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.