London Calling

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!

This last week I’ve been reading through Arts Council England’s public consultation Achieving Great Art For Everyone and pondering the multiple questions it raises: What are the challenges and opportunities for us as Arts Marketers in the decade to come, and how best can we respond to the evolving arts landscape both as individuals and organisations, to name just a few.

Clearly the first step is to get involved and make sure to register and complete the survey. I’m still finishing mine, but then I’m a wordy kind of guy and it’s the kind of big picture stuff that requires some serious thought.

The future’s not set, but Liz Forgan, Chair, Arts Council England has some thoughts on the fate we’ve already made for ourselves, and the major trends the Arts Council can see unfolding, to get us started.

What will the world look like in 2021? Some things we know: a generation of digital natives will dominate the creative arts; climate change will be central to all our thinking; the demographic composition of Britain – its artists and its audiences – will continue evolving; and the fallout from the recession of 2009 will still be felt in both private and public sectors. Life – and art – will be different.

For me, I’m naturally inclined to think about this from a marketing perspective, and how vital it is that proper funding consideration is given to promoting and communicating Great Art, not just achieving it.

The Arts have a proud history of grand ambition and shoestring budgets but – in my humble opinion at least – there’s a pressing need to support our sector’s excellent efforts at communication as much as there is a need for director or curatorial excellence, and I’ll likely be saying something similar in my survey answers as soon as I’ve thought them through.

The deadline’s not until 14th April, but there’s no reason not to start sending those thoughts in now, and the more the better.

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.

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.

With the Arts Council publishing their criteria for regular funding and Arts & Business chief executive Colin Tweedy calling for government created incentive schemes for private donors who sponsor cultural organisations, it seemed fitting that I also sit down to review London Calling’s own recent sponsorship and support.

What first got me thinking along this track was the forthcoming Culture Business conference,  a one day event in Paris organised by Agenda, the people behind the Communicating the Museum conference.

Aimed at fundraising and development teams, the programme covers everything from new themes of social solidarity and positioning culture to practical skills on pitching and negotiation.

Following this line of thought, it occurred to me that a view from the other side of the company fence could be useful in any potential negotiation. So, what useful information might we be able to share with Agenda’s delegates that would help them come up with more tailored pitches and packages?

Looking at our own recent approach to sponsorship there’s no one distinct strategy for choosing when to get involved with a particular project or organisation, although there are lots of distinct reasons why we’d choose not to. For instance I’ve increasingly found myself explaining that  getting our logo slapped onto things is rarely the motivating factor for us in any of our sponsorship conversations these days.

Instead what I’ve found is that our choices most often echo our company’s collective values and shared interests in some way. These aren’t just the values you’ll find listed out in our brand manual (although we do have one just in case) and are more commonly drawn from an initial shared idea or personal connection that’s sparked at the right moment.

Here, then, are some more specific examples that have lead to our own most recent partnerships:

Participation

Right now our most obvious level of sponsorship is the AMA’s upcoming Digital Marketing Day. It makes perfect sense to us given that we first launched our specialist London Calling Digital service at their main conference back in 2006. This latest event is selling very well apparently, and our logo is pretty much everywhere on their promotional material, but that’s not the reason we’re doing it.

The reason we’re keen to offer our support is because we already get a lot of value from the AMA. Their conferences, training days and networking events are our first port of call for learning and participation. Sharing experience and practice is key to the future of our sector, and if we can help pay the knowledge forward then all the better. It also brings me neatly to my next point.

Knowledge

We know why organisations most often seek sponsorship from us – monetary or in kind service support basically – but what should we ask for in return? One of the obvious answers is knowledge. A new marketing connection or insight into a different audience group can be highly valuable to us. For instance our recent support of the Raindance Film Festival wasn’t just an altruistic gesture based on their last minute loss of major banking funds (thank the credit crunch for that one), but also a great opportunity for us to get behind the scenes and learn more about how to market a festival with international reach on a bus fare budget.

Partnerships

Sometimes an initial contact can lead to an going relationship. This is exactly how we came to be partnered with Arcola Theatre and developed a reciprocal relationship on sustainable marketing initiatives that’s benefited both organisations over the long term and even set us out on the road conducting networking events to share what we’ve learned.

The point here is that it’s worth looking to the future of a possible relationship right from the point of first contact. A quick technique is to picture not just the immediate benefits as you step up to pitch, but also consider where your two organisations might be in a year from now. Working backwards, can you follow the steps that would have led to this potential future? If so, voila, instant strategy.

And Finally, Fun

Or, to put it another way, it’s good to do something new sometimes just because you can. Brands and companies are people too, and not every sponsorship decision is based purely on a direct strategic gain or return on investment. Some things are simply fun to do. The recent Treehouse Gallery Project would fall under that category. Our support was relatively small and most of the benefits to us were strictly internal – it seemed like an intriguing project and our Green Committee were keen for us to help out, which often is all the motivation required. And yet, every connection, no matter how small can lead on to bigger things, inspire colleagues or bring new and unexpected knowledge into an organisation.

Companies like Google have popularised the working practise of 20% Innovation Time as a key part of their business development. I’d argue that the new creative opportunities a modern company can gain from sponsorship fall within this concept of an innovation space.

Markets are conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto made clear back in 1999, and I’d argue that first and foremost a great sponsoring partnership is a fantastic way for a company to spark new and interesting exchanges at every level.

Culture Business 2009 takes place on Thursday 10th December in Paris, and full details of the event can be found here.

An away day from the office isn’t what it used to be.

So, for instance, not so long ago a day’s training at the Ecademy learning about Social Media for Business with self-described Silicon Valley tech geek, blogger and early adopter Louis Gray would have been just that. A day away from the office and all the associated desk-bound projects left there under the watchful eye of an out-of-office message, and maybe a quick and conscientious check-up call over lunch.

