Thoughts from the Digital Marketing Boot Camp for Arts

Last week I was in New York for Capacity Interactive’s annual, 2-day Digital Marketing conference. Here are a couple thoughts I jotted down during the conference and on the flight home.

Getting people excited and the power of word of mouth

Seth Godin’s keynote went about identifying and emphasising the power of your ‘tribe’ (he really likes tribes), essentially that what we — as the cultural sector do — is not ‘for everyone, every time’, it necessarily can’t, won’t and shouldn’t be.

The power of a great cultural experience does not come from chasing mass-market, lowest denominator populism. I think there are numerous semantic cracks in this particular argument, but as a broad thrust it makes sense to me.

Our focus should be on creating, and getting people excited, about the best experiences we can offer. Great experiences are what people want to be touched by, and great experiences are what they are going to remember and talk about.

Seth shared some research commissioned by Broadway theatres (in, I think 2013 or 2014) that highlighted the average percentage of each audience that was there because they had been brought by someone coming for a second time OR because they had been told by someone they trusted they simply had to see that particular show (spoiler, it was loads of people per show).

It made me think about the best cultural experiences I’ve had this year, how I found out about them, and how I reacted to them.

Hamilton — I really don’t like musicals, however last year I spent an inordinate amount of time queueing (and subsequently faffing around with the awful purchase experience…) online to buy tickets for Hamilton. Why did I bother? Because a bunch of people whose opinion I trust told me I had to see this show (really, they wouldn’t shut up about it). So I queued (for a long time), and I parted with a not insignificant chunk of money to get tickets for something I otherwise would have paid no real attention to. And what did I do immediately after seeing the show? I grabbed a bunch of people and told them they had to see this show, because it was amazing. And I know of a few people who then went to see it on my recommendation who otherwise would never have set foot inside a theatre, or gone to see a musical (and they thought it was amazing and lo the cycle continues).

St Vincent at Cadogan Hall — I’m somehow signed up to a stupid amount of live music related alerts, the sheer volume of these emails means that I rarely (if ever) check the ‘promotions’ part of my inbox (sorry marketing pals). However I spotted on Twitter that St Vincent was performing a solo, acoustic show at Cadogan Hall, so I bought tickets there and then (she had been doing a ‘full band’ tour for most of the summer that I had mostly ignored/missed), and a few days later I went (and it was incredible). But if I hadn’t happened to have seen that tweet, there and then, I would undoubtedly have missed the fact that this show was even happening, and actually if it had been a ‘normal’ show would I have been as interested? Probably not. St Vincent has subsequently released a bunch of these ‘acoustic’ versions of her songs, have I bored all my colleagues and friends by recommending and playing them endlessly? You betcha.

Black Kkklansman — I went to see Spike Lee’s latest film a few months back based on the reaction of a few friends to it (which I’d seen online, rather than it being directly recommended to me), it stunned me, and I wouldn’t shut up about it (leading to at least one friend then going to see it based on my incessant recommendation). Again, a personal recommendation leading someone to experience something they otherwise might have passed by.

Killing Eve- the initial hype around this really put me off, so I studiously ignored it. But the increasingly effusive praise from more and more people who I wouldn’t class as ‘easily hyped’ convinced me to give it a go, and my goodness was it worth it. I then went and recommended it to everyone who would listen.

So, what am I trying to say here? I’m certainly not saying anything new, but it was an interesting exercise in reflecting on my own experiences.

Maybe because I work in the sector, but cultural marketing mostly passes me by — I’m immersed in it all day every day so it doesn’t perhaps have the impact it should or might do.

My cultural recommendations now come almost entirely from word of mouth/personal recommendations, or ephemeral channels — mostly Twitter. I don’t respond to posters, I don’t pick up flyers, I don’t read your brochures, I don’t see your emails, I ignore your Adwords campaigns.

But if someone I trust has a great experience and tells me about it, then I take notice, or if you hit me at the right moment with information about something that is exciting or unusual, then I respond.

I realise this isn’t a particularly helpful observation, it’s more a reflection than anything. Of course not everything is going to be Hamilton, or a one-off experience, but the quality and ‘special-ness’ of these experiences led me, in every case, to go and try to make other people experience them because I’d had such a good, remarkable time. And isn’t that what we are trying to do? Create things that are remarkable, that make people want to remark on them.

Jargon is unhelpful, and probably way more prevalent than we’d care to admit

On the face of it what I’m about to say could be seen as directly contradicting what I’ve put above.

Google gave a session that was basically selling how clever their advertising tools are now (clue: they’re really clever and there were some interesting things in there around ‘intent signals’ — probably a subject for another post). But the session was driven by a piece of research they’d done around ‘the path to purchase’ for ticket buyers.

One part of it particularly stood out to me, the finding that ‘regular’ purchasers spent much more time on show websites than ‘super-fans’ before making a purchase. Which makes sense when you think about it, these less frequent attenders will want to do more research before spending their hard-earned money on something, they may have less time to ‘do culture’ so want to be absolutely sure what they’re going to is something that’s going to be worth their time and money. People who come all the time have a much better idea of what they want to see, and are going to spend less time researching as there are fewer unknowns for them.

This finding, alongside the takeaways from a session delivered by California Symphony’s Aubrey Bergauer on their ‘Orchestra X’ project (you can read more about that project here) — which found that newer/younger audiences often found ‘conventional’ arts marketing copy almost totally baffling and unhelpful made me think about the content that arts organisations put on their website.

So often there seems to be a fear of ‘dumbing down’, or simply a misunderstanding of what audiences will actually find useful and interesting. Aubrey’s examples included the frequently opaque titles they were giving to their performances (for example, assuming the audience all knew who Mahler was and why his 2nd symphony was important or noteworthy) rather then telling the story of who Mahler was and why his 2nd symphony is an interesting and exciting thing.

And all too often content is taken from other written materials (programme notes, brochure copy) and just put onto the website without any real consideration that the web is an entirely different medium and whilst, yes, “it’s all words”, people consume those words in a totally different way when they’re on a screen, on a website.

I think that probably all arts organisations could do with reviewing how they’re producing content for their websites and who they’re producing it for. The idea of content design still seems to be in its infancy in the sector, it’ll be interesting to see if it gains traction as a discipline that people value (as they do in other sectors).

There are so many stories we can tell as cultural institutions but we need to think about how we tell them and who we’re talking to. Afterall we probably all have an opportunity to be story-tellers, which is pretty exciting when you think about it!

Congrats to Erik and the team at Capacity Interactive for a great conference. Lots to think about..