Webinar Recap: Driving Attendance - Early Findings (Part 2)
Advisory Board for the Arts was excited to continue sharing early insights from our latest Signature Research Initiative, Driving Attendance Post-Pandemic: Marketing Practices that Accelerate Audience Growth during our second in a series of webinars about the study on January 11th.
This virtual session, led by our Chief Research Officer, Pope Ward, explored the second set of early insights from the marketing study many ABA friends and member organizations took part in across the summer and autumn of 2023. Missed the webinar? Read on for a full recap, and scroll to the bottom of the page for a full video recording.
Themes of the Research Findings
Before jumping into the day’s material, we completed a brief review of the study purpose, structure, and first four key findings, which we covered in our December 19th webinar. For those who missed that session, a full recap and recording is available here.
We then set up the main themes of the final three findings:
First, top performers don’t focus their time on aligning the audience experience with what the brand stands for — in fact, they're a bit less likely to control the physical space than their peers. Instead, they focus on creating context so that people know what to expect before they come. They frame the experience emotionally to give it meaning and they reduce uncertainty around what’s physically going to happen during the event.
Next, top performers don’t have disproportionate influence over the artistic agenda relative to their peers. Instead, they focus on being good collaborators with the rest of the organization. Frequent communication and participative content development is more important than internal power dynamics.
Third, top performers are conservative investors in the productions that they market. When it comes to program marketing spend, it’s better to think of them as value investors than speculators or gamblers looking to strike it big occasionally.
With that context, we moved into our first hypothesis of the day.
Hypothesis #5: Top Performers Architect Differentiated Experiences Closely Aligned with the Institutional Brand
Our initial premise was that top performers focus on creating a “total experience” that is highly differentiated — meaning that the experience reinforces what the brand stands for, in the same way that, if you walk into an Apple store, the visuals and behaviors of staff reinforce what the brand is all about. We wanted to test whether the same is true in the arts.
The reality is, while top performers are almost twice as likely to say their experience is highly distinctive, only a small portion of organizations reported that their experience is tightly aligned with their brand. And top performers were even a bit less likely to describe their experience as even somewhat aligned.
So, if their experiences were distinct, but they weren’t brand aligned, what were they? We asked survey takers to tell us what made their experiences distinct, and the number one answer was the production itself. It is simply very difficult for performing arts organizations not to focus on the artistic quality of what’s going on on-stage. Beyond the stage, organizations reported focusing on the quality of the physical space of the theater/auditorium, as well as attempts to use the venue and lobby as welcoming “second spaces” to shape the experience.
Next, we looked at what top performers do to make the experiences in these spaces so differentiated. And to do so, we used a metaphor: pizza vs. steak. Many people enjoy both, but when they enjoy it often depends on context. For instance, steak would make much less sense at a children’s birthday party than would pizza. The best marketers don’t do a better job of accurately describing a pepperoni pizza. They do a better job of creating a context in which a pepperoni pizza sounds amazing — or steak if that’s what they’re serving. They work to attract people who want that experience and put them in a frame of mind to get the most out of it.
Similarly, the best arts marketers don’t more accurately describe what’s going to be taking place on stage. They do a better job of framing the experience in a way that makes what’s on stage sound amazing, or comforting, or mind expanding, or larger than life… whatever it is that your experience uniquely provides.
To create a highly distinctive experience, top performers aren’t so much focused on engineering the lobby experience or the service quality so much as they are creating context, emotional and otherwise, through their marketing efforts. They do this to increase the chances that they’ll attract people who will value their experience and put potential audiences into a mindset where they will get the most out of it.
They also focus on activities that increase the confidence level among audiences (especially new audiences) that they will get value out of the experience and that they shouldn’t have anxiety or uncertainty about what the experience will be like.
So while our initial hypothesis about tying the experience to the institutional brand was not quite correct, it is true that top performers do something different to create a framework that attracts the right people to the performance and increases their appreciation of the experience.
Hypothesis #6: Marketing Organizations with Greater Influence over Artistic Programming Outperform Their Peers
We are now shifting from an external view of the experience that we’re creating for customers to a hypothesis that is deeply focused on ourselves: what are the power dynamics within our organizations? Specifically, what is the relationship between the artistic side of the organization and the rest — especially marketing.
The hypothesis here was that marketing departments with greater influence over and involvement in decisions about programming will outperform their peers.
In the graph below, we asked marketers explicitly how much influence they have over Artistic programming decisions.
Looking at the left, over half of top performers say that they have only minimal influence over the organization’s programming choices.
And, looking over at the graphic on the far right, we asked about whether artistic leadership was willing to accommodate changes to the season to achieve revenue goals. No top performing organizations said that their artistic leadership was open to changes “to a strong extent.”
So, the story seems to be that the artistic team largely owns programming, and marketing largely owns brand character & positioning — and the two agree not to mess too much with each other’s territory. This is also reflected in the timing of marketing teams’ involvement in programming, which is typically after a provisional full plan has been developed at top performing institutions.
