London Calling

London Calling dispatched intrepid accounts man Tom Butler on a sightseeing trip into the future of collaborative and interactive arts at the Shift Happens conference, and this is what he brought back…

Over the last couple of years, the questions within the Arts industry have been ‘What is social media?’ What is this technology?’ and then swiftly followed by the sweeping statement of ‘I don’t think it’s for us’. Well thankfully, as Bob Dylan had the foresight to predict…‘the times, they are a changing’.

York was the setting for the fantastic, third annual Shift Happens conference last week, and amongst this beautiful, castle walled, cobbled street city it seemed oddly appropriate to attend an event that was embracing the future and had new media and technologies at its core.

No longer was the question ‘What is this technology?’ but ‘How best can we use it?’ ‘How best can we engage with and develop new audiences?’ The speakers talked with passion and knowledge and the delegates lapped it up and posed questions via twitter. Everyone came away enthused as to the possibilities within their grasp.

Such is the potential to reach huge audiences via social media these days that within 48 hours of the conference ending, the shifthappens hashtag had made 2.7 million impressions with over 3,000 tweets made by 410 tweeters over 2 days. My boss even knew I’d had quiche for lunch!

And what makes it even better is that because it’s new there’s a feeling that everyone’s learning from each other. There’s a willingness to share ideas and see the great collaborations coming together. Check out this great video by Sour which had a massive on-line presence in Asia and has since won loads of awards.

Within the arts industry and across all sectors there are new approaches to marketing and audience development taking place and a genuine excitement attached to each campaign to see the results. So lets, talk, blog, tweet, facebook and share what we know and find out.

I want to go to next year’s conference and hear about the amazing, intuitive, creative campaigns we’ve all undertaken and be equally inspired by each other. So thank you Shift Happens, and yes Mr Dylan, the time’s are indeed a changing!

We’re often asked what format and size of print are the most popular with different audiences and venues, so here’s what we found out.

Tom Butler investigates:

An interesting document arrived on my desk yesterday, it detailed every single piece of print that we’d taken out over the past 12 months. Initially I thought nothing of it, but once immersed in the facts it soon became clear of an emergent trend. We had more pieces of A5 print on display last year than all other sizes put together (DL, A6, etc). And we were looking at over 80 different sizes of print!

Now this is not to say there is a more effective size over the rest however. The sheer number and varieties of print we have successfully taken to market over the past year are mind blowing! If each piece of print was designed and coloured in the same way it would become mundane. So it’s this variety that keeps people interested.

But what does this variety mean!?! I hear you ask. Well I got to thinking, and in one sense it’s about familiarity and comfort. When a medium of marketing has worked so consistently well throughout the ages why would anyone veer away from it?

And yet in another sense, when a bold piece of print goes to market it creates that spark of recognition, that sense of excitement amongst an audience who know already they’re going to be entertained, fascinated and educated all at the same time.

Is this why print has become so endearingly popular? Is it because it’s visible? Is it because people think they’re getting a free guide when they should have paid? Is it because you can pick it up and put it in your bag? Is it because your going to mention it to your friends when you next see them? Well, amazingly, it’s all of the above.

So who is it that creates this raft of print in all shapes and sizes? Well research would suggest that it’s the traditional organisations, galleries and museums who produce the A5 print, film companies and contemporary organisations think up a postcard or something not seen before whilst the theatre world corners the market in concertina glitzy DL leaflets.

And in that sense, it’s also partly about brand recognition. Organisations are looking to develop a series of consistently designed pieces of print with the long term goal being for audiences to recognise the style and production of a leaflet in connection with the venue, exhibition or show.

So whilst the advent of Social Media has brought about a whole new raft of ways in which to reach your audience it brings a lovely sense of familiarity to see the multi-sized flyer defying the trends. In short, it’s become a core of organisations campaigns that shows no signs of slowing down for the foreseeable future.

Viva Print!

