Arts Intranet

Over the past few weeks, a new face has been popping up at street fairs and food festivals across the country: an Amazon “food truck,” doling out Kindle Fires alongside neighboring trucks’ hot dogs, hamburgers, and artisanal cupcakes.

Amazon isn’t angling to be a contestant on “The Great Food Truck Race,” though. Rather, it is making an effort to fulfill the needs and desires of today’s changing consumer. Amazon understands that today, technology is as much a part of the fabric of everyday life as eating and drinking, and it is addressing this shift head-on.

What does this have to do with the future of arts marketing?

Ariel Fielding

How does a marketing director with an audience-centered approach reconcile the growing primacy of data and digital marketing? Would it be possible for such a person — me — to collect, analyze, and mobilize data without reducing patrons to strings of zeros and ones? Would the things I love about my work — using images, language, and design to entice people to join the audience, and to give them a larger context for understanding the performing arts — would these things become less important in the headlong rush towards data? These are a few of the questions I brought to NAMPC2014, and the answers I found were more compelling, nuanced, and heartening than I expected.

Your users are telling you that your website is broken. They’re telling you what content they like and what they don’t. They tell you who they are and what they need. They’re even telling you how to prioritize your web initiatives. You have their stories and the ability to listen to them. Those stories, of course, are contained in your data.

Web analytics is often defined and accepted as measurement and reporting – numbers that tell us about traffic volumes and website performance. Although measurement is one of the more powerful components of digital (the ability to cheaply measure things in fine detail, with high accuracy, and in a real-time basis should not be overlooked), that on its own does not define analytics.

Just this October, our venue presented Orpheus in the Underworld (Virginia Opera) that got a rave review in a major newspaper.  But, by the time the review hit, the set was struck and it was too late for those readers to see the production. This is our challenge every week. Our audience members leave feeling inspired. We receive fantastic feedback immediately about our programming. Presumably, they leave our venue and tell their friends about their recent arts experience. The word is spreading! But, the artist was only on our stage for one night or at the most one weekend. The buzz is too late to sell those tickets and engage more audience. 

James Sims

If size matters, community engagement must not, or so the current trend of Facebook advertising and it’s near white-noise moment forecasts. Now that the dust has settled on arts organizations creating social media channels, the urgency for continually increasing follower count needs to slow down and priority needs to shift to integrating content and social strategies.

Did someone in your marketing department cheer when Instagram announced that advertisements were nearing reality on the photo-sharing network? Send that person back to Social Media 101. For every step a social platform takes towards monetization, two steps are lost in the journey towards community engagement.

“Marketers believe that a good ad can divert attention, maybe even kick start conversation – a troubling proposition,” writes André Mouton. Is he wrong? Hardly. Beyond the obvious danger of over-saturation, the loss of an already somewhat tenuous relationship between brand and consumer on digital platforms is a real risk.

Breaking that relationship would mean a complete defeat of the social engagement overhaul organizations spent the last few years adopting. “Social media is in danger of becoming something like reality television – a glimpse into the lives of people we find interesting, but have little personal connection with,” Mounton adds.

How should a brand avoid falling down the advertising rabbit hole on social media? Start understanding that everything you post on social media is, by its very nature of coming from a brand account, considered an advertisement. That innocuous photo of a gorgeous sunset over your theatre’s plaza might have resulted in ten times the number of shares a link to the latest New York Times review received, but they are both serving the same purpose in the eyes of a consumer—brand awareness.

Kim Hedges

The day we planned to launch the new AmericansForTheArts.org website, everyone on staff was ready for a party-a pizza party to be exact–to celebrate all our hard work and the debut of our beautiful new site.

While the web team was humbled by staff's faith in us and their palpable joy about the new site they helped create, we were a little less ready to celebrate.

Yes, technically, we just needed to make one DNS update on that day to point traffic from our old site to the new one and viola, a new site is launched.

But, it's actually not that simple.

Yes, we had spent weeks testing the site and getting everything in order, but the traffic of 10 people testing a site just doesn't match the traffic of your daily visitors. When you open your site to that increased traffic, they stretch it in different ways, interact with it differently, and a new level of testing begins.

And that’s the testing that really matters-whether you acknowledge it or not.