I heard two surprisingly dubious radio ads for arts events this week.

The first one, from the L.A. Opera, was so mind-numbingly trite that I couldn’t remember what show they were trying to sell.

The second, from L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, was a jumble of artsy jargon so dense I couldn’t understand what they were trying to say, let alone figure out what they wanted me to do.

There’s nothing new here. Most nonprofit arts advertising is amateurish drivel. But the thing that really got me was how familiar the drivel was: it was the same drivel arts organizations were using before the pandemic.

I could write a lengthy essay here about the post-pandemic audience crisis, how deep and long-lasting – if not permanent – the losses will be, and how necessary it will be for arts organizations to recoup their losses by attracting new audiences, but we are all painfully aware of this new reality.

I will say this: If you’re still speaking to the customers you lost while ignoring the customers you need to gain, you deserve to be swept away in the great culling.

Trying to appeal to uninitiated audiences with the same frivolous, canned, selfish, empty-headed, out-of-touch, condescending nonsense you’ve been vomiting at the world for the last fifty years is completely irresponsible.

I’ve got three questions for L.A. Opera, MOCA, or any other arts organization that hasn’t radically re-tooled its strategic communications in response to this new post-pandemic reality:

In your efforts to appeal to new audiences, who exactly are you talking to?

What have they told you they want?

How have you adapted your strategic communications to capitalize on this knowledge?

If you can’t identify exactly who you want to have visiting your venues, if you haven’t taken time to engage with them, learn about their lives, and understand their desires, and if you haven’t bothered to figure out if there’s any overlap between what they told you they want and what you’re trying to sell, you have no business blaming Covid or anyone else for your failures.

If there’s one thing the pandemic has driven home with screaming urgency, it is this: It’s not about you anymore.

Why are you still blathering on as if it’s all about you?

[This is a re-post from several years ago. Sadly, it is more relevant now than ever.]

History may tell us that one of the greatest tragedies in the arts was that our generation gambled away the survival of professional art forms on the promise of amateur marketing.

Classical concert music, for example, employs the most talented, highly trained, technically proficient professional musicians in the world, yet we market their output with the efforts of workers who rank nowhere near the top of the marketing profession. Unlike artists who at the top of their professions work for nonprofit arts organizations, marketers at the top of their professions work in successful businesses, corporations, and political campaigns where strategic communications are far more sophisticated.

Arts marketing is somewhat of an oddball in the broader marketing realm. It stands apart from the mainstream, it answers to its own set of quirky norms and traditions, it doesn’t evolve with the markets it expects to influence and it takes its marching orders from executive leaders who have no particular expertise.

I mean no disrespect to arts marketers. There are many talented, trained, experienced, technically proficient arts professionals who do marketing, but the standards the cultural sector expects from marketing fall so far short of the standards upheld by the marketing profession in general that any critical comparison will reveal a disturbing imbalance.

What fascinates me about this imbalance is that amateur marketing is so deeply ingrained in the culture of culture that we rarely, if ever, step back to consider the damage it might be doing – or bother to ask if we should expect our communications staff to perform at the same level of professionalism as their counterparts on the stage. Venerable institutions that represent the highest imaginable achievements in artistic excellence are teetering on the verge of insolvency because they can’t sell enough tickets – yet they refuse to apply the same rigor to the process of persuading new audiences as they do to producing and presenting classical concert music, theatre, dance, opera, fine art, etc.

Take a look at the promotional content used by just about any troubled arts organization that’s making news these days and you’ll find communications that bear the unmistakable hallmarks of having been created by amateurs. These hallmarks – as I’ve stated so often on this blog – are self-flattery, self-indulgence, self-importance, condescension, presumption, cloying clichés, off-putting stereotypes, frivolous poetic metaphors, artifice, unrestrained hyperbole, mindless repetition, and a cavalier, if not arrogant, disregard for the perspectives of persuadable but skeptical outsiders. Seldom will you find customer-centered content that was crafted by knowledgeable communications strategists using objective, external market intelligence and rational methodologies. That sort of thing may be commonplace in professional marketing circles, but it’s just not how we do things in the arts.

I find it ironic that local cultural communities can rally around obscenely expensive and unnecessary building projects that saddle arts organizations with massive long-term overhead but can’t scrounge up enough money to hire marketers with enough expertise to keep the doors open. And I’m amazed that the cultural sector as a whole continues to undervalue marketing as if it’s the shameful concession people thought it was back in the 1980s – or fundraising’s bastard stepchild, or a commonsense endeavor that any passionate intern can learn, or the operational department that makes all those pretty posters and brochures.