As we enter the last phase of our latest Social Media research project, Georgina Turner examines the ongoing blend between online and offline marketing…

By now you are riding a wave of Social Media and the water’s great, isn’t it? What’s even greater is that I have started to notice my personal favourite social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, appearing on print campaigns for venues such as The Royal Institution and the V&A – a practice we’ve been big advocates for.

This got me to thinking, three years ago I carried out research for London Calling into the use of Print Media and how audiences respond to it,  and now in collaboration with students from the University of Northampton we are conducting research into the use of Social Media. So wasn’t it high time the two had a face-off? Was there a clear winner when communicating to your audiences?

The research highlights that it is a balancing act when getting the content of your print right. Selecting information and designing layouts can be a challenging task especially when one of your objectives is to reach new audiences who you don’t necessarily have a profile for. But once sitting proudly on display (in a London Calling Leaflet Rack, naturally) it would be nice to know why your print becomes that pocket takeaway.

Our results showed that 57% of visitors to our display racks are searching for offers, discounts and incentives. They pick up print for information on locations of venues and contact details including website addresses. But not just this, they want something to take home to show the folks like a form of memorabilia.

For Social Media, other than being extremely credible when delivered properly, when content is current you have the opportunity for two-way real-time conversations that are both sustainable and engaging. On Facebook, there are even tools enabling the audience to decide which conversations they view or follow – the fans or the ones belonging to an organisation. The brand can hear exactly what is being said about them, all while they are still in the room, and audiences can opt-in to listen and engage.

So, with round two and three in its mitts, Social Media shows that both B2C and B2B organisations can benefit from being active in Social Networks that give them added access to key audiences within their sector.

So, I thought I was onto my winner! “Ding, Ding!” However, going full circle to the beginning of my argument, it’s clear that Social Media has got to be considered as part of a well thought out and integrated marketing plan, and so we’re back to the rest of the mix again. And, crucially, remembering it really is a mix, not a simple silo of individual strategies and tactics.

“Marketplaces are conversations” is one of the key mantras of web marketing. What we’re learning is that physical print can play a crucial role in reaching new potential audiences and converting them into followers, fans and budding conversationalists.

Call it a draw? Call it what you like, I still love them both!

Audience segmentation for the next decade is the theme of the latest issue of the Journal of Arts Marketing, the quarterly publication from the Arts Marketing Association.

My latest piece argues for an approach to sustainability that moves past the simple eco-checklist approach to putting your house in order, and rather returns to the core brand values of an organisation. In this way sustainability becomes a strand of programming in its own right and another way to think about and  talk to our audiences.

The implications for understanding how an audience’s attitudes to green issues and sustainability might integrate with our more traditional segmentation strategies are still being uncovered, but it’s clear to me that failing to include this line of thinking in our planning is a failure to grasp new opportunities for building relations with our target markets in the decade to come.

Here’s the article in full:

Like a latter day Johnson and Boswell, Dr Ben Todd of Arcola Theatre and I have been out on the road performing a green marketing double act at AMA Networking events and other choice locations across London and the South East.

The idea has been to inspire discussion on the different ways a green marketing mix can benefit broader audience engagement and, as Ben pointed out, take advantage of the biggest and best networked marketing team we possibly can to help test out our theories.

One of the main questions we’ve been posing is whether a venue’s marketing team should be the ones taking the lead on green initiatives.

Unfortunately there is no one size fits all simple solution to the problem of sustainability.

Rather there’s a need to navigate any number of different positions. You’ll want to encourage investment in meaningful change, avoid the slippery greenwashed slopes of a quick carbon neutral cop-out, seek out new lines of communication and explain what you’ve learnt so that others can follow in your footsteps.

During our mini-tour one theme has become increasingly apparent – if you really want to position sustainability as a central part of your venue, it needs to be embedded right through the corporate identity. In other words we’re back to brand – the natural home of the modern marketing team.

Talking about the Arcola’s own experience, Ben outlined how evolving their own sustainable strategy has been a long, slow burn in direct contrast to the quicker promotional ‘splash and dab’ of selling theatre tickets.

The first lesson they learned after deciding ‘We’re all going to be sustainable – Yeah cool!’ was to start asking what that really meant to them as an organisation.

