Would you be mine, could you be mine?

I would not win the ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award for eating. I tend to like what I like and stick with it, the result being that I go to the same four or five restaurants all the time.

Two of my favorites are Pomodoro and Covo, and my friend Joe has come to both with me. At Pomodoro, they make fun of me for asking for more Parmesan after I’ve eaten down to the portion of the rigatoni that’s not under a cheese blanket, and at Covo, they know I’ll order one of three things every time and that I’ll want to sit outside no matter how cold it is. One night, Joe and I went to another restaurant down the road from my apartment called Largo for drinks. “Do they know you here, too?” he asked. “No!” I snapped, “I’m at the deli next door every day and they’re owned by the same people, but I’ve actually only been here two or three times.” So we get our drinks, drink them and two more, and soon enough the bartendress is vacuuming and closing out the register. We’re the only people left and we’re wondering why they haven’t asked us to pay. “Hi there – can we pay?” I ask. “Oh…well, that guy over there is my manager, and he says you’re next door all the time, so the drinks are on him.” Of course Joe looks at me incredulously and says, you get free drinks at the place you’ve “only been a few times”?

A couple months back, Elizabeth Maupin at the Orlando Sentinel posted the following on the newspaper’s blog:

There’s a New York writer named Amanda
Ameer who finds marketing ideas everywhere. This time around, it was at
her friendly neighborhood spa, which gave a discount because she came
through the recommendation of a friend and another discount for
scheduling a facial two months in advance.

Good marketing ideas
can come from anywhere, Ameer points out, and she has some others —
including one or two that are tried all the time in Orlando (New York
isn’t always the forefront of things) and a bunch that are not. Check
out her column for some ideas that might be very good for you.

“Including one or two that are tried all the time in Orlando (New York
isn’t always the forefront of things)”. I’ve noticed a few commenters on this blog from Florida, coincidentally (or not) enough, have said they’ve tried what I’ve posted about. Margo from the Bach Festival Florida is a good example. She’s commented a few times, one time to that same facial post about box offices being open during and after performances:

This season we introduced a Flex Ticket Package for the first time and during the first few performances of the Season we left the Box Office open through intermission and after the performance, encouraging patrons to upgrade their single ticket to an entire flex package, or even to a Series package. We didn’t sell out our Season doing it, but we certainly sold more tickets that way than we thought. I would say overall it was really successful. However, by the time we were a few performances in to each series in the season, we weren’t selling enough to make it worth the money in staff time. So, I would say do it at the beginning of the Season and evaluate from there.

A week or so after Elizabeth’s post and Margo’s comment, my friend Justin sent me a link to this NPR story about the New World Symphony, also in Florida:

If you’re in Miami Beach with 20 minutes to spare, the New World Symphony has a proposal: a mini-concert for $2.50.

Howard Herring, the symphony’s president, tells NPR’s Melissa Block it is an attempt to win a new audience.

The
program includes a Mozart Clarinet Quintet, followed by two works —
Handel Passacaglia arranged by Halverson and the Bartok Contrast for
clarinet, violin and piano — and a Brahms Clarinet Quintet.

Is Florida just a hot bed of excellent classical music marketing ideas? Possibly. Or, in general, are presenters in smaller cities simply better at marketing than those in big cities like New York? It makes sense; presenters in more tight-knit communities know their patrons and local business owners, often personally. Of course the manager at Largo would cover my drinks; I buy four Caesar salads a week from him. Similarly, if I were promoting a concert in my neighborhood, I’m sure Largo would hang up posters, put postcards in the take-out bags, and host the opening night party. The manager at Covo has been booking bands and jazz ensembles from City College, which is a few blocks up, to play at the restaurant bar every Friday and Saturday night. He gives them a nice place to perform, their friends come to the restaurant to see them, hopefully everyone comes back for dinner one night. This is how neighborhoods work, but do New York City presenters think of New York as one giant neighborhood, or do they strive to build organic relationships with leaders and groups in different communities?

I was surprised in the elevator one night when my neighbor Kenny told me he had just come from a play. “You went to a play,” I teased. “Seriously?” The play was The Jim Jones Project, and, as the title would seem to dictate, featured the rapper Jim Jones. I asked Kenny how he had heard about it, and he said a friend told him and there had been TV and radio spots. So I, who read Playbill.com obsessively, had heard nothing about this particular Off-Broadway show, and Kenny, ESPN SportsCenter devotee, knew all about it and bought tickets. Though we live three feet apart, we are not – according to the marketers of that show – the same community.

Dan Bauer, the press director at McCarter Theater and my former boss/current friend, knows everyone in Princeton. He’s worked at McCarter well, a very long time, and lives right there in town. He knows the difference between physical neighborhoods and social communities, and can identify what press and marketing coverage reaches both. He knows because he lives where he works and is an active member of the community he is reaching out to. Would Dan be as effective promoting a play in New York? Probably: these things are partly publicist personality type and hard work. But it wouldn’t be as natural, and it would take a lot more time.

Of course, Schweppes, Apple and Club Monacco have been marketing to me for years without having a clue where I live, who I hang out with, or what I like to do. But can arts organizations afford – time or money-wise – to throw ads against walls and see what sticks? Or should they work toward organic presences in communities within larger location communities? LA seems to have created a community around their orchestra, as have Cleveland and Phoenix. Those are big cites, by any definition, so have they created these communities from scratch, as it were, or did they form a unique orchestral community from many existing communities?

An aside: is it possible for a presenter to “know” a community too well? That is, they think they know exactly what their community wants to see, and consequently refuse to book anything new? Or their press department keeps going back to the same media outlets because it’s easier to pitch to people you already know, but other opportunities may be out there?