What’s in this post:
- A Boston Symphony concert poster, just as ineffective as most classical music press releases
- A theory: that these materials are ineffective because no one really expects them to do very much.
- And then, at the end, this thought:
If you put out ineffective stuff because, in your heart, you don’t think these materials can be effective, then haven’t you made a self-fulfilling prophency?
And wouldn’t it be better — even crucial, since we need a new audience — to find out what really sells?
I was in Boston, walking past Symphony Hall, where the Boston Symphony plays. Big poster out front, advertising concerts that weekend.
On the poster, closeup of an amiable woman, sitting in the midst of the orchestra, holding a flute. Most likely the principal flute. Seems like a nice person, but nothing in the photo would make me (or anyone else) rush to buy tickets.
She was wearing a wedding ring. Because I’m high on marriage and family, my mind wandered. What’s her family like? How many kids? Where does she live? In town, in the suburbs?
Further down…
…the meat of the poster. Listing of the program. In smallish type, hard to see. Much bigger, grabbed my attention: logos of several funders.
Ineffective poster. Nothing in it made me want to hear the concert. And the one thing that — lacking anything else striking — might have made me interested, the program listing, was hard to find.
So it’s not just publicists who (for the most part) don’t know how to get our attention. Neither did one of the top orchestras in the US. (And it’s not alone.)
Why this is
Here’s my theory. Press releases and big-orchestra concert posters are ineffective because no one expects them to have much result.
No one thinks that when a poster goes up, passersby will stop in their tracks to read it, then rush to the box office. No one thinks that when a press release goes out, there’ll be a surge of response.
It’s not like it was when, two years ago, Kate Bush announced her first major live performances since 1979, and they all sold out within minutes. If classical music announcements got even one percent — one-tenth of one percent — of that response, then of course we’d be actively working to find out what kind of publicity worked best.
But we hardly get any response. The San Francisco Symphony press release I linked to in my last post — how many people was it, realistically, aimed at? How many would wade through the clutter of words to find out what it said? Probably no more than we could count on our fingers.
And their response — a story in a newspaper not so many people read — wouldn’t create much excitement.
But the funders!
One last thought. Why did the Boston Symphony poster tout the funders so strongly?
The reasons for that, I think, are very clear. No one at the orchestra expects the poster to sell many tickets. So not much is done to ensure that it sells.
But if a funder gets angry! Oh, they know what that’s like. They know what happens when funders aren’t pleased.
So that they take care of. Making the funders’ logos nice and big, so they get no complaints.
That’s my theory. If I’m right, the weak posters and press releases — weak from a sales point of view — are understandable. And the heightened attention to funders (which won’t sell tickets) also makes sense.
Now think about this…
If you put out ineffective stuff because, in your heart, you don’t think these materials can be effective, then haven’t you made a self-fulfilling prophency?
And wouldn’t it be better — even crucial, since we need a new audience — to find out what really sells?
I know, by the way, that some people in classical music do really do this. But too many don’t.
My biggest complaint about classical ads is when the ad says “music by Brahms” or “music by Mozart, Ravel and Beethoven “. No one ever buys a ticket without knowing what they are going to hear. And all the orchestras and concert halls do it.
This is a critically important post, Greg. In my experience, it isn’t that the Marketing Departments doesn’t expect results, it’s that the marketing department does’t fully understand what they are promoting. Most people come to symphony marketing from other fields where the goals are more clearly delineated–say, sports marketing. If you don’t know what you are promoting, then a photo of a flutist may be all you’ve got.
This points to a deeper issue: most orchestral management professionals don’t know why their orchestras exist at all.
It’s because they’re all amateurs, Greg. The leaders who sign off on these posters and releases don’t really know much about professional marketing, let alone sales, and they care mostly about funders. If a professional marketer walked into an orchestra’s conference room with a mock-up that was guaranteed to sell tickets, the rest of the room would quickly strip it of its potency and reduce it to the ineffective pablum you write about here. The highest paid person in the room would have final say and he or she would typically be the person who has the least professional expertise in marketing, sales or publicity. This is what nonprofit classical music marketing is all about.
And it’s why the good communications professionals leave. The communications staffers who stay in the nonprofit arts are either as lacking in competency as their bosses or too complacent to fight for something that will actually work.
So, yes, some of the people who produce these materials know they won’t accomplish anything, but their bosses don’t. And until the leaders are held accountable for their own lack of professional acumen, nothing is likely to change.