The answer was to go right back to Arcola’s corporate branding and mission statement, so the place where long term work on building company identity and relationships with stake holders, funders and audiences becomes the home for sustainability as well.

As Ben explains it, there are two divergent approaches to adoption. Treat sustainability in the same way you would Health & Safety (forms and tick boxes basically) or position it directly as a strand of your core programming. For Arcola their three main strands of programming – Professional Productions, Youth & Community Work and Sustainability – are now all intrinsically linked, cross-pollinating creative ideas and creating new and exciting ways to engage with Arcola’s audiences.

As Ben explains it ‘we’re identifying a whole new way of engaging audiences, building loyalty and accessing new markets.’

We think you’ll agree that rather than just viewing this as adding another task to the teetering pile of to-dos, the opportunity to engage with new ideas and talk to our audiences in new ways is precisely why we became marketers in the first place.

At it’s best arts marketing is about capturing people’s imagination and inspiring them to try new experiences. It’s exactly this kind of engagement we need to encourage a cultural shift towards more sustainable practises, and this is precisely where the arts are in a prime position to reach people and help create real change for the better.

Full Disclosure:

London Calling is the current sponsor of JAM, supporting the Arts Marketing Association and working in partnership with our recommended printer, Greenhouse Print, to ensure each issue is printed to the highest possible standards of environmental management.

We’ve chosen to use the promotional space that comes in kind as part of our supporting package to create a series of advertorial articles highlighting issues of sustainability within the arts and cultural sector.

We rather like writing these, and all comment and feedback is always greatly appreciated.

It’s a whole half-decade since Mosaic audience profiling first made its mark on the arts marketing world, and now in 2010 the landscape is changing again.

Back in 2005, London Calling was something of a pioneer in the sector when we first introduced the profiling software as part of our support for the Africa 05 celebrations. Then the main brief was to correlate traditional arts audience information with residential and ethnic-origin datasets, so we could segment up London and look for areas of maximum crossover between the two.

At the time I thought this was possibly one of the most exciting toys for grown ups I’d ever got to play with and now Experian, the people behind the product, have raised their game again and introduced a whole new version of their software, complete with brand new classifications that best reflect the social changes now happening in contemporary Britain.

In the short term this means that all of us who’ve spent the last few years thinking of our audiences as members of groups like Urban Intelligence or Symbols of Success have some re-learning to do, but the potential benefits of the reclassification far outweigh this immediate need to rethink our terminology.

For a start this isn’t simply a casual rebrand to update the same old groups and types with shiny new buzzwords. Life in Britain has changed considerably since the last major iteration of this software in 2003, and as well as providing more distinction in terms of the individual personality profiles, this latest version also takes a number of increasingly significant social trends into account, for instance…

An Ageing Society: The new classifications recognise the increasingly active and varied nature of our early retirement years and the opportunities this can create for engaging with potential new audiences. Combine this with an increased trend towards their favouring historical and cultural inland towns over the more traditional south coast retirement towns, and suddenly there’s a significant need to rethink our geographic approaches to targeting these groups.

Migration: The new Mosaic now better reflects the diverse and increasingly multicultural nature of contemporary Britain, and identifies both mono-cultural enclaves (for instance Asian Identities) and neighbourhoods which have increasingly embraced multi-culture through assimilation and integration (for instance Terraced Melting Pot and Global Fusion).

The Network Society: The UK has grown from 10% to almost 70% adoption of broadband coverage since 2003, and this massive transformation has unlocked a whole range of new social behaviours. The digital groundswell continues to revolutionise our understanding of and approach to audience engagement, and the new Mosaic works to identify how different social types use the Internet for shopping, sourcing information and social networking.

Impact Of Recession: Many of these new types have been directly affected by the current recession, for instance the group Active Retirement have seen their saving and investments seriously eroded, and the Professional Rewards type are finding themselves under increasing pressure to provide financial support for their grown-up children. Both of these types will factor heavily in the audience make up of  many arts organisations, and Mosaic can help in the creation of new campaigns that directly reflect their current social and financial realities and potentially offer new ways for audiences to experience their offers and events even in the midst of a trend towards more considered leisure spends.

