The real stuff

I confess: that last post kind of bored me. Smart people already know all that, don't they? Anyway, I wrote it, and now we can move on to something more interesting. But the last sentence of the last post does provide a starting point for today's topic: Give people substance in your communication with them. For some reason, theater people want to be advertising people. They get excited about advertising their productions in some slick way that makes them feel like they're on Mad Men. Don't do it. It's not you, that's not what you're best at, and besides, you're the content creators. You can make the real stuff. The wonder of social networking on the Web is that it allows much, much better word-of-mouth advertising than we've ever been able to do before on a much larger and quicker scale. (Yeah, I know seems like I changed topics. Don't worry; I'll get back to that.) Word-of-mouth is by far the most effective form of advertising you have at your disposal. It's always been that way, and it always will be. Other promotional methods may come and go -- last year it was web ads, this year it's brand analysis, or whatever -- but if you can get people to tell their friends about how good your show is, then that's where you really get audience. It doesn't really matter whether they use Twitter or semaphore to communicate that. However, the range of easy media options available in our (not-so-) new digital age gives you a range of tools to facilitate word-of-mouth. It's great if someone tells his buddy, "You gotta see this show!" but it's much better if he can prove it. This is what video can do so well but, depending on the show, audio, interactive, or a well-thought-out piece of creative writing can also work. But this is what a "trailer" needs to be, and somehow people forget that. Of course we want our video trailer to go viral, but it seems to be lost on lots of people that that means it has to be good. It has to be enjoyable enough on its own for people to want to pass it on. Occasionally an advertisement is that good, but rarely. However, you're artists: you can make the real stuff. This touches on another point from the previous post: increasing points of access. You have an artistic vision. Why not express this vision in your promotional materials? Then your promotional materials become a sample of your art, a small piece of work for the skeptical to try you out. Aside from dance, it seems that theater gives people the least information for the largest expected investment of any of the arts or any form of entertainment. So often we expect people to want to see our shows by giving them a production photo (or even worse, a staged press photo) and a paragraph blurb. And then expecting them to pay twenty bucks or more for that risk. We need to reduce that risk. We need to give people small amounts of content requiring very little commitment. We want them to come to our shows wanting more. And in one of life's little ironies, remember that if people come to a show expecting to like it, they're much more likely to like it. People want to be right. And when they are (or believe they are), we want them to tell everybody they know about it. People like to claim first discovery, but first discovery is so much better if you can get others to agree with you. Making this aspect of human nature work for you requires a couple of challenging tactics. First, as I discussed above, you have to give them compelling tools to make their point. But, more importantly, you have to give them time to make their case. If your show only runs one weekend, you're screwed. If it runs two weekends, it's not much better. Unless... ... You get people to be sure that your show is great, well before it opens. Once, I had the unenviable challenge of promoting a show that was a completely original creation, one that was most certainly not going to be finished being created until opening night, and probably not until closing night. I wanted to do a set of promotional trailers, to be released starting five weeks before opening, but I was feeling like I'd be lucky if I got a show title that early. Production footage? Forget about it. Rather than giving up, I thought of doing a set of "making of" mini-documentaries, but when we started to shoot, the actors wouldn't leave character. After a brief moment of panic, I realized we had something far better than a mini-documentary: we had an independent-but-related supplementary piece of art, a piece that people would want to distribute, could stand alone and be entertaining on its own. It went viral, people who had never been to our theater were dying to see the show, students were coming back a second or third time and bringing their friends. This is what we want. Most importantly, they already liked the show when they arrived at the theater. They had enough information to feel their risk was minimal. They had the tools to pass the word along. The transformation was complete: total strangers had become the best promoters. Of course, this raises a new critical issue, one that I'm going to deal with in the next post. I call the issue: "Are you any good?"