I’ve had a chance, a couple of times, to talk to high-level business consultants about what the classical music field (and especially orchestras) should do. Their suggestions are simple, really Business 101. And they’re flabbergasted, just utterly baffled, to hear that the obvious steps aren’t being taken. If you’re losing your market, do something to make the market pay attention!
A friend of mine who worked at the time for a major orchestra once asked Stephen Spielberg what he thought should be done. Same thing. He focused on performance enhancements, and again, it seemed just obvious to him. I’m not saying that his ideas or those of the consultants have to be correct. All this is off the top of these peoples’ heads, and they haven’t studied the problem. But I’m sure they’d do better than we do!
Philadelphia Enquirer recently covered Michael Kaiser’s report on the Philadelphia Orchestra: “Kaiser’s report also paints a picture of an organization that is not very good at communication – with donors, musicians, the community, or the media.
Ouch.
I happen to live a few blocks down Spruce St. from Verizon Hall, the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and have a subscription to their concerts every year. Personally, I have been a classical music fan since I listened to my mother’s 78 albums (I was big enough to carry them around, but not much bigger) and the Saturday Met broadcasts on a radio that would only elicit laughs these days. If a kid starts out at that age, there’s no problem sustaining an interest in the music.
There is certainly a lot of room for improvement in that organization’s work communicating with the public, and it does share a lot of the faults and mistaken ideas Greg has been pointing out. But it also has a very great and very dedicated fan base in the area–many people who are quite knowledgeable about classical music (lots of old folks like me but a fair number of ticket buyers who are of an age that they manage to climb the stairs to their seats without straining, also). And you would find if you went to a concert that the applause at the end is always an impressive outpouring of love for this group of musicians.
I am sure that the orchestra communicates effectively with every person in the Philly area who has any interest in this kind of music. It is making efforts, through a series of free concerts in the area every year and in other ways, to increase the number of people with that interest, but it can’t do it alone.
Players in the orchestra put a lot of effort, individually and in small groups, to introduce classical music to as many people in the area as possible. Music education and opportunities to learn to play instruments in the schools have fallen very low here as elsewhere, That’s one place where a little help could make a big difference, I think. But there is obviously a very great difference between the ways pop music fans and classical music fans relate to their kinds of music and musicians, and I’m not sure that will ever change. The challenge is always helping more people who have never learned how to relate to the latter type of music to turn on to it.
Would it cost them a huge (or “yuuuge”) amount to hire some people who really know advertising, and in particular advertising for concerts (say, in the field of rock) to improve their advertising?
Of course, having lived in the Boston area, I realize that, this city being the Hub of the Universe and having a storied history going back forever, it will be practically impossible to pound sense into these guys’ heads.
A few comments on the above….
First, a thought experiment about the target audience with three potential listeners:
– A: Doesn’t know the difference between Mozart and Mahler.
– B: Knows the difference between Mozart and Mahler, but not between their individual symphonies.
– C: Knows the difference between (and main themes) of symphonies of both Mozart and Mahler.
I’m guessing group C already are regular symphony attendees….and I see most discussion about “outreach” is toward group A. But many strategic marketers would probably start by looking intensely at group B. Why? Often the biggest opportunity is increasing frequency of infrequent “users”, as you only have to “sell” the event (see this concert) rather than the whole concept (see a symphonic orchestra). Thought exercise…if a symphony was able to sell 1 more event per season to each person who heard at least 1 event in the last 3 years, what would that do to % of seats sold per season?
Second, thinking about communications to group B, and your poster example. Someone decided to program Mahler’s 5th. Why? Not because of a union agreement or because a major funder demanded it. More likely because 1) it’s a great piece of music, 2) it hasn’t been heard live in town for x years, and possibly because 3) the conductor or specific instrumentalist has a great expertise interpreting Mahler or the specific piece.
So tell my why THIS performance is worth paying for including parking, babysitter…not to speak of walking through inclement weather, etc. Tell me that it hasn’t been performed live in my town for 10 years, that this is the most (adjective) of all of Mahler’s symphonies, that the guest conductor is the most (adjective) of conductors of Mahler. If it is special, tell me why. If it isn’t, program something else. Because, if you can’t explain why THIS performance should not be missed, I will probably miss it. And if you can’t explain why ANY of your performances should not be missed, I may miss the entire season (unless there is a piece that I already know, love, and want to hear live….that I know will be worth the money and the hassle).
Finally a word about changing the product to make it more hip. How many orchestras can (for example) deliver the “Ellington medley” with more than a fraction of their competence of delivering Mozart? My ears still pain from hearing string sections trying to play genres they aren’t experienced at.