It’s clear that the demand for popular and increasingly sophisticated arts experiences is still increasing, and the ability of these new Mosaic profiles to offer further focus on the different constituents of our audiences can only be a good thing in a time when budgets are tight and the need to spend wisely will be one of the key priorities for the year ahead.

Following someone on Twitter or keeping up with the Facebook posts is all well and good. But it’s still not the same as making reaching out and making a real connection. The virtual equivalent of a quick call or stopping by for a cup of coffee.

With your patrons, there are well-established regular touch points – when they come in to see a show they interact with staff and feel welcome; when they receive an email offering them preview tickets at a discount they feel special and wanted. But how else can your social networking help to solidify that communication? With so many followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook it can feel impossible to make your contact personal. But here are some ideas on how you can move from a transactional to a constant relationship with your patrons.

Make it easy: Most of us are using many different types of social engagement, but not all will have the same technical abilities. Make it easy for people to find you, get started and keep interacting.

Make it engaging: President Obama widened the spread of his message from live speeches, debates and interviews into the social sphere, providing supporters multiple ways to spread the message for him. Rather than just passively consuming content, people became engaged and active participants in his campaign.

Keep it interesting: the more often you add content, post new blogs or reply to comments, the more engaged your patrons will be.

Look at the individuals: Understand your audience and tailor the experience to them. Take advantage of log-in info and user preferences, modify content for younger audiences.

Measure your metrics: Facebook has shown how much people like to follow their own stats. Create measurements for user polls, competitions etc.

Share: Let people share content, see what everyone else is doing and spread the message far and wide.

User-generated content: Take the burden off yourself sometimes. Let your users add their own images as well as posts.

Be consistent: Create reasons to stay in touch. Follow-up on survey results, reply to messages and show that you’re listening to what people have to say.

Create a long-term strategy: Social networking is about more than just setting up a Facebook page and hoping people become fans.  True engagement means full engagement in the channels where you choose to invest. If you’re resource-constrained, it’s better to be consistent and participate in fewer outlets than to spread yourself too thin.

Get your team on board: Any successful social media strategy requires all of your organization’s staff to be on board, from the Finance Director who ok’s the budget to the summer intern. Make it part of everyone’s job to get involved – a few minutes spent regularly every week, enriches your social networking point of view and adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

Appreciate Your Friends: People who lend you their time, by following your posts, passing on your emails or blogging about a play, they all deserve a thank you. Everyone likes to feel noticed and appreciated.

This post is by London Calling’s guest blogger Sarah O’Hanlon

In anticipation of the AMA’s Digital Marketing Day next week, I’ve been getting to grips with the practicalities of internet marketing and its associated acronyms: SEM, SEO and SMO to name a few of my personal favourites, i.e. Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Optimisation respectively.

This got me thinking about something a lot of us marketers take for granted – the basics of print design.

Sure, there may be best practise guidelines and plenty of examples to hand (just check our racks if you need some new ideas) but what interests me here is how we can use these new digital lessons to revisit our other communications mediums and, for instance, re-imagine our approach to print within this broadening context.

Here then are some of my own thoughts on new approaches to print and how to optimise it’s affect as a vibrant part of a 21st century audience engagement strategy that includes digital, mobile and the whole marketing mix.

Include more than just your URL

It used to be enough to include a simple www.myvenuename.com URL on your print, but now  I’d argue that simply listing your URL is almost counterproductive. Audiences expect you to have a decent website, after all they all have one via facebook, twitter or even personally branded sites, so how much value does simply listing this really add?

Print display is an ideal way to reach new audiences, so we should be thinking of how best to add calls to action that will encourage people to jump online to where all the added value content is,whether it’s curatorial blogs, video trailers for forthcoming productions or even just foregrounding the 3 clicks & You’re Booked benefits of a new online box office system.