To set up what differentiates top marketing departments regarding their organizational influence, we looked at an out-of-industry case study from the business world. Valdis Krebs is a data scientist who specializes in social, relational, multimodal data analysis and visualization to help clients understand and improve their organizations and communities. He has created network maps for everything from terrorist networks to corporate communications across racial lines to interactions among bicycle clubs in Philadelphia. Years ago, he worked with IBM, who wanted to figure out why some product development teams were more successful than others. There was one product team that was achieving much higher hit rates with new products than others, and they were doing it in much shorter time frames than average. Krebs’ network maps showed that there was much more cross-functional communication on this team than in others. Research and development was talking to manufacturing, who was talking to marketing, who was talking to sales. It turned out that, when these groups talked, they were much more likely to make decisions that didn’t create problems for their colleagues later in the process.
When IBM brought this group together to ask what was facilitating this communication, they discovered that all the members of the team were smokers, and when they were out in front of the building on a break, they got to talking. The informal communications during those smoke breaks created a productivity breakthrough.
Top performing marketing departments in the arts appear to be onto the same insight.
Marketers at these organizations prioritize meetings with other teams — particularly development — with the express intent of collaboration. These teams also facilitate contributions from other departments, like artistic and education, for marketing campaign content. So, while artistic is mainly managing programming choices, the whole organization is collaborating to bring that vision to life in ways that are highly aligned. And marketing plays the key role of “aligner in chief” in this process.
Back to our hypothesis, it turns out that success is tied more to the level of collaboration across the institution, and less to marketing teams’ influence over the artistic planning process.
Hypothesis #7: Top Performers Shift Program Investment Dynamically To Capitalize on Successful Productions
Our final hypothesis was that top performing marketing departments are more fluid in how they invest money to promote individual programs. Specifically, we wanted to test whether they were more likely to shift funds from productions that weren’t performing as well, and put it into productions that had momentum.
To start, we looked at how marketers behave with regard to ticketing.
On the left, you can see that top performers have increased their high end prices by about 50% over the past four years, harvesting more revenue from their least price sensitive customers. Their peers, on the other hand, are just getting back to their pre-pandemic pricing.
On the right, top performers are spending a little less at the beginning of the production cycle, and more at the very end of the cycle, just as a production is launching. We hear a lot about this waiting game that is increasingly getting played these days. Audiences are buying tickets later, creating a lot of stress for marketing departments because they have less visibility early about whether they’re going to hit their sales targets.
The data here seem to be saying that top performers are resolved to the behavioral shift, confident that, if they shift spending to later in the cycle when people are ready to commit, they’ll still hit their numbers. Spend too much before people are willing to commit, and you’re wasting your money.
Together, these insights suggest a pragmatism among top performers. Next, we looked at their sense of conservatism.
Top performers are surprisingly more likely to low-ball their revenue forecasts, while their peers are more likely to be spot on or a little aggressive in their forecasts. When you combine this with the bigger picture about top performer mindsets, a reasonable interpretation is that top performers are simply being conservative. They are “value investors” rather than “gamblers” when it comes to program-marketing spend.
We then looked at how often marketing departments cut spending on a production vs. increasing budget. Top performers were almost 50% more likely to have cut the budget between two to four times across their past ten shows. They were also twice as likely never to have increased budget for any of the past ten performances. This suggests that top performers have a disposition to trim rather than boost budgets for individual productions.
So, unlike our hypothesis suggested, top performers are willing to follow the money when it comes to pricing and timing of spend, but they are in general pretty conservative when it comes to investment in particular shows. They:
Forecast conservatively,
Spend in a narrower band,
And are more likely to cut spending than increase it.
Prudence and discipline is what characterizes the high performers in this space.
Final Takeaways
We finished with a reminder of key insights coming out of both our webinars — a summary of the most impactful and actionable lessons from our analysis.
Without ignoring your core audience, pick a growth target that will act as the gravitational center for your marketing efforts. Pick a small number of metrics that will help you see whether you’re making progress against that objective. Of course, this doesn’t mean to take your eye off the ball on performance vs. forecast. Top performers maintain strong discipline around the tracking performance vs. forecast for program marketing efforts. Don’t try to measure everything — be selective and focus narrowly on measuring performance on strategies that you are actively pursuing.
Make sure your leadership team is 100% aligned around your marketing goals and that everyone on the team has the same, crystal clear understanding of your institutional brand. A clear message from the analysis is that marketing is the “Aligner in Chief” for the brand.
Focus your content on creating emotional and literal context for the experience audiences will have. Consider making a video or videos explicitly about what the experience is to dial up the emotional benefits of attendance, reduce anxiety and increase confidence for those who might be hesitant to come. Focus on storytelling, not so much on literal depictions of the stage or performers.
Use micro-influencers to attract audiences directly, but also as a learning device to figure out where your growth target lives online and what kind of messaging resonates.
Take a hybrid marketing approach. Advance your institutional brand at the same time that you're marketing specific programming. Top performers view every marketing message as an opportunity to reinforce the brand.
Focus on consistent, efficient spending rather than making big bets on programs. Forecast conservatively. It’s better to catch up to demand than backpedal after overreaching.
Click below to watch the full recording of this webinar. Find more information about our Driving Attendance study here.