Episode 7: THE DEATH OF A MARKETING DEPARTMENT

Jun 02, 2024

“We've Tried Nothing and We're All Out of Ideas!” — Ned Flanders, The Simpsons

[DISCLAIMER]

This is not a critique of the folk who work in marketing.

This is not a critique of any individuals, nor specific organisations they work for.

Although I would love to name and shame the hopelessness I have encountered over the last decade, the departments that requested 500 posters for a show and yet when we arrive we can’t find a single one posted anywhere.

No, it’s not about them.

It’s not about the marketing departments that managed to spell my name incorrectly on a press release about my own work… even after they made me submit my own copy that they chose to ignore.

It really isn’t about them either.

Nor is it about the marketers that you never see actually attending the work in their own venue.

No, certainly not them.

This about an industry that went wrong. It took a wrong turn. It missed the right exit. This is about not questioning an orthodoxy that was developed by keen and excited humans on the brink of a new paradigm.

I even think I have a fix for it.

Oddly, it involves McDonald’s.

[SPURLOCK]

I read this week that Morgan Spurlock died. He was 53.

He was a complicated man, according to many of the obituaries. He had addiction problems and a history of sexual misconduct.

However, he’ll be mostly remembered for his gonzo documentary film, Super Size Me, released in 2004.

Super Size Me was a durational act. He would film himself eating fast food for a whole month and document the results on his body and his mind.

He had one other rule. Whenever he was asked if he wanted to supersize his meal, he had to say ‘yes’.

For the young people, super-sizing is what fast food outlets, like McDonald’s used to offer. It was big food. It was good value.

It was a bucket of sugary drinks and a tower of salty, fatty food.

It was up-selling at its most luke-warm and tasty.

[AUDIENCES]

Arts engagement has been falling for decades.

In 2009, when I was working in the box office at what was formerly The Nuffield Theatre, was then Live at LICA, and is now Lancaster Arts, there were a few shows that failed to sell any tickets at all.

This was not the fault of the artists or their show. It wasn’t unusual.

This is despite the fact that the host university had a theatre course and heavily discounted tickets for the students.

These were people who were supposedly passionate about the form, yet they needed pushing into the theatre at every opportunity. You had to convince them to go and see what they were supposedly interested in.

We can lay the blame now at COVID or Netflix, but the truth is, this isn’t new.

There’s a bit of me that wonders, when I see those same people that were students then, complaining about their own low audience figures, if they are aware of this.

There’s also a bit of me that wonders how those same people, now artists, take responsibility for the fact that they still don’t go and see other people’s work.

[SUPER SIZED]

It wasn’t so much that the film started the conversation about fast food.

There was already a healthy discussion on the morality of using sponsored Saturday morning children’s television to advertise to young people.

The Happy Meal was being criticised for conflating toys with high fat, high sugar foods.

People were becoming aware of a thing called ‘High Fructose Corn Syrup’.

However, Super Size Me landed heavily in the middle of all this. It created a focal point for these discussions.

During his 30 day stint eating fast food, Spurlock gained 11 kilograms of weight from eating a diet that contained twice the calories recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture.

He also appeared to suffer liver damage, which the doctor compared to the damage of a severe alcohol habit.

When it was revealed much later that Spurlock was, at the time, a heavy drinker, doubt was cast on the legitimacy of this evidence.

Regardless of what caused the damage to his liver, the damage caused to McDonald’s became quickly apparent.

In the months following the release of the film McDonald’s stock plummeted and it removed the Super-size option from its menus.

There was talk that this would be the end of fast food.

[TWITTER]

As the fallout of Super Size Me was happening, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams were working on something quite special.

It was going to be called twttr, because this was during the great internet vowel shortage.

The process is called disemvowelling. It’s a lovely word.

The term dates back to the 1860s. It even appears in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

abrdn, BHLDN, Tumblr, Flickr, Scribd.

This was later followed by the trend of adding ‘-ify’ to the end of ordinary words.

