While I stayed home and watched television on my computer Thursday night, I viewed several commercials promoting my activities of choice for the evening. PNC Bank was advertising its new “Virtual Wallet.” In the commercial is poses the question: Go see a movie and spend $12 or stay home and watch hulu.com and save $12. The other commercial was advertising Direct TV. The ad featured a pretty girl and a good looking dude who spends the whole ad trying to get this girl to go on a date with him. He suggests the idea of going to the movies, the ballet, rock climbing, dinner, a gallery, all of which the girl turns down. His final suggestion is watching television. She smiles all big like and then agrees to watch television with the poor kid. Golly gee willikers, arts world! This is bad!
Dear Arts Marketers, you certainly have your work cut out for you. What’s going to happen to live performing arts if everyone stays home to watch television on a Friday night? I think there are two options. We can either fight it or work the trend to our advantage. If we fight it, we’re going to have to do something drastic to get people off their couches and into the theatres. I know art executives around the world will die a little on the inside when I suggest this, but what if we make tickets cheaper? Perhaps we can bundle with local restaurants so both the local economy benefits. I know ticket sales on average cover a mere 30% of the total operating budget, but we have to do something. Arts organizations have to be the ones to change because we certainly aren’t going to be able to convince Americans to come to a show when the cheapest ticket isn’t even under $50. We have to make the experience easier and better for the consumer or we won’t have an audience base any longer.
Our other option is work the trend to our advantage. So people want to stay at home on Friday night, so what? Why not stream live for a fee? Indiana University streams their operas live. You can even watch them after the show has stopped running. The best part is that it’s free! Now, I realize that it isn’t fiscally responsible or commercially practical to provide this service for free. However, with the dawning of the internet capable television, such as this one from Sony , we can stream right into the consumers living room! I know companies like the Metropolitan Opera have their own channel, but it’s only available on the computer and you have to pay for a subscription. What if we created some sort of arts channel that was like Pay per View and the consumer could watch live and archived concerts, operas, and plays at their leisure?
If we want to continue to exist, arts organizations must be relevant. I know this is difficult because relevancy often requires more money than arts organizations have to spend. Remember small progress is still progress. Long live the arts!
--C
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