Sell the experience

If online is trackable down to the last pay-per-click, then is modern print shifting to a more experiential model? Now that people are as likely to find you via search, land where they like on your site then navigate around by themselves, there can be real value in reconsidering how you want people to engage differently with your printed material.

Returning to the idea of Prestige Format print, what are the added advantages of being able to directly influence the journey people take as they browse your brochure? Are there ways you can look to make your content more immersive? What can we learn from the ways people browse magazines, newspaper or even books. Does your print have a throughline, something that foregrounds the wider experience of your venue or production? What stories can you tell that go beyond the usual mix of production copy, pull-quotes and how to find us information.

Offer multiple ways to engage

Our research shows that offering new ways for people to engage with you can help foster a more modern & up to date impression in the eyes of both new and existing audiences. For instance including SMS short codes on posters and print has been popular for a number of years and is increasingly catching on in our sector. However there’s still a need to tailor the offer to your audience.

Downloadable mobile wallpaper and similar content might be great for fans of blockbuster movies, and I’d count myself in that demographic, but I’m still looking for more from my friendly neighbourhood arts venue. Instead, are there vouchers I can text in for and use at the bar, can I sign up to controlled text message alerts that update me on the added programme around a main exhibition or even for the price of my original text message (perhaps tailored to a one-off premium charge) can I sign up to a new cheaper but more flexible mobile membership scheme with your venue?

Think about sustainability

Audiences are demanding, and we’re seeing mounting evidence that arts audiences are also highly likely to be engaged with broader cultural concerns like climate change. If you’ve not greened your print yet, then the costs of doing so are now highly competitive as more printers are appreciating the added business benefits of using vegetable inks and sustainable paper stocks. If your print is as sustainable as you can make it, is there more you could do to highlight this to audiences and communicate other green initiatives your organisation is working on?

Could you include especially selected pre-show dinner offers with sustainable restaurants, highlight the new selection of organic drinks and snacks in your bar or restaurant or, given that one of the largest parts of our sector’s carbon footprint comes from travel to and from a venue, partner with a friendly carbon-neutral taxi company?

I spend a lot of time thinking about print in one form or another and, whether it’s meetings with clients, planning campaigns, researching different audience segments or just sitting in a bar with friends and watching how people approach our racks, one thought comes through loud and clear.

People love print.

Note, I didn’t necessarily say financial directors, front of house staff or even marketers, just people. Oh, and before this starts to come across as a digital marketing versus trad marketing screed of some kind, let me also say I love my iPhone, am hooked on Twitter and buy a load of stuff online (including tickets) like everyone else.

And none of this means that print, and our relationships to it, isn’t changing.

Because I’m fascinated by evolution, I like to talk a lot about how the marketing mix functions as an ecosystem and how, like everything else, print evolves.

Evolution is slow, difficult to spot in the field and, crucially, not a conscious process, so adaptations that might seem entirely sensible to intelligent designers are often lost in favour of seemingly counter-intuitive but highly efficient solutions that work just fine in the real world.

For example, given the flexibility of modern websites to create new pages and update content in real time versus the predetermined size, page count and word limits of brochures, it would make sense that marketers would shift to a quicker, cheaper and more efficient flyer or postcard format with a simple call to action. The obvious tactic being to nimbly attract people’s interest then encourage them online as swiftly as possible so they land where all the good stuff is.

It makes sense in a tactical kind of way, and there’s likely all kinds of efficiencies involved, however looking at the print display campaigns we manage, and the trends over time, I’m starting to recognise the beginnings of a different pattern.

In simple terms, I’ve started to think of this emergent trend as a shift towards what I’ve called prestige format print.

Prestige print is an approach to design and content that eschews the lowest cost to highest content ratio of many brochures in favour of investing in a deliberately high quality product that enhances the reading experience.

Quick examples of prestige print would include an investment in higher quality print stocks, value-added copy such as Q&A’s with artists, and a design process that favours open white spaces mixed in with text and often devotes whole pages to single unadorned images.