Not so now. In a room of perhaps 80 people the vast majority were skilled smartphone ninjas, even the ones still finding themselves baffled over the difference between feedburner and friendfeed (friendburner?), and I was far from the only one checking a few incoming work emails, facebook statuses and bookmarking names of other sources to go check out. On the back row others were enthusiastically tweeting quotes and questions live to Louis and wider the world – Gone are the days when they ask you to switch off your phone before booting up the powerpoint. I’m still trying to decide between the echofon and tweetdeck apps at the moment, having previously preferred easier former option but now being swayed back to the more all-in tweetdeck on recommendation from Louis, one of its first adopters and early evangelists, and having now seen the scale of new tweets I can expect from following him I suspect I’ll be glad of an app that can handle some heavy social media lifting.

All of this certainly helped highlight one of Louis’ central points about how we handle information and overload in the modern working day. That this has fundamentally shifted seemed readily apparent to everyone in the room, and Louis summarised this neatly as a conceptual shift from jobs where people worked full time to jobs that now happened in real time. If the place where you work won’t let you engage with these tools, says Louis, you need to find a new company.

A few days later, and I’m still processing some of the deeper implications of this pattern shift in my working topography and doing a little social media stock-taking. I wouldn’t even pretend to be as fully immersed as Louis so clearly is, but it seems the first signs of a residency in cyberspace are there for all to see. Quickly totaling my own main social media sites and information channels, it seems I’m regularly plugged in to three distinct email accounts and seven social media ecosystems (with multiple accounts in more than one), while connection with this online life shuttles back and forward across a couple of different laptops and a smartphone with its own discreet contact list of phone numbers and text messages. This doesn’t include all of those sites like Amazon where I simply maintain an account rather than participate or post content, or those blogs and bulletin boards (remember those?) I might visit and comment on as part of my broader online browsing and grazing.

Louis likened the buzz we see surrounding services like Twitter today to ten or so years ago when email as a marketing channel for business was really starting to ramp up. To summarize quickly, you likely wouldn’t attend a day’s presentation on Email for Business today, it’s just part of the landscape, and likewise ten years from now Real Time will simply be Time once again.

In the meantime, and again courtesy of Louis, here’s a link to the Online Marketing Blog with some handy hints for those who’ve optimized their social media presence and are now seeking to optimize the way the amount of time they stay immersed.

Tom

My latest article for the Journal of Arts Marketing talks about the thorny issue of carbon-offsetting and its potential for the (unwitting or otherwise) greenwashing of your company’s marketing mix.

I’d dearly love for London Calling to be a genuinely carbon neutral company, but the simple fact for us is that offsetting our carbon emissions is being viewed as the last resort rather than first or only step on the road to becoming a truly sustainable company. Our prime aim right now is to work to actively reduce the levels of our actual carbon emissions, especially out on the road, and you can find out more about our progress on this and other sustainable initiatives here.

Meanwhile here’s the full article from July’s issue of JAM.

Ready – Steady – Greenwash

So, I originally had a whole series of these articles planned out, but fortunately for me, and my impending copy-deadline, I’ve just lucked out and found the ultimate easy option for greening up your image in an instant.

It basically works like this: Hop online, run some easy numbers through one of the many handy carbon calculator websites you’ll find there, then simply hold aloft your magic credit card, loudly exclaim By The Power of Greenwash then just sit back and wait.

Sooner or later the same nice website will award you a badge or something. Just pop this on to your website, brochure, headed paper etc etc and you’re off. Hey presto, instant official Carbon Neutrality. Well done you.

In a nutshell this and various similar tactics are what people mean when they talk about Greenwashing.

I need to be clear here and say I’ve got nothing against the majority of carbon calculator websites, just the companies who look to them for a cheap and easy out. We recently stumbled across one website that suggested we could offset a whole year of our carbon output for around a thousand pounds. Cheap sure, but on this occasion perhaps reassuringly expensive really is worth more.

On the plus side these sites are a great awareness resource and I’ve frequently used them myself to contribute some kind of meaningful charitable compensation for all the glamorous business travel I seem to do these days – and since it’s my own cash I tend to select my own favoured charities as well, which is why I’m now the proud adopter of some snow leopards and a great white shark amongst other things. Lucky me.

My real problem is with the illusion of sustainability this type of activity can create, both inside a company and for your customers or audiences.

A company doesn’t necessarily have to be actively unscrupulous to fall into this trap, but it can be all too easy to punch in your pin number and simply offset the issue into that mental territory known as someone else’s problem.

To quote from John Grant’s excellent book The Green Marketing Manifesto, “The biggest misconception about green marketing is that it is about making companies look green (my italics).”

In other words, it’s broadly okay to offset your carbon output. It’s even okay to wear the badge and tell people about it. The real trick is in acknowledging that isn’t the end of the journey and you also need to go that extra mile to reduce your actual carbon emissions. Only when you’ve ticked all those boxes of what’s meaningfully achievable should you go looking to offset the shortfall.

My advice is don’t focus on this almost inevitable shortfall as an embarrassing company problem you’d rather wash and spin away, but rather use this as a spur to think about all the creative ways you might start bridging the gap.

Full disclosure: This article was written as a paid for advertorial as part of our ongoing sponsorship of JAM. As sponsor London Calling is responsible for the print production of the journal, and ensures that it is printed to the highest possible standards of sustainability by our print partners Greenhouse Print. This mutually beneficial arrangement allows us the opportunity to regularly raise and discuss green issues within the wider arts marketing community and to highlight examples of best practise that can benefit everyone.

How We Work

Creating a print display campaign is a collaborative process. Our aim is to work closely with you to suