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 pande ..read more

[This is a re-post from ten years ago. Sadly, it’s 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 orga ..read more

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 o ..read more

According to Variety, Patti LuPone managed to insulted 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 probabl ..read more

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 devote 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 de ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 in ..read more

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 takedo ..read more

In a recent blog post on her Culture for Hire website, Ruth Hartt reminds us that it’s not a good idea to be overly didactic in arts marketing content. It’s useful advice for organizations that need to replace audiences lost to the pandemic. New audiences don’t possess the same background knowledge that older audiences do, so arts administrators often try to fill in the gap by slipping educational content into their marketing. It comes out of an ernest but twisted sort of thinking that says, “We know you lack this knowledge so we’re going to feed it to you in this promotional material in hopes ..read more