Traditional sales-dependent arts organizations need a steady supply of new audiences to guarantee their survival. This is a simple fact. The only way to get these audiences is to persuade new people to come, and the only way to do that is with new, more effective, more persuasive forms of strategic communication. We can’t fundraise new audiences (unless the funding community wants to pay their way). We can’t find new audiences through public policy. We can’t educate new audiences when it takes a generation to see returns. We can’t engage new audiences by talking down to them about how wonderful we are. We can’t get new audiences to come by doing what we’ve always done and hoping for better results (which appears to be the dominant strategic approach). We can’t compete for new audiences if we fail to match the sophistication of our commercial competitors. And we can’t attract new audiences by placing all our faith in data and technology when the strategic impact of the substance of our communication is what makes the primary difference.

Can the arts professionalize marketing? Sure. With the right industry leadership, the right expertise, the right allocation of resources and an influx of educated, experienced, properly compensated marketing professionals, it’s well within the realm of possibility. But can the arts make the changes that will be required to make it happen? This I’m not so sure about. Comprehensive change would have to originate with leaders who understand the issues, know where to find help, and have enough influence to move the industry quickly and decisively away from counterproductive traditions toward more productive business practices. Given the cultural sector’s preoccupation with fundraising and public policy, however, and the notable scarcity of qualified marketers in industry leadership positions, such change is unlikely to occur any time soon.

Meanwhile we sit and watch as a long line of organizations creeps inevitably toward the brink, all the while preening and strutting and flirting and boasting as if it’s 1959 and the world is overflowing with avid arts lovers who find them irresistible. This is not the case, of course, but it appears that somebody forgot to tell the people who approve all the emails, press releases, banners, and brochures.

Professional marketers wouldn’t let their organizations talk endlessly – and almost exclusively – about how wonderful and important they were unless they had plenty of objective, external evidence to suggest that self-proclaimed wonderfulness and importance were compelling factors in new audiences’ decision-making processes. The likelier scenario is that they’d learn what new audiences actually believe is wonderful and important – in their realities and on their terms – and talk about that in equal measure.

The arts can be forgiven for having taken so long to accept marketing. Nobody wanted to believe back in the 1970s and 80s that art needed to be sold. But now that we know that attracting and keeping new audiences for many traditional arts organizations is the only thing standing between survival and obsolescence, shouldn’t we at least give professional marketing a try?

Struggling American theatres are taking quite a beating in the comments section of a New York Times editorial today.

Isaac Butler has written an essay arguing that America’s nonprofit theatre industry needs a government bailout. Theatres are closing or shrinking everywhere – especially after covid – and Butler wants taxpayers to put them on life support. It’s the usual “too important to let die” sort of cant that fills most grant applications, but the readers aren’t having it.

Two things struck me about the response. There weren’t all that many comments compared to most Times articles – just over 500 by mid afternoon, by which time the headline had disappeared from the home page. And there wasn’t much support for Butler’s thesis. Most commenters didn’t think the government should be asked to artificially sustain an industry that can’t find enough customers to keep its doors open.

The good news is that these responses contain plenty of useful feedback for out of touch theatre professionals who need a wakeup call.

Definitely worth a read – if you can still find it.

I found the paragraph below in a job ad for an arts marketing manager.

Somebody needs to encourage the ten highest-paid executives at the Philadelphia Orchestra to print out this paragraph, fan out into city neighborhoods, read it to people gathered in hoagie shops and pay very close attention to the looks on their faces.

For about a week.

“Leading with our bold vision to inspire and connect humanity through the Philadelphia Sound, we at The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, Inc. are vital influencers and conveners, emblemizing our values of being exceptional, innovative, diverse and inclusive, and authentic. IDEAS—Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access Strategies—is a comprehensive transformation process, guided by our vision and values, to assess and improve all aspects of our operations, concerts, and programs, and to spur sustainable change.”

Note to job applicants: Make sure you learn what ‘emblemizing values’ is before anyone asks you to do it.

According to Variety, Patti LuPone managed to insult millions of Broadway ticket buyers AND a host of Broadway producers recently with this comment:

“I think we’ve spent — not we, but whoever’s in charge of, whatever — has actively dumbed down the audience. And so the attention span of the majority of the audience, I think, is much less than it was in the past, and I don’t think plays are going to have long lives on Broadway — I feel as though it’s turning into Disneyland, a circus and Las Vegas.”

Calling someone who spent a small fortune to spend an evening with you ‘dumb’ is probably counterproductive.

If Ms. LuPone wants more sophisticated shows with smarter audiences, she should create and produce her own material and do her own marketing aimed at drawing only smart people with long attention spans to her shows. Only then will she have the right to call her customers dumb or compare her work to theme parks, circuses or popular entertainment destinations.