Anyway, it’s not clear if they held meetings with supersized drinks and meals, chatting late into the night about what a profound effect this would have on the world.

I like to imagine they did.

[MARKETING]

In 2009 I sat in a lecture about arts marketing. It was fascinating.

“You have to set up a twitter account, it’s absolutely necessary to get your work out there”.

My work was already out there. Online. I hosted a webcomic. It wasn’t even very good, but it had a regular readership and occasionally when a content aggregate site like Digg, Stumbleupon or Reddit picked up on one of my comics, I’d get close to a million page views in a day.

I also had a twitter account.

I don’t think more than 100 people in total ever visited my site because of twitter.

Still, these guys are in marketing. They know what they are on about, right? They certainly seemed confident.

Most of it was wishful thinking though. None of it had actually been tested for long enough in the real world to see if it made sense.

Social Media was seen as the lifeline for marketing. It was cheaper, more responsive and a had further reach, well beyond the people in the local town who would see the posters.

Except it wasn’t a lifeline. It was a death sentence.

[SHARES AND LIKES]

In January 2024, the value of McDonald’s stock reached 1000 times the price it was upon the release of Super Size Me.

There are 42,000 locations worldwide.

Once, the fast food industry was being compared to the tobacco industry, now it is back to being seen as a source of reasonably priced, enjoyable food.

The film was not a death sentence. It was a life line.

[VIRAL]

The first rule of working in marketing is to market yourself.

That is to say that every marketer is a self promoter because they are telling you that they are good at marketing. If you believe this, then they are good at their job.

They do this, mostly, through jargon and promises.

They talk about reach and engagement. They dabble in the dark arts of metrics and analysis.

Back in the early days they dangled a promise of ‘going viral’.

The thing that most people in this brave new world of social media marketing did was to pretend that it was a proven solution to a problem that didn’t exist. I think, fifteen years on, that maybe, perhaps, they didn’t know for certain what they were doing.

Ask yourself, how many arts organisations do you know that have had a tweet go viral? In all this time on social media, what is the hit rate?

The ultimate metric would be audience numbers over time. Those audience numbers continue to fall, that means this isn’t working.

However, there’s a reluctance to change. Why is that?

[METRICS]

Back in the late 2000s advertising online was a little different.

Google’s AdSense programme allowed any website host to place adverts on their website and make money from them. A quick sign up, a snippet of code and away you went.

The biggest difference was how these adverts were monetised.

You got paid by impression. That is to say, you were paid by the number of times someone looked at the page with the advert.

Page views drove revenue.

The logic is sound. It followed traditional television advertising rules. More viewers meant more potential exposure, which meant more sales.

This led to a race for eyeballs. Viewer numbers became the standard metric for how good a website was.

But there was a problem. It became apparent, rather quickly, that the number of people potentially looking at an advert didn’t really translate into sales of the product being advertised.

The internet is a goal-focussed medium. It is not as passive as television. People ignore adverts, sift through information and click ever onwards on their journey to consume.

Everything is an advert online.

No one makes content that they don’t want people to see.

Google pivoted and the main metric became click-throughs. You were now paid by the number of people who clicked on the advert and followed the link.

For a large number of sites, their advertising revenue dropped sharply. Others were inclined to make the adverts bigger and more intrusive.

We saw the golden age of adverts posing as content.

We saw adverts posing as engagement.

Product reviews with affiliate links. News articles that linked to advertisers as sources of information.

Even back then, it was understood that just putting something in front of someone online was not enough to make them engage with it.

The landscape is too noisy.

[RELUCTANCE]

In arts organisations and venues, the marketing department is, in reality, usually one person.

That person is often under an incredible amount of pressure with an awful lot to do and not very much time to do it in.

Again, I’m not aiming this at specific people, rather a system that has broken down.

That broken system causes the marketing department problems too.

One of the ways modern technology has helped the marketing-department-that-is-really-only-a-single-person is through automation.

I’m talking about scheduled tweets, generated hashtags, off the shelf marketing plans.

These tools enable the marketer to effectively be in several places at once, across a broad range of platforms.

