Seeing with the eyes of the audience

Today I pick up where I left off in an article which came out on Feb. 4: a discussion with Dennis Marasigan, who, aside from being a theater, film, and TV talent, is also well versed in the art (or rather, the science) of arts marketing. Over lunch recently he shared his ideas arising from his study of and extensive experience in the field, much of it with the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Here is the rest of what we discussed.

Not one market but many

Marketing also means identifying an audience for every single event, even for the same performing company. “There is not one market but many markets,” he says, “which is why you need to identify and target each particular one.” An example: at one point, the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra wanted to put together performances with nothing but modern music. They found, with the help of Dennis, then marketing director of the CCP, that such a program would alienate more people than it would attract; hence, they designed mixed programs, giving something to everyone in the same concert. Plus, the variety introduces the new work to the Brahms-Beethoven crowd, which expands their horizons and makes them more open to more adventurous programming in the future.

The lesson: being audience-centered doesn’t mean that marketing dictates programming but that programming be done with an eye and a respectful ear to the audience.

There’s price, and then there’s cost

Another thing overlooked: the experience of booking a show. Cost, after all, includes not just the price of the ticket but everything else that a person needs to put up with to watch a show. Just getting a ticket can be a pain. Ticketworld, Dennis found, proved to be a boon. Aside from making it easier for audience members to book, the online service provides day-after summary reports, i.e., valuable data.

Dennis relates how he once had to fight to get decent lighting for the CCP parking lot. What does that have to do with marketing? “People buy not just the show,” he explains, “but parking, safety, politeness,” and other seemingly unimportant or unrelated things. If theater companies think of their responsibility extending only to what goes on inside the theater, they will fail to see from the audience’s perspective.

Seeing from such a perspective led Dennis to defend the idea (broached by the supplier) of putting up the huge video signboard outside the CCP that faces cars hurtling down Roxas Boulevard toward SM Mall of Asia in front of a skeptical management committee. It used to be that the CCP was out of everyone’s way; now it’s on the route to the MOA. So people on the way to the mall can see what’s playing.

Another potential audience overlooked: the crowds at the CCP Complex. Changes in the environment have drawn in crowds, such as the cluster of restaurants and coffee shops called Harbor Square just across the road and the nearby amusement complex, Star City. Hence, the marquees on the islands and tarps on the lampposts, an idea continued in the large, easily seen tarps in front and at the side of the building.

Example: ‘Stageshow’

I asked him about Tanghalang Pilipino’s Stageshow, perhaps the signal example of the current audience troubles. It’s the show that occasioned playwright and actor Rody Vera’s lament about the missing audience, the one to which I responded (in “The Case of the Disappearing Audience,” Dec. 24, 2012). It’s a wonderful production (I raved about it in these pages) that pulled in sparse crowds during its two-week run in October last year. Dennis raises the issue of pricing: “Was the decision to raise ticket prices to P800 (the price for TP’s shows at the Little Theater for two seasons now; it was P500 in 2006 then P600 soon after) made considering the current theater market for plays of the same company or of similar kinds at the CCP, or simply because the administrators wanted to show that the projected earnings were equal to the projected expenses?”

Such a decision fails to take into account an audience’s price sensitivity. It’s not that people didn’t want to see the show, but that people may not have been willing to go at that price. As a rule of thumb, ticket prices should go up no more than 20 percent at a time, according to Dennis, or else the audience balks. Besides, raising ticket prices can be tricky. If you do so, you might increase overall revenue but at the exchange of a drop in audience size; short-term gain might come at long-term cost, if the people put off by the price hike stay away. Going for the quick payoff risks going backwards in audience development, which may mean lean years later.

Also, word of mouth takes at least four weeks to build, so why did Stageshow run only two weeks? (TP shows usually run three to four weeks.) When I mentioned that Stageshow’s first weekend ran up against The Phantom of the Opera’s last, he was dismissive, insisting that marketed to the right audience, Stageshow would have packed the Little Theater no matter the crowds upstairs.

Crossing over, joining forces

One idea kicked around in Facebook discussions was audience crossover: that theater companies should try to woo the audiences of other companies. Dennis calls this a good idea. “When I first did research on CCP audiences years ago, I already discovered that theater audiences are likely to watch productions of other companies. So when Philstage was founded, I thought it would be a good way to get audiences to cross over to other productions.” (Philstage is Philippine Legitimate Stage Artists Group Inc., an alliance of professional performing arts companies with members such as Repertory Philippines, Tanghalang Pilipino, and PETA.)

“When I became CCP marketing manager, I proposed that the CCP and Philstage come up with a calendar à la the London Theater Guide that all companies will carry and give out to their audiences, but costs were prohibitive then.” In London, this guide can be found in places you don’t associate with the arts, such as malls and condos. “This would have been my next great project after the Gawad Buhay! [the groups’ awards, similar to Broadway’s Tonys; I served as juror during the first two years], and it already had the approval of the Philstage board, albeit as an internet publication. I still believe that now that the theater audience is expanding, it is the best time for everyone to pull resources together towards audience development and marketing.”

The few recent crossover attempts have succeeded, Dennis notes. Tanghalang Pilipino brought its hit musical ZsaZsa Zaturnnah from the CCP to the Yuchengco Theater at the RCBC Plaza on Ayala Avenue; it sold out three weeks of shows. PETA’s Care Divas played at Onstage, home base of Repertory Philippines, for a weekend one summer, also successfully.

It makes sense. The audience of one company can be enticed to watch the shows of another, and it’s easier to get one theater-goer to watch another company’s shows than to get someone who doesn’t watch theater at all to start the habit. No need to worry about fighting over chunks of a limited pie; such efforts will grow the pie so there will be more than enough for all.

Wanted: Forward thinking

Underlying all the practical problems is a lack of forward thinking. “An investment now pays off in seven years,” Dennis claims, which is the amount of time it takes for the ladder of involvement (the process in which someone ascends from mere participant to ambassador, discussed last week) to be completed. Right now companies are content to focus on block sales (devolving marketing to show-buyers) and wooing principals and teachers to bring in hordes of students. It’s a myopic perspective because audiences are not being nurtured. Today’s audience troubles result from years of neglect, and today’s neglect will in turn mean sparse crowds for years to come.

It doesn’t seem to be Pinoy culture, Dennis rues, to examine why things don’t work. We don’t drill down into an experience in a scientific way to figure it out. And when they do work out, we attribute success to extraneous things. When success comes, we don’t know why it comes and how to repeat it. When failure comes, we don’t know why it comes and how to avoid it.

In short, whether we succeed or not, we don’t understand why. But, Dennis insists, “an informed and intelligently designed and implemented marketing effort that looks at the long term and goes beyond dole-outs and student group sales can increase and expand an arts organization’s audience.” Informed, intelligently designed, smartly implemented, with the long term in view  if marketing is all these things, the audience can and will come, and grow, and stay. It can be done. All that’s left is the doing.

* * *

Comments are welcome at dogberry.exie@gmail.com.