And it’s not just Patti. Arts professionals everywhere regularly insult the people who pay their salaries by lamenting the ‘dumbing down’ of audiences, criticizing their shortened attention spans, and complaining about having to produce ‘popular’ entertainment to get people to buy tickets. Seldom do these folks venture outside their artsy bubbles long enough to immerse themselves in the lives and cultures of the distracted dummies they so casually disparage.

To her credit, Patti is suggesting that she’s stepping away, which is probably a good idea. If you are old, and you have strict standards that were established several decades ago, and you are disturbed by changes that are happening around you, it’s probably best to pull away from the mainstream and hold onto whatever stability you can find for however long you have left.

Meanwhile, the world will continue to change, art and entertainment will endure, and audiences – however dumb and distracted they may be – will continue to decide who belongs on the stage.

A Denver dance company did and they’re just fine.

According to a recent article in The Denver Gazette, the Wonderbound dance company chose to take the time, money and energy that once went into social media, and direct it instead into personal engagement with their audience.

According to Artistic Director Garrett Ammon, the decision had no noticeable negative effects and sales are actually up. Ammon confessed that he’s “a total lifelong tech-geek,” but suspected that the tech his company had adopted was distancing people, rather than connecting people, to dance.

“Our stated mission is to deepen humankind’s common bond, and I feel that the way social media has evolved, it is doing the exact opposite.” – Garrett Ammon

I think Ammon has touched on a deeply unsettling truth about human art forms and digital media. They may be two entirely different and, ultimately, incompatible things.

Read the article and listen to the Ezra Klein podcast that Ammon mentions. It’s really fascinating stuff.

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Thanks to Artsjournal.com for the heads up.

If you believe that artists deserve to be paid, or that arts organizations deserve to exist, you’ve got to read this great post from Alan Harrison.

My favorite quote: “Outside of a very few, no one cares if a nonprofit arts organization closes except its current staff, leaders, board members, artists, and its core audience. Politicking folks may experience temporary wringing of hands, but only for show.”

Alan has committed the ultimate nonprofit blasphemy of revealing that the community is the measure of the value of an arts organization.

It’s about them.

Who knew?

Any young arts administrator whose attempts at innovation are thwarted by change-averse leaders should read this article: “What Stops Managers from Looking to Other Industries for Inspiration.” 

The Harvard Business Journal article does a great job of describing why organizations insulate themselves from external influences, and why it’s so hard for internal change agents to obtain and exploit useful information from outside their industry bubbles.

Fortunately, the article also offers pragmatic advice for overcoming these obstacles and finding ways to introduce productive innovations.

The arts belong to a business category where customers are asked to secure access (seats, tickets, admissions) to something that takes place outside the home. This means there is a natural kinship between the arts and a broad variety of businesses that do similar things: theme parks, attractions, sports venues, popular entertainment providers, special events & festivals, travel destinations, travel service providers, tour operators, etc. All of these businesses specialize in getting customers to come out and do something, and then selling them the access they’ll need to do it. 

And they all offer opportunities for the arts to learn about and embrace new ways of getting customers to participate, and new ways to sell them the tickets or admissions they’ll need to secure their access.

This pandemic has made innovation more important than ever before. It’s time for young, smart, well-educated arts managers to infuse their organizations with fresh knowledge from outside sources, and to circumvent the efforts of well-meaning but inert leaders to stop them.

Thanks to Artsjournal.com for including this article in their excellent roundup.

Ruth Hartt has hobbled together a demo video that every executive director of every traditional arts institution should see. It’s a raw mockup she’s created to illuminate the future of arts marketing and it may well be the salvation that audience-hungry arts organizations are searching for.

Click the link above, read the post carefully and watch the video.

If you’re member of the funding community, this is what you guys should be paying for.

If you’re an arts policy wonk, this is what the policy community should be advocating.

If you represent an arts industry trade organization, this is an initiative your group should be spearheading.

If you’re a leader of an arts organization who thinks your old-fashioned, self-centered promotional boasting is a good idea, you need to stand down, get out of the way and let this happen.

Promoting shows doesn’t work anymore. We have to sell the personal, emotional, customer-centered value of going to shows and Ruth has just given us a template for doing that.

It’s time.

If you like stories about arrogant, imperious, out-of-touch arts organizations getting their comeuppance, read this L. A. Times article now.

In the grand scheme of things, news stories about museum directors are about as important as summer corn salad recipes or things to do over the Labor Day weekend. And news stories about publicists trying to control news stories about museum directors are of dubious journalistic relevance.

But if you’re a Covid era arts administrator who still communicates with your support systems from a position of self-important superiority, Christopher Knight’s takedown of the Museum of Contemporary Art is a cautionary tale worth heeding.

It’s also a deliciously juicy good read.