marketing to be “the process by which you come to understand the relationship between the product and the customer.” I don't think this definition has become false because of all the changes in the platforms we use to connect with our customers, or even because the needs of our customers may be vastly different from what they were a decade ago.

David Dombrosky

For years now, we have been talking about the latest tools and the best practices for incorporating these tools into our marketing and communications strategies. Of course, this is a necessary conversation in which we need to continually engage, but there is a corollary discussion that also needs to take place regularly.

As technology advances and communication-based behaviors adapt to these advances, arts marketers find themselves adding new tactics to their marketing strategies in order to stay current in meeting audience expectations. So the corollary discussion that we need to have is, “If we need to add new tactics to keep pace with changing technology and patron behavior, then which older tactics can we afford to lose?”

During the past five years of leading online technology workshops for arts managers, one of the most frequent concerns expressed by participants has been the ever-increasing workload. We’ve added social media to our plates, as well as mobile applications, broadcast emails, SMS campaigns, and more. But what have we taken away?

Ian David Moss

The hardest question to answer in arts research is “what would have happened if we had done things differently?” Researchers call this question the “counterfactual,” since it refers to a scenario that doesn’t actually exist. Generally speaking, it’s hard to measure things that don’t exist; hence the difficulty for arts research. We can’t measure that scenario directly, but we can get close to it through experimental designs that include a control group.

In a marketing-specific context, counterfactual scenarios come into play when considering alternative strategies aimed at driving sales or conversions. One technique that a number of organizations have used is called A/B testing, which is when two different versions of, say, a newsletter or a website get sent to random segments of your target audience.

Internet technology makes A/B testing relatively painless to execute: in the case of a newsletter, for example, all it requires is a random sorting algorithm in Excel to divide the list in two before sending the slightly different newsletter versions to the lists as you normally would. You could test which design results in more clickthroughs to a specific link or which subject line results in a higher open rate.

Sara Billmann

It’s an honor to be included in the Arts Marketing Blog Salon. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from the conversations over the coming week.

If the Internet was the buzzword of the mid-1990s, there’s no question that social media has reigned supreme over the past few years, with names of sites now popular becoming verbs that have entered our modern-day lexicon and the entire industry now abbreviated as something that even as recently as a few years ago would have implied something tawdry.

The beauty of social media is that it ultimately just takes word-of-mouth to a whole new level, albeit a more visible one. Let’s face it, there was a certain comfort in the pre-internet days of knowing that people heard about performances by ‘word of mouth’ without knowing what, exactly, was being said.

Now that message is broadcast far beyond the reaches of our own venues, giving us opportunity to enhance or diminish our own reputations with the press of a few keystrokes. We all plot how we can use this power to our advantage as consumers, but would be better off thinking about how we should be using its reach and power to ensure nothing but the most satisfied, engaged customer.

Brian Reich

Everyone talks about the transformational power of digital and social media, the contribution that technology and the Internet are having on our society – but for all the changes and advancements, most of the important things about our society seem to be largely operating as they have for a long time.

The promise of new technology is scale, reach, and efficiency. Just because we can move faster doesn't mean that work should take priority over developing relationships and providing value to our audiences.

We have prioritized telling a quick story that suggests progress over investing in long-term impact that changes the world and drives people towards deeper commitments to organizations. We have become too accustomed to measuring success based on the size or popularity of an organization and not the value that a community of supporters places on the work that groups are doing.

As long as groups continue to focus on the wrong opportunities, our efforts to address serious issues will continue to stumble.

I am a HUGE proponent of partnerships! There is nothing like getting in front of a group that is loyal to a certain brand, and have that brand state that your organization has value for the group to also support you. Throughout a season, we work with numerous partners to reach new audiences, from arts organizations to corporations and beyond.

Here are some of the more successful partnerships we have had:

Dracula's Night at the Bats

Dracula’s Night at the Bats: A fully integrated campaign with Louisville Slugger Field and our baseball team, the Louisville Bats. Dracula threw out the first pitch (a bit high, but right down the middle), we had a table set up behind home plate, our promotional video was played on the jumbotron in the outfield, we gave away an opportunity to purchase $10 tickets to an entire section and  one lucky person won two season ticket packages (and Dracula handed them out on the third-base dugout).

The benefit: Exposure to a different audience in a fun and interactive way. It showed potential patrons that theatre is not as intimidating as they might think. While there was not much advance promotion of this event, the face time we had with the thousands of people at the event was invaluable.