Is Marketing Shows a mug's game? The problem of choice in Chicago Theatre.

A Note: I'm in "state of the industry mode", with TCG about to start in a week and our very own Chicago Theater (anti-) Conference coming August 3rd. So if you're bored by numbers and marketing talk, skip this 2,200 word blog post. :)

Mortar Theatre recently published an interesting question on their blog, "Where have all the audiences gone?" There has been a lot of conversation in the last 24 hours about this issue and I have some interesting data points, and some possibly totally unfounded opinions on this subject.

At the Wit, we have also seen a recent drop off starting this spring in ticket sales volume. This is across companies in our space, and, working only with those companies that have run previous shows in our building where I have attendance data, there is a 28% drop off in paid attendance averaged across all such companies between this spring and the previous spring. Perversely, attendance this fall was up 30%, so annual attendance for the theater season is about even across all our companies.

So what can we make of this? I am currently tempted to ignore it as a single data point about recent attendance this spring isn't statistically meaningful. And as the companies have wildly differing marketing budgets and strategies, I am also tempted to disregard the individual sales tactics (but not entirely, thus this blog post) and look for more macro conditions.

Of these, of course, I know almost nothing as I'm not a sociologist or economist or statistician. I will note that this spring has been remarkably pleasant by Chicago standards, without the usual looney shifts into freezing winds or constant rain that typified spring for the previous three years. Maybe the initial turn into warm weather in March depressed many sales around the city. I can attest that daily sales dropped by 30% as soon as the temperature rose above 72 degrees. And we're well air-conditioned.

So maybe part of this is because it's nice out and Chicagoans' evening entertainment options dramatically expand whenever they can set foot outdoors without risking hypothermia.

But I don't think that's the whole story. So we called 400 customers of the Wit for a phone survey. The selection criteria was that they had to have a) seen a Theater Wit-produced show in the last 12 months), and b) not visited the Wit for at least three months. ie, we were trying to survey our previous more frequent visitors and find out where they went. Did we piss them off? Did they have a bad experience? Can/should we do something different?

On the long list of things I'm not, a poller is one of them, so I wasn't really sure how to formulate the questions without saying plaintively, "what happened? why don't you come back?" so I boiled it down to five questions:

1. How did you enjoy the play you saw last here?
2. Have you recommended the theater to anyone?
3. Is there anything we can do to improve your experience next time you come?
4. How many shows do you attend a year?
5. Have you heard about our current production of *Tigers Be Still?*

Out of 400 calls, we collected 60 responses. And the response was amazing. Of those 60 people who picked up the phone, the response broke down as follows:

1. Did you enjoy your show? 89% "loved it" 8% "liked it" and 3% "thought it was ok or a little disappointing" (I"m artificially collating all these responses because we just wrote down their comments rather than giving them a scale). I call that a win. By and large, the patrons at our space seem happy with the product quality.
2. Is there anything we can do to improve your experience? 98% were very complimentary about the building and the staff and the entire experience. We had a few negative comments, one about the house management, one about the long line at the bar, one request for both "larger productions" and "more experimental plays" and one request to "babysit my kids!" Which I would totally do if we could figure out the logistics and licensing. :)
3. 100% of the people would recommend our theater to others.
4. On average, our respondants attended 8 shows a year.
5. 38% had not heard of *Tigers be Still.* 62% had.

Other data points: about 40% of those surveyed are on our email newsletter list. Of those surveyed, they attended Theater Wit an average of 1.25 times in the twelve monthsOk, so here's what we know. Theater Wit has an customer approval rating HIGHER THAN APPLE COMPUTER. Any number of small businesses would kill for that kind of relationship and response from their customer base. It's a tribute to both the building and the programming that I'm really proud of. So we should probably be valued at at least a billion dollars, right? Why not?

And, if the average person sees 8 shows a year, and we know that at one to two of those are at Theater Wit, we're pulling that person in for at least an eighth of all their annual theatergoing visits. So, is the problem that there aren't any more people who want to attend? Doubtful.

Here is the real question I think we answered in our totally non-scientific survey:

Almost 40% of our "most-likely to attend" audience hadn't HEARD of *Tigers Be Still.* Why not? Here are the macro levels of our marketing plan for the curious:

1. Facebook ad placement, approximately 300 clickthroughs over six weeks.
2. Six weeks of theater loop/newsletter/metromix placements
3. Eight weeks of print display ads, primarily Tribune
4. Postcard drop to 2,200 patrons.

