All posts by Michael McCallum

Arts Marketing Australia
The arts industry already produces great content, but a new breed of marketing specialist is needed to ensure our arts get to their audience.
The arts landscape is changing, and the outlook is distinctly business-like. With that in mind organisations dedicated to arts are looking to specialist marketers to help get their work in front of audiences. Handling everything from press enquiries to ticketing, marketing specialists are helping shape the evolution of the arts industry, and the motive is surprisingly simple.
‘It’s the heart and passion of increased engagement,’ said Michael McCallum from Arts Marketing Australia. ‘We have an incredibly vibrant cultural life here in Australia, and it deserves to be celebrated.’
According to McCallum, practitioners are often loathe to engage with the marketing process, believing their work should speak for itself – ‘and it does! But not if nobody is around to hear it. Think about the average audience member. How will they find out about your show? Talk to them, feel for their needs.’
‘There are so many disengaged potential attendees: they don’t know what’s out there and how it might benefit them. We’re essentially trying to develop new markets for the arts industry by getting these people in venues and experiencing art.’
With revenue concerns always pressing, Arts Marketing Australia focuses on finding cost-effective solutions. By creating a forward-thinking marketing plan, they help arts organisations looks beyond the next season and formulate a long-term plan. Often the solutions are surprisingly simple, such as ensuring websites are mobile friendly. ‘We have the digital marketing tools that arts organisations are unlikely to have readily at their disposal: in the end, it’s all about telling the right people about great art when they want to listen.’
Arts Marketing Australia is a proud sponsor of the ArtsHub Conference 2015.

2 One Another

5 – 14 Oct

Roslyn Packer Theatre Walsh Bay, Sydney

One hundred international performances 2 one another returns to Sydney in October for another explosive performance series.

#SDC #sydneydancecompany

Link to the video and bookings here

2017 is the year of the rebel at the Malthouse Theatre this year with some notable productions.

In the last few days John Hurt, who played the lead in the 80s movie Elephant Man died and this years production The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man explores this story as it travels through ‘hospitals, circus’ and every day life.

King Noble’s You’re not Alone explores loneliness through performance and ‘guerrilla’ video.

And what could create more of a time bomb in China that spoilt and  overburdened children resulting from the single child policy. Lachlan Phillpot’s Little Emperors explores this situation with comedy and pathos of this situation.

The 2017 season is described as ‘smart, fun & …controversial’, and also harks back to the best of 80’s theatre.

Away will be a revisit for some, a popular HSC text, so those seeing it can bring to life those school studies in an engaging manner. Gow’s text allows for a myriad of interpretations, so this one is should be a delight.

Likewise, Popular Mechanicals was a laugh a minute for those who love some Shakespearean slapstick. The original Belvoir production had one of the best farting scenes in Sydney theatre, and you’ve got to love a good fart joke. A great production for all the family.

Another gem is Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 with humour, sexuality and obscene language this play from the late seventies is sure to confront the contemporary audience as it explores colonialism .

Yes, smart, fun and controversial are the words to describe STC’s 2017 season.

Marketing Summit Rick Antonson

Notes from the Arts Marketing Summit 2015. Audiences: Marketing Summit: Yours, Mine and Our. The Summit which was held in Cairns, Australia on June 1 & 2

These notes were made by Michael McCallum during the event.

Rick Antonson was the first keynote speaker.

This talk basically focused around long term vision, planning and action.

Rick made the point big things don’t happen overnight, and it might take along time to complete the vision. It may take generations, like some of the world great cathedrals.

His formula is

1. Give the though a name then articulate your vision. It needs to be accepted by others to grow.
2. Position your idea: Look for partners not competitors
3. Commuicate your idea. You need to be prepared. Get hard data and use that data to drive your strategy. You need to share the data, if you hold onto your data too close your ideas will not build a broad level of support.
4. Implement the idea,working to build and share your vision with others

Check out the full video here

 The presentation by Danny Homan (2014) at the  Bristol AMA Conference demonstrated how changing marketing is about more than changing traditional selling, but changing the way a company treats its clients and programs for them.  The Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) is an organisation with a highly developed marketing sense. The charity controls some of Britain’s palaces, including the Tower of London, Kensington Palace, and Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland. The charity gave up public funding in 2004, so it needed to market its product to survive and pay the high costs associated with the upkeep of these places .

The HRP, which has a well-funded and productive marketing operation, wanted to engage new visitors to sites. The market at the moment is 3.2 million visitors, of which 60% are from overseas. This makes the organisation open to downturn if international tourism for some reason dramatically falls. Their chief aim in the operation is to increase the domestic market by 50% to 1.5 million by 2020. The gain was to be drawn by an awareness to ‘put [HRP’s] audiences first’. This switches the traditional hierarchy of seeing these places as great institutions that the public should visit. The British public have a high awareness of the places, with 89% recording an awareness of at least one venue, but only 5% would even consider visiting them in 2013.

The HRP saw it needed to develop the relationship with its audience. All this happened during the post-GFC period, where ‘our research told us that in a world more uncertain than ever, people were searching for roots, foundation and anchors’. It was not to develop the relationship between the physical places and the audience or exploit the emotional and intellectual needs of the British public.

The HRP came up with a new brand proposition. Homan  described it as emerging from the diagram. The drive comes from the concept of relationship as a ke y marketing strategy that was going to drive not only marketing, but the events at the palaces.

The brand proposition became ‘through Historic Palaces, I can relive the drama of the nation’s past.’ What the proposition did was to open up a myriad of marketing opportunities for the houses. The places are seen as being comprised of three distinct steps:

• ‘Step onto the Stage’ one goes where history was made and meets kings (actors), gardeners, and conservators.
• ‘In Your Own Way’ one explores the palaces both in serious and fun ways in self-guided events and methods.

This was all completed around the theme of the 300 anniversary of the Georges taking the throne.

This is calculated by segmentation of the audience conducted with considerable analysis using segmentation devised by HRR. The HRP sees the expression of the key segment as being essential, for which the affirmation is secondary. They used the survey to gain a full perspective of audience preferences regarding how they consume media, their interests, and their concerns.