Americans for the Arts

David Dombrosky

Mobile device adoption and usage is a global phenomenon with over 4.5 billion mobile users worldwide. In the United States, smartphone adoption has exceeded standard cell phone ownership by nearly 2-to-1. We no longer use our phones to simply make calls and send text messages.  We use them to explore our world. Anything we experience can be recorded, researched, and shared from the palms of our hands – anytime, anywhere.

As our adoption and usage of mobile technology has grown, so have our expectations for engaging with the world around us at a moment’s notice. Researchers at Forrester define this as the mobile mind shift “the expectation that [we] can get what we want in our immediate context and moments of need.”

We’re sitting in a local diner in Atlanta, trying to summarize what we gleaned from the National Arts Marketing Conference in a short blog post. Like it’s possible. Actually, we can’t seem to get away from #nampc this year in Atlanta. Seriously. We cannot leave. During Sha Hwang’s brilliant keynote, in which he rhapsodized about the brave pilots who were the first to “fly west with the night,” United airlines texted that our westbound, evening flight home was canceled. Oh the irony.
 

A few weeks ago, I attended a show that wasn’t very good. It wasn’t bad, I guess, but it was an arty bit of esoterica that I only would have had the attention span for in my twenties. I couldn’t focus. While ostensibly watching the performance, I started thinking of ways to expedite my tax filings, pondered the purchase of an energy efficient refrigerator, and wondered how it was that NSYNC’s music videos haven’t aged very well relative to how timeless they once seemed. By the conclusion of the evening-length work, I was bored, depressed, and thankful that I wasn’t the poor schmuck arts marketer whose job it was to communicate a rationale for such meh art.

Erik Gensler

If you still say "Facebook is not a direct sales tool" you're not using it correctly. And you don't understand how the marketing world has dramatically changed.

At a recent arts conference there were evidently some sessions where presenters said "Facebook doesn't sell tickets" or "we just use Facebook for branding and awareness."

We are in a new world where social storytelling and smart digital targeting are cornerstones of marketing. And those organizations that don't know how to do it are going to keep falling further and further behind. Spreading this misinformation is just going to keep our sector amongst the dinosaurs who think we can keep interrupting our way to ticket sales by buying traditional media.

Janet Starke

An Arts Educator’s Report from NAMPC 2014

I had the privilege and honor to attend this past weekend’s NAMP (National Arts Marketing Project) Conference in Atlanta. I co-presented a session with AFTA’s Arts Education Program Coordinator, Jeff Poulin. This stemmed from a conversation we first began last winter, when we discussed the concept of the “shared space between arts marketing and education.” Mind you, even as we might picture the "center" of the highly-valued Venn Diagram, there are varied tracks within that center:

1) Marketing arts education for the advancement of the programs

2) Using education as a tool for marketing the organization

3) Using education as a vehicle for increased audience development and ticketing sales

As the year 2016 approaches, as arts marketers we can look back and reflect on the variety of social media networks that we have seen succeed as effective platforms for engaging audiences: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, to name a few.

On the other hand, we’ve seen just as many flop. From Friendster to MySpace to Google+, these platforms fell short somewhere along the social media road to success. For example, Friendster lost the race to Facebook and MySpace when these two placed their emphasis on social sharing and connection. Then, MySpace -- even with its tag line “a place for friends” --- sunk when it gradually became an advertising platform for bands rather than a network for connecting with people.