The aim is to deliver an artifact with lasting value. A piece of print that wouldn’t look out of place on a coffee table, serves as a direct statement of your own interest in innovative arts culture and encourages repeat readings over a simple short-term browse and bin.

Now that the web is the default destination for information on demand, perhaps print is changing to meet a different set of audience expectations and satisfying a need for a more lasting and tangible engagement with modern venues. One that runs in parallel with the way we engage with our audiences online.

Today is the three week countdown to the Arts Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Day, for which London Calling is the proud headline sponsor.

Following on from the theme of sponsorship in my last post, and given the fact some may note a slight incongruity in a digital marketing event being sponsored by a company best known as a provider of print display, it seemed highly timely to offer some insight into exactly why we think there’s such a big connection between our work taking print out on the road and the new opportunities to be found on the good old information superhighway.

The first time I really started thinking about the effect of digital media on the modern marketing mix was back in the last millennium – 1999 BB (Before Broadband) to be precise – and I was working  box office and communications at The Junction in Cambridge.

I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the basic tide of popular opinion back then went something like this:

“In a couple of years time we won’t need to print any more season brochures because people will simply go online and print them off themselves at home.”

Now, I’ll add a big caveat here and say this wasn’t necessarily the opinion from the marketing team, but it was certainly a trending topic of the day and the first time I encountered the so-called Death-Of-Print concept. And, as something that I’ve been encountering on and off ever since, it seemed a suitable topic for discussion here.

London Calling is  a company built with print marketing at its heart, so you can see how we might think it a good idea to take this kind of talk seriously. The thing is though the predicted trends aren’t bearing out. In fact with the internet breaking, mutating and re-paradigming established business models all over the place, any kind of long distance prognostication is proving a tad hard for people.

Instead let’s focus on what we do know. Change is definitely happening. Conversation has toppled content as online king, and the way we consume and share information is radically shifting our traditional marketing models; or, as some prefer, giving us a more insightful understanding into how those same models actually worked all along.

The question for us is where does a company like London Calling fit within this realignment of priorities? Do we want to stay at the centre of the mix, or are there new perspectives to be gained from experimenting on the edges?

The answer is most likely a combination of the two, but it’s the details of that potential mix that most fascinate us and have led us to trialling new digital products of our own and, ultimately, investing in conference events like this in support of both our own development and that of our clients.

The prediction about everyone home-printing their own brochures may have failed to materialise – hardly surprising given the cost of printer ink compared to pretty much everything else – and in fact London Calling has seen volumes increase year on year, which can be a different kind of concern, and one of the reasons that’s lead to all of our recent sustainability initiatives. However the shared world of marketing, communications and advertising can be a highly sensitive ecosystem, and we’ve all heard that story about what happens when even a single butterfly flaps its wings.

In anticipation of the Digital Marketing Day it seemed fitting to use this blog space in the coming weeks to explore the recent work we have done under the banner of London Calling Digital. Sharing our own learning experiences – the good, the bad, and the error 404s – and offer our own two-cents on the ways print, digital and now locative media may begin to interact in the future.

In my humble opinion it’s a fascinating time to be a marketer, and the levels of expertise, initiative and enthusiasm we’re seeing across the arts to engage meaningfully with their audiences suggests the need to experiment and share our knowledge has never been so timely.

*I was originally going to put ‘Before Google,’ but they first launched in 1998 (to no fanfare whatsoever, which just goes to show how people fail to pay attention to the really important things).

Whatever happened to the good old text message, huh?

That’s the question Sarah O’Hanlon and I were challenged to answer in the latest issue of JAM, the quarterly Journal of Arts Marketing from the Arts Marketing Association.

We were especially drawn to the reasons why mobile has yet to reach a critical tipping point in the arts marketing mix – an unwillingness to risk an accidental tarring with the scuzzball brush? – and suggested that perhaps one of the main barriers to adoption was a tendency to think in terms of large and relatively consistent mailing lists rather than embracing the niche opportunities that can exist in a faster opt in / opt out conversation.

You can download the whole issue here.

To save you looking we’re near the back on pages 21 & 22.