Hootsuite. Tweetdeck. Tools that allow multiple account management and platform independent content creation.

The problem with this is that it becomes impersonal too. It makes the act of marketing through social media a broadcast medium rather than an engagement medium.

Venues send out tweets but seldom reply to any member of the public that engages with them. Often a simple like is all that is given. Furthermore, these accounts don’t interact with the wider communities.

You rarely see a venue account popping up in a discussion to talk about something that isn’t about their programme.

And this happens because it is necessary for an individual to run a marketing department on their own, or even with a small team. And this is often the case because the venues don’t have the money to employ more people.

But it is a circular argument. Low box office, leading to low revenue, leading to tight budgets, leading to reduced engagement, leading to low box office…

This is what causes the reluctance to change. The lack of infrastructural support combined with a workforce that is highly specialised in a thing that no longer works.

[ADVERTS]

Do you remember television? Do you remember adverts on television?

Do you remember getting up to make a cup of tea, or turning the sound down, or turning over to see what else was on TV?

Adverts are naturally audience repellent. Humans don’t like being advertised to.

You can get around this by tricking them into thinking that what they are watching is not an advert, but is actually engagement.

But this takes a lot of skill and a surprising amount of luck. It also means that you have to take the position that you are willingly duping your audience.

[FAILURE]

It’s a massive weight to carry.

Failure in marketing and engagement means that the venue doesn’t make money.

Failure means that artists don’t get their audiences and end up playing to a depressingly small group of people.

Failure means audiences are disengaged with the art form, often missing out on things they might like.

[BOMBAST]

Adverts that make misleading claims are not just ethically dubious, but are subject to legal repercussions.

Can you imagine a toothpaste advert describing the product as “urgent”?

Perhaps an alcohol advert describing the drink as “necessary”?

What about an advert for life insurance that describes it as “transformational”?

You wouldn’t believe those adverts would you?

In advertising you need to watch your language.

[GENERICISATION]

Here’s the problem.

Branding has become generic.

Most arts organisations have a logo and probably a colour scheme. There aren’t really enough colour schemes to go around so often they pick a particular shade of colour.

*That* pink, or *the* yellow.

They are rather territorial over that shade as it defines them, it is their print and online aura. It is what makes them different from other arts organisations.

Admittedly, audiences don’t really see the difference.

The logos are often pretty similar too.

How many theatres have a box as their logo?

Oh, or maybe a few lines at a jaunty angle? Nothing says deep arts engagement like a few lines.

Or maybe just their name in a particular font.

Again, they are territorial over the font.

Weirdly territorial, especially as font choice dates quicker and harder than anything else.

Do you remember the font Contact in Manchester used until a few years ago? Nothing more squarely 90s than that. A font that once said ‘new and exciting’ became a font that said ‘your dad probably thought this was cool’.

Because marketing departments try to streamline the process of marketing, they ask the artists to provide copy and image then add their own logo to it. It saves the department from having to write specific copy, situating it in a specific location.

It offloads the work onto the artist.

This is fine, in itself, and would work perfectly well if the internet and social media didn’t exist.

The problem is that we are all connected now. Most people I know follow organisations from all over the UK, and all over the world. Most people that go to theatre and art galleries follow hundreds of accounts from organisations.

So, when one organisation is posting about a piece of work they are hosting they use the artist’s image and copy with their own logo.

When another organisation hosts that work, they too add their logo to the same image and copy. This repeats.

The audience doesn’t really distinguish between the logos. All they really see is the same image, and familiarity lessens the appeal with each rebrand.

You see that same image over the course of a tour, forever tweeted and retweeted. And eventually, you just sort of tune it out. You certainly aren’t looking to see where is hosting it.

Furthermore, the effect is amplified by marketing orthodoxy.

Marketing orthodoxy states that certain types of copy and image work best. You’ll hear this when you hand over an image of your work —“Maybe it needs the artist’s face in it, people like that”. And so every marketing image starts to look more and more similar.

You can see this during the Edinburgh festival when you look at posters for comedy shows.

