Last week, rap group Wu-Tang Clan announced a never-before tried launch program for its new album later this year. Called The Wu: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the collection of songs will be sold to one -- and only one -- person, after touring museums and galleries, where you will be able to buy a ticket to listen to the album for $30 to $50, according to this piece by Ilan Mochari in Slate.It’s a cool idea, and...
Who doesn't love a little free publicity? That's exactly what The Lion King production in Australia got when the video below went viral.To celebrate the launch of the show in Brisbane, cast members sang "The Circle of Life" on the airplane back to Sydney. You can feel the energy and even if it was preplanned, the video doesn't feel that way. It's fun to watch and easy to see why everyone's sharing it.
Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about ticket sales marketing and the importance of knowing when to kill a program that's just not working. To help you evaluate whether a marketing program is successful -- or if it needs cancelling -- we've put together four posts that'll walk you through the process. Take a look:• First, a reality check: If a marketing campaign is working, then you should be able to see the results pretty clearly.• But, how do...
For some reason, businesspeople tend to drift toward gibberish in their speech. (And you’re all businesspeople, by the way, even those of you who believe that “businesses” do something different from what nonprofits do.)In the search for something interesting, different and effective to say, people try a lot of things. Many of those things are nonsensical. Some of the nonsensical things sound good, and sometimes when they sound good people start copying that nice-sounding bit of nonsense. Eventually, people...
Get a child hooked on your product when he’s 10, and he’s yours for life. A lot of marketers believe that as gospel, and from time to time evidence emerges that “proves” it.I’ve always been less convinced. Preference is highly perishable, and most of the “brands” I liked as a kid aren’t particularly relevant to me now. I mean, I still like Count Chocula in theory, but I don’t exactly eat much of it.And when you look at the...
Not zombies, just hippies. Specifically, the Grateful Dead. Scott McDowell wrote a great piece on 99U recently reminding me of what I’ve long believed. The Grateful Dead were decades ahead of the rest of the live entertainment business in a number of ways.You should read the whole article, so I won’t distract too much from that, but I want to point out a couple things that I think are of particular interest across all genres. He highlights “building a...
We talked recently about how you should be willing to turn off programs that don’t work.So let’s get more specific about ticket-selling programs and when you should turn them off. It’s actually quite simple.If they're not improving your Revenue Per Seat, turn them off. Not average ticket price sold. That’s a sucker’s metric. Revenue Per Seat.Count all the dollars you bring in and divide it by all the seats you could potentially sell.Let’s use a simple example. Say you...
Like print advertising, the glossy season brochure has just about come to the end. It’s one of those things kept alive by a belief that “you have to make a glossy season brochure.” One day the spell will be broken and that belief will fall to the floor like a dropped glove.I don’t know anything about the work of the theater who made the video below, but in just 54 seconds it makes me want to know more about...
Most marketing and sales managers are mediocre. Of course, that’s true by definition, unless you’re in Lake Wobegon. But in the case of marketing management, it means the marketing programs they run are usually only either slightly better than if they’d done nothing at all, and frequently worse.Just about any professional marketing manager, even these mediocre ones I’m talking about, has skills. They can develop marketing materials; they know how media buying works; they negotiate effectively; they deliver campaigns...
I don’t have an Aunt Sally.That was just my way to get you to start reading this before I tell you that I’m going to talk about math …But before you click "back" or shriek in Wicked Witch-like horror when doused with water, know that I majored in English in college! I wrote a thesis about Frankenstein. I like T. S. Eliot.I’ve got non-math-person cred.So stick with me. If you’re a live entertainment marketer and you’re math-phobic, I’m going...