What I like about the "haven't heard" part of the question is that it removes the "convinced you to come" part of the marketing from the equation, which is a separate concern.

Everyone we called at the minimum recieved a postcard addressed to them. Half of them get our newsletter which talks about it every 2 weeks. We did not ask about their media consumption habits, so that's all the information. But regardless, if 4 out of 10 people hadn't heard about our current show, that means… something.

It might mean that all our marketing is totally ineffective. That it is so forgettable that people see it and dismiss it. But it might also mean that people are subjected to a ton of advertising messages and that we would need to spend more money to break through the white noise. I also think that media channels have become so fragmented that we're now spending money to reach 100 people on Facebook where we used to reach 50,000 in the Sun Times.

Of course, we can spend more money on advertising. We have a 100 seat house. How much advertising can we do before we exceed the capacity of the venue to sell tickets? Where would that money come from, etc.

I don't doubt that a $10,000/week marketing campaign could, with the right creative, sell out our house. But we'd spend more money buying the attention than we could realize in ticket sales. And this is the problem with marketing shows for the small houses that are so emblematic to Chicago's theater scene. Any gain we might get from improving the messaging is incremental at best; a breakthrough campaign has a financial distribution barrier that outweighs the potential transformative benefits.

So, what are we to do? If we don't advertise a show, no one knows about it. Even with advertising, there is no magic formula to pull in audience. And yet, we also know that people are paying attention. Our city always has little breakout shows, some of which are due to a 4-star Tribune review, but many of which are just good performers for that theatre. Word of mouth, a particular play at a particular moment, etc. are our most performant and least-controllable tools. And neither of them answers the question, "how do we get people in the door to start with?"

Is it the rapidly-old "supply-demand" trope that says Chicago is oversaturated and so deserving product can't find an audience? That's a part of it, but I just don't buy audience exhaustion in a city this large. Besides which, if the audience was truly exhausted, we wouldn't be seeing new people come through our door all the time. One of our members has subscriptions to seven theaters. One of our phone respondants said he sees about 100 shows a year! (I dropped him from the average as a clear outlier). Every year, about 20,000 people come into Theater Wit who have never been here before. That's not a over-extended audience. That's a vibrant marketplace.

So we need to think about what conversation we're having with our audience through direct and broadcast marketing channels. Maybe selling plays is the wrong thing to be selling.

"Alison" commented on Mortar's blog, in part saying:

Totally agree with so much here! My husband and I love theatre and hardly ever patronize smaller companies – usually only when a friend is involved. For me, I am SO overwhelmed in life being pulled I all directions that shopping around for a company to support or even a show to attend is hard… I feel pathetic saying “make it easy for me” but, well, there it is.

 

This really hit home for me. There's something true in what Alison says about the multiplicity of choice as a detriment to theater. Not in the tired old "supply-demand" economics front, but in a human psychology front. The problem with 80+ plays on a particular weekend is primarily a selection issue. I strongly recommend everyone take a look at "The Paradox of Choice," a TED talk by Barry Schultz:

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

If you aren't video patient (I'm not), Schwartz discusses that a multiplicity of choice provides a barrier to both consumption and satisfaction. The question becomes not "what should I see?" (difficult to answer in Chicago), but also "how can I figure out the *best* thing to see" (an impossible question to answer). Frustration leads to passivity and a lot of activatable audience like Alison miss out.

And what tools do we as an industry provide to help people make this impossible determination? Realistically, a few sentences, perhaps a paragraph at most. Sometimes it's an edited review, or a blurb in print, or a link on a listing/aggregation site.

Occasionally it's what fits on a postcard, or the first paragraph of an email.

Or a top ten list with four words.

And don't talk to me about video, I've seen my videos and your videos, good and bad, and also looked at the YouTube viewing statistics for them. It's not pretty. If the Goodman Theatre can only get 1,200 views with a star-studded, professionally produced video with Brian Dennehy and Nathan Lane, I'm not spending the money to play in that space until I have a *really good* idea. And, honestly, who is going to watch two dozen video previews in Chicago to make a determination? In that amount of time, that prospect could see an entire freaking play.

If there's a supply/demand factor at work, it's a "attention vs. time" problem. I would argue is a new factor of modern life and no good whining about it. On one hand, we can make so much more information available to the public. On the other, the public can't actually consume it.

So, I am now considering the idea that marketing shows needs to be a relatively minor part of our outreach. What do the most successful theaters in town have? How do they get that attention? Because believe me, It's not actually with money. Goodman and Steppenwolf have the exact same problem about communication bandwidth and audience attention that we all have. They have better tools and larger staffs, but also higher requirements for return. Timeline is similar, although scaled down accordingly, but hugely successful and a great model.

What Timeline and the other mid- to large- size theaters have built is trust. Not in a particular show, but in their identity as a whole. Consistency is a part of it, but so is time. This is probably Mortar's biggest problem. They're new. Right Brain Project is new. The Wit is new.

This is our challenge: enhance and build trust while helping audiences cope with the multiplicity of choice dilemma. It was when I first heard Schwartz' talk that I seriously considered our membership program, which is designed specifically to change the choice question and encourage people to find new companies and artists. I hope we will encourage trust through our own production standards and our curatorial interest in the companies that use our facility.

This next season, we're going to spend a lot more effort marketing the entire experience of coming to Theater Wit, and not focus on just our own shows. I believe that we can help everyone have stronger attended shows and find new audiences. We're going to talk about opportunity and Chicago's theater artists and experimentation and the joys of an evening out and uniqueness.

But in this city? In this millennium? Marketing just a show? Heartbreak awaits.

 

What's real on stage?

This last week a theatre/journalism firestorm erupted when This American Life retracted a rebroadcast they did of Mike Daisey's monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. TAL discovered that not all of the events described by Mike had actually happened to him. When questioned by the factcheckers, Mike then lied about a number of the specifics. TAL then broadcast an hour-long retraction, which focused on an interview with Mike about why he lied, followed by a sequence on Foxconn manufacturing from a NY Times reporter.

Much has been twittered and blogged about Mike's personal culpability, the impact for political theatre today, etc. A lot of discussion has circled around his intent. I think we can only guess at what Daisey was thinking or what the future holds for him and this piece. Most of the socialsphere seem to agree that the widespread impact of Mike's powerful piece has now been dramatically undermined. Some have suggested that he can't perform at all anymore. The latter position seems more tied to journalists and tech bloggers than theater practitioners as they are contextualizing Mike's professional sin in the context of professional journalism.

But of course, context is everything. There is a sequence in the TAL retraction show where Mike asks to return for a followup interview. In this post-interview, Mike says that he stands by the work and believes in its power and reality, and that his key mistake was lying to translate it into the journalistic context of a Public Radio broadcast. I believed this, but it's also the sequence that seems to stick in the craw of many people I've talked to.

And here's the interchange that stuck with me so strongly (from the transcript):

Mike Daisey: ... I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.

Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater. And how people see it -

Ira Glass: I find this to be a really hedgy answer. I think it’s OK for somebody in your position to say it isn’t all literally true, know what I mean, feel like actually it seems like it’s honest labeling, and I feel like that’s what’s actually called for at this point, is just honest labeling. Like, you make a nice show, people are moved by it, I was moved by it and if it were labeled honestly, I think everybody would react differently to it.

Mike Daisey: I don’t think that label covers the totality of what it is.

Ira Glass: That label – fiction?

Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.

Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as ‘here’s a work of fiction.’

Mike Daisey: I really regret putting the show on This American Life

I don't know how "normal" a worldview is. I do know that one of the most essential qualities of the theatre is the core dichotomy between artiface and humanity. There is an implicit assumption of the suspension of disbelief in the theater. When a gifted actor sobs on stage, he/she is actually crying. With genuine feelings, honestly expressed. AND we are being lied to. We want this; we need it. An announcement at the top of the show that "this is fiction" changes the experience. Even if we know it is fiction. (I think there are other ways to accomplish this besides a disclaimer, of course.)

I saw the show at the Public a few weeks ago, and choked up in the now infamous "It's a kind of magic" scene, which is an amazingly effective moment on stage. I thought a lot about this. Was the power of the moment solely due to my perception of it as literal truth? That certainly punched it up; it made the scene inarguable.

But, if I knew the scene was fiction, how would it have felt?

On the one hand, I would have been given an escape hatch if the moment was too painful. On the other hand, I’m in the theatre to have that emotional experience. Would I have taken that hatch, and how much does the piece rely on an implicit “documentary” authority? A friend I saw the play with said the experience was ruined for her. She felt that the specific call to action of the piece made it expressly political theater (which she normally avoids) and felt that him acting as a reliable witness was the key thing that made the play work for her. Interestingly, she identified the touching the iPad scene as fictional but was unbothered. She is actually upset about the contextual wrapper around the event which owes a lot to its airing on public radio.

My experience was different. I went back and listened to the broadcast. I thought the moment was still powerful. Even knowing it was fiction, it brings these tensions of ownership and privilege and indebtedness and responsibility together in a powerful moment. Even fictionally. This is the second show of Mike’s I’ve seen, and what I’ve admired in his work was his genuine passion, and how it creates a storyteller’s joyful excess in the room that can be as offputting as it is engaging. (For example, a side rant during the performance of Agony suggested that genuine theater was actually happening and that most of us have never seen it before. That distracted me for several minutes, far more than the possibility that every event I was hearing about may not be literally true, even if it was emotionally true.)

Because that’s the license we grant the theater. The ability to emphasize, distort and color life to help us focus on a deeper truth. It is, ironically, also what This American Life does so well every week. TAL edits its work very brilliantly to create emotional impact. Because of its position on Public Radio, it must be excruciatingly careful in its editing to walk an ethical line. They are as manipulative as any piece of theater; it's why I love the show. To compensate, they must insist on total factual accuracy. No one, including Mike, argues that his piece didn’t cross TAL’s journalism lines. Again, context is everything.

Agony has also been called to question by Mike’s inclusion of a meeting with a worker poisoned with Hexane gas. (This is a factual event, it just didn’t happen to Mike.) One of the challenges that Mike has in constructing a monologue is the question of immediacy, what he calls "unpacking the narrative complexities." His pieces always cast himself as the core character. Is this transposition inappropriate for the theater? Of course not. Anyone who’s tried to do anything on stage knows that the theater is about immediacy. Things have to happen to the people in front of us, without that, there is no kinesthetic response in the audience, and we don’t experience it in our hearts and minds.

Ira calls Mike out for being “hedgy” but I think that response is ingenuous. Radio journalism gets its power from hearing information first hand. This is rarely an option for the live theatre. Ira may assume that If someone on stage says "this happened to me" that it is an experience functionally identical to what happens on This American Life, but I don't think they are the same. At all.

But of course, the piece was billed specifically as "non-fiction" at several venues, so I have huge sympathy for Ira and my friend, who described her post-revelation experience as "having been Fox Newsed." On the other hand, the piece did make her care, and she still does. She's just angry about the delivery mechanism. If she had been taken to a play "based on real events" rather than "non-fiction" her experience would have been more positive. She could have owned the insights in the piece rather than feeling manipulated into it. Perhaps no label should have been applied, allowing the audience to build their own beliefs. Who knows?

Despite these errors, Mike created a vivid and exciting piece of theater. Like him, I might regret its broadcast by TAL, but I think it's important that we not throw the baby out with the bath water.

What I thought was most effective about The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was the way the piece conflated the larger questions of global manufacturing and workers’ rights with our own personal relationship with that technology. The piece was more personal than polemic, and its core question was presented intimately and theatrically. Daisey made me consider my relationship to these distant places as a consumer. I'm typing this on an iPad. I might never use one again without thinking of the human effort required to create this object. And that is a truth, theatrical and factual, that can't be erased by controversy.

 

New Year’s Resolution

Every January we emerge, blinking like naked mole rats in the harsh light of day from the holiday season. Every Christmas, the building is packed and this year was particularly dramatic, as not only did 3,500 of you come to see Santaland Diaries (a new record), but Spring Awakening, Silent Night of the Living Dead and The Reindeer Monologues were at near capacity for the last two weeks of December. Add the two repertory works performed by the striking Noemi Schloesser from Salomee Speelt, and I half expected to return to a smoking crater in the ground when I opened up the building on the 2nd of January. And we weren't the only ones near-living at the Wit, some of our members were here every weekend in the month of December just to see everything.

But of course, the holiday season passes and we're all supposed to take stock and consider our resolutions for a new year. My track record for personal New Year Resolutions is only about 50/50. The things I'm interested in at the beginning of each year tend to fall by the wayside as I chase new, shiny dreams. But the theater can make some resolutions as well. We've been in full operation for about 18 months, and I do think it's time to make a resolution or two. Here's our first:

Figure out where we are going. All of us.

This one is top of my list. And it comes directly our of our history, so a little examination of the past is probably useful in looking ahead to the future.

One of the key design decisions I made when organizing Theater Wit was that it was a theater with a space. I've written about why I feel that's critical for a theater. And then we, well, did it. Now, building out a space is famous for totally commandeering a theater's resources and energy. Mike Daisey talks, to great effect, about how making buildings destroys the integrity of producing organizations. In his gripping solo piece, How Theater Failed America, he has a fantastic story about how the pressures of running a large institutional theater permanently changes the type of work that can be presented there, often relegating the very art that created the institution to a small studio space ghettoized from the mainstage.