It is almost always a mid-torso close crop of the comedian against a bright background. The comedians are only allowed one of four sanctioned facial expressions:

1. "What am I like?!"

2. "Just telling it how it is"

3. "Comedy is a serious business"

4. "I'm just as shocked as you!"

It isn’t the comedians that come up with this rule. It is the marketers.

This genericisation has fallen out of the guru-speak of marketers. The language they found necessary to market themselves into a position of authority about a new platform that no one really had any idea about.

[REACH]

A simple question.

What is the point in advertising to people so far away, geographically or ideologically, that they will never come to a show?

Another question.

Why are some marketing departments using the metric of reach as a measure of success?

It doesn’t matter, does it? Who sees an advert, if they can’t buy the product.

[BROADCAST]

Another part of the problem is a function of how these departments use social media as a platform.

Pltfrm… there’s one I’m saving for later.

Social media works best when the social part is amplified. If not, it is just another broadcast platform. If you are using a broadcast platform you really need to make your content worth consuming.

Glorified listings are not compelling content.

Furthermore, of course you are going to say that the show you are hosting is great, brave, necessary, a must-see.

You are hardly going to say, “Yeah, it’s OK if you like that sort of thing” or “you might not like this because it over-promises and under-delivers”.

This sort of marketing is both bluntly factual and entertaining, in the case of listings, and wildly untrustworthy and bombastic in terms of the sloganeering.

Media consumption has trained humans to filter this stuff out. It isn’t marketing, it is just wearing out keyboards.

It’s rare, but occasionally you will see an account that engages with people online. I’m not talking about those sassy accounts for Wendy’s and the like, but arts organisations that engage with the debates and discussions around art.

Frequently, these accounts are not talking about their own shows, but the wider field of art. They can be compelling, informative and entertaining, for example, a gallery that walks you through their permanent collection, adding context to their works.

However, many of them also fall into the trap of impersonality.

I think most people like to speak to people and not inanimate objects.

The younger generations seem to be dogmatically opposed to leaving answer phone messages or having to speak to automated help desks. It causes them understandable existential anxiety.

Why should we present the arts on social media in the same fashion?

@BuildingName is not a person. @Organisation is not a person. @Info is not a person. These names seem to exist to create a generic sheen of professionalism to accounts that simultaneously yearn to be hugged and adored by their audience.

And sure, it allows corporate streamlining… many people can share the same handle to make things easier, and if one of the marketers changes jobs, then the handle just gets passed on like the mask of Zorro.

But what about having Dave@ArtsOrganisation bring his own personality to the discussion? Not just posting listings, but commenting and liking art from all over the world, participating in the very community we so often hear these departments talk about engaging with?

[LOVIN’]

A diverse group of friends gather around a window table.

The camera cuts to a tray on the table. The classics are all there, the Double Cheeseburger, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and, of course, a Big Mac.

The packaging looks oddly retro. It is all browns and oranges.

It looks like how you remember it.

Underneath the burgers, the golden arches.

What we see here are not people buying a burger. Nor are we watching them eat a burger. That is not the focus.

We are watching them have meaningful experiences with their friends, in the setting of McDonald’s.

They are not consuming.

They are making.

They are making memories.

McDonald’s survived the controversy of Super Size Me by changing how they pitched themselves at the world. It was a smart move through smart advertising.

They reminded people why they liked McDonald’s in the first place, and they did this by focusing on nostalgia and personal relationships.

McDonald’s didn’t need to tell you that they sold burgers and fries. Everyone already knows that. What they chose to do instead was to remind people of all the good times they had when they were eating the burgers.

We recognized that the mass marketing of mass messages to masses of people via mass media was a mass mistake. — Larry Light, former global CMO, McDonald’s

The “i’m lovin’ it” campaign pre-dated Spurlock’s film, but afterwards the brand leant into it.

Love is unconditional. It doesn’t care about health, it accepts the bad times with the promise of good times.