Context: We hear symphony 1-2x per year. I’m a group B listener, recovering jazz trumpet player. And I’m a consultant experienced in strategy and marketing, but not in the performing arts.
None of this music (orchestral formal music) was commercial or really popular, If orchestras play the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven then they should do as those great composers did and depend wholly on patrons because apart from Operas none of their symphonies or other orchestral work ever made them enough money to live on.
As to the 19th cent. yes there were an increase in commercial avenues that could benefit a young hot composer, but works from that period is being performed more times in a year than in the whole live of the composer, In that century symphonies were written every year, performed once (per avenue, city, etc) and then the people moved on to the new…while we with recordings of every symphony want nothing but to listen to the same old repertoire again and again, at least it’s not awful noise of modern symphonies but still!
Operas were big commercial success, yes but they were NEW and in a language the audience could understand (or at least grasp it, since Italian is so near to the Latin that educated people had to learn then) and most probably the singers didn’t resonate the hell out of the words. People love musical drama and Broadway musicals are big commercial success today, so are Bollywood movies with the obligatory song&dance number, but who wants to go watch an Opera about an aristocratic trying to bed his servant’s wife? Even if the music is by the glories Amadeus? If the song is incomprehensible, the story totally out of this world and the ticket price ten times the cost of a movie, how can it be POPULAR entertainment?? no amount of PR shtick will solve this equation.
I have a simple solution to the poster problem (and the whole PR approach): stop selling tickets to the general public, give all the tickets to the sponsors, commission new work for their aggrandizement: the iPhone symphony, the Windows overture, the Tesla flute concerto, etc, etc maybe if we re-create the working conditions of Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven we’ll have something new worth listening to.
I love reading your blog, but what is your ideal situation? recreating the conditions of the 1950’s? Those days are long gone I am afraid and will never return.
PS: I see a lot of classical instruments players pop-up on YouTube playing classical covers of pop songs and movie/tv themes with great success, many sell their arrangements and even some go on tours. People will pay for what they like to hear and that has never been and will never be big formal orchestral music 😉
Not a return to the 1950s! More like a rebirth of classical music, with a new, lively, younger audience. Because the music is newer, younger, livelier.
Long story, that. But the real reason I’m responding is to flag the notion that composers in the 18th century had patrons. They didn’t. They had employers. So Haydn wrote many symphonies because Prince Esterhazy hired him to do that. After Haydn got famous, he could go to Paris and London and write symphonies commercially, being paid to write them by concert presenters who thought they in turn could make money from the concerts.
Mozart’s Paris Symphony (he wrote letters to his father about the premiere) was the same story. An impresario presented concerts, hired Mozart to write a symphony for them. Many composers in the 18th century would present, with their own money, what were called “academies.” Big public concerts on which the composer’s work would be played. Mozart, for instance, premiered piano concertos that way. The premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth (also the premiere of three movements from the Missa Solemnis) was a profit-making enterprise on Beethoven’s part. He rented the theater, paid the musicians, hoped the ticket sales would earn him money. It didn’t happen. He lost money instead. But his idea was to make a profit.
Composers in past centuries were far more entrepreneurial than we tend to think. And far more dependent on employment of various kinds to make a living, far more than by having patrons.
This resource is quite good and has been around since 2010:
“The Experts’ Guide to Marketing the Arts” by the Arts & Business Council of Americans for the Arts
http://artsmarketing.org/resources/practical-lessons/practical-lessons
While some lessons need updating, I think many marketers (of the arts and otherwise) might benefit from a review of lessons 2 and 5.
I suppose others among Greg’s readers will be familiar with the Facebook feed managed by the Seattle Opera. We attended their “Ring” performance a few years back, and that somehow put me on their “friends” list — so, even though we’re located on the opposite corner of the continent, we get daily FB postings about the Seattle Opera. I’m very impressed with how they use that particular medium — especially as contrasted with our local Palm Beach Opera. Seattle regularly posts articles, many of which are whimsical, many are “deeper” and more informative. They include interviews with singers — about, for example, what the audition process is like for a young aspiring opera singer. They also have neat backstage articles, about their costume department, set design people. I read them every day, and feel a real connection with far away Seattle Opera. I’m sure we’ll go back eventually.
By contrast, our local Palm Beach Opera basically lists the same four or five operas — they regularly cycle through “Butterfly”, “Tosca”, “Boheme”, “Traviata” — but there’s not much there telling us why we’d want to attend. Every performance is prefaced with an onstage appeal for money and donations; and very little information about what they’re giving the community.