Now, I saw Daisey's piece one week after we opened our new theater. Which, in retrospect, was just as well, since it would have FREAKED ME OUT. But I think, in the spirit of our new year's resolutions, it's worth looking back at our first eighteen months and see what happened.

The biggest advantage we've realized is in gaining freedom to program. Far from changing or restricting our programming, having a home has enabled me to persue our artistic mission more truly. When we shifted from place to place, we spent all our effort telling you where we were, instead of telling you about the work. Settling down has enabled me to focus on our play selection, our deepening relationship with some of today's most important playwrights and tuning our work for a specific impact in a specific room. I feel much more freedom to offer work that isn't specifically "marketable" or has a great elevator pitch or tag line, because you, our audience, are coming to our shows much much more often.

I think some of this is directly attributable to the space and our new operations, where we did some counter-intuitive things.

• We shrank. We had been producing in a larger house. The material costs of our productions shrank by about 18% and our rental cost dropped by about 20%. We put that money directly into performer salaries and adding preview performances which has allowed us to improve the quality of our work tremendously.

• We shared. The model of our new building was always based around a shared space that other companies could rent and produce entire seasons in. More importantly, we resolved not to finance our own productions with rental income from the theater space. This was a risky strategy because we didn't know if we would get lost in our own space. And it entailed a huge investment of time and money without direct recompense. How do we best support work by other companies while still maintaining a direct relationship with you, our audience? So we decided to share the audience as well. We started programs like the FlexPass and Membership cards to actively encourage our audience to explore other companies' work. Again, we run these programs at cost so we don't profit financially from them, but we deepen our audiences' relationship with us and the visiting companies simultaneously. We redesigned our website to help audiences find the amazing variety of work produced in the building. And it seems to be working. Last season, twenty five thousand people came to Theater Wit. Three thousand of them attended shows by two different companies. A growing number of members attend our theater two to three times a month. Single ticket sales for our own shows are increasing 15% show over show for the last eighteen months. This year, 18,000 people have come to the Wit in the last three months.

• We stopped discounting For our own shows (we don't impose any pricing practices on renting companies), our new ticket model releases tickets to each show in blocks, starting at $18. Once the $18 tickets are sold, the next block goes on sale for $24 and so forth and so on. I wanted to ensure that prices were egalitarian while still making sure we kept ourselves operationally afloat. Rather than subject people to a crazy hunt for discount codes and discount ticket mailing services and sites, anyone can see any one of our shows for a low price with a reservation far enough in advance. And members get to see multiple plays even cheaper if they wish. We do still release tickets for same day sales at the HotTix booth to support that community of theatergoers and the League of Chicago Theaters. We also offer discount tickets to students under 25 at the door. Apart from that, there are no special offers, no deals. And both audience size and revenues have increased since we started this policy.
  
  
• Bring ticketing in house. The current trend for theaters is to outsource their ticketing systems to third parties. We wanted you to talk to our own staff about all the shows, and we also wanted to get rid of aftermarket ticketing fees. This has taken a huge effort of time and money, but we can now staff a box office by someone who's actually eaten at the restaurants he recommends, who's seen the plays, etc. And we can do it without charging you facility fees, service fees, credit card processing fees, renovation fees, etc.

When I look at the company's history over the last seven years, I see so many of our decisions made in response to a key operational concern: We're making a space. From the conception of our company, starting with a home base was a given. This affected a huge range of decisions, from frequency of production to type of programming. It's hard to over-estimate how critical the long-term plan of building a home was in every aspect of our operations.

Now, of course, we have a home. And, unlike most of the dire warnings about how space confines you, having the physical building completed is wildly freeing for us. We have a much broader range of options available at every turn. The loss of the build-a-space priority (and the gain of have-a-space) has multiplied our options immeasurably.

But all this means we have to refocus as an organization. We are refocusing on our mission, our values and our artistic sensibility, and we need to do it company-wide, from the board down to the interns. Here are the questions we are looking to answer this year.

What is Theater Wit?

Who are we and what do we want to become next?

How does our space and our programming enhance our community of theaters? of audience?

I can't answer those questions in a bubble. So, we are doing some formal strategic planning sessions with the staff and the board. We're also just sitting at the bar and hashing these questions out. And we are going to our audience and other theaters and finding out what they have to say. Heck, I'm going to this blog, so if you have any ideas about these questions, sound off in the comments. I'd love to hear from you.