Telling isn’t selling. Our customers did not want to hear and did not want to be told what to do or how to feel. — Larry Light, former global CMO, McDonald’s

Two advertising agencies, Wieden+Kennedy and the Narrative Group, continued this methodology. They centred their approach on “Human Truths” and emotional connection. They sought out areas of comfort and nostalgia as well as highlighting the different ways you could enjoy the process of being a McDonald’s customer.

They accepted that not everyone liked a Big Mac, so they stopped telling everyone that they did. Instead they chose to highlight how everyone has their own likes and dislikes. Individual items on the menu are not for everyone, but the menu does contain something for everyone.

McDonald’s became a place where people from all different walks of life could gather and have experiences that shared a commonality.

It left an impression that eating at McDonald’s is somewhat akin to civic participation.

It worked.

[THE MEDIUM]

When Marshall McLuhan said, ‘The medium is the message’, what he meant is, that in social discourse, the way you choose to communicate is as much a communication as the thing you are trying to say.

What does that mean for your average social media user? It means that your values are assumed to align with the platform you are choosing to communicate through.

Since the acquisition of twitter by Elon Musk, the platform has enjoyed a rapid increase in racial slurs, homophobia, transphobia, bullying and misogyny.

One slur against trans people has seen a massive 53% increase according to researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Another slur against homosexual men has increased a mere 39% in comparison.

Many artists have left the platform. It leaves you looking massively hypocritical to base your work on social engagement and tolerance and then use this platform to communicate it.

So why is it that so many arts organisations continue to use twitter, now ‘X’, as their primary mode of marketing and engagement with audiences?

You could conclude that they are OK with increasing racism, or rampant homophobia.

However, the pride flag in their bio counters all of that, surely?

I don’t really believe that arts organisations are OK with any of this, and I strongly suspect they are aware of the hypocrisy in their continued presence on this particular platform.

I think they are there because they don’t have any other ideas. The marketers have gone in so hard on using social media as their main marketing strategy that they are scared to leave it. Not least this is because their supposed expertise in marketing is almost entirely based on the functions of that particular platform, not in engaging with audiences.

[LOSS]

It’s also worth considering what we lost as marketing moved to social media.

Bespoke posters that, oddly, those same theatres display on their walls as part of their history.

A wonderful document and archive. Site specific.

It’s not as if these places have a lack of talented artists who could be drafted in, and perhaps even paid, to create such wonderful things.

But that’s ephemera. The real thing that has been lost is the audience.

And sure, distractions like Netflix, impending environmental collapse, and TikTok all play a role in this, but ultimately, the audience you want are the very same people that are not going to be reached through social media. These are offline, real world experiencers. They get their engagement face-to-face and where they live.

The sort of people that would come to the venue, not because of what was on that week, but because they were the sort of people who went to the theatre. You see, like most things, it’s a habit.

It’s a highly enjoyable, mostly affordable habit, but it is also an easy one to fall out of.

You need prodding every now and again, whether by your friends or by work that demands your attention. That's the job of marketing, to remind people why they enjoy going to the theatre, not just to provide a listing of what is on.

And they do this by being passionate about the form and the audiences. They do this by being where their audience is, not in some vaporous digital space.

Just like MacDonald’s, arts marketing needs to drop the existing dogma of how its customers relate to it. They don’t necessarily want bigger and cheaper, or flash promotions, they want to feel an emotional connection that happens *whilst* they are at the theatre, and the easiest way to do this is to make these social spaces. The sort of social that arts marketing should be chasing rather than the social online.

So, get off the internet and go and do your job.

Remind people of why they love the arts.

Provide a venue for people to have experiences in.

Talk to them, not just about your programme, but about the arts in general.

Don’t schedule. Enthuse and respond.

Cater to your existing audience rather than concentrating on finding new audiences.

You *are* the audience, see the work, always.

Repeat the phrase, “listings are only useful to people who care”.

Join conversations that aren’t purely about you.

Don’t hide behind a corporate identity, be a human.

Local not ‘reach’.

Bespoke, not streamlined.

Emulate the art you are trying to sell.