Got this brochure recently from the reanimated San Diego Opera…

… and couldn’t help noticing its kinship with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s season brochure, which features images like this:

I wrote a few weeks ago about SDO’s post-crisis brochure, which featured a short white man in a brown suit, and I think this might be a marginal improvement, but I can’t help wondering what’s up with the flying babes. What the hell do sylphs have to do with selling tickets and why are two of America’s most notoriously troubled arts organizations featuring them in their marketing materials?

Do these organizations know something we don’t know about the persuasive power of sky spirits? Or is it possible that inane marketing choices are a shared characteristic of failing arts organizations?

In professional marketing, images that appear in sales collateral are chosen according to market intelligence and they’re designed to leverage actual audience dispositions. Given my experience with nonprofit arts organizations, I’m going to guess that these images were chosen by amateur insiders according to personal opinions and designed to look nice.

If the creators of these materials had access to objective research data and were designing sales messages in response to what target audiences told them they were looking for, sylphs would never have been a consideration.

Executive leaders of arts institutions that don’t sell enough tickets should understand this.

If they don’t, we may have a clue as to why they’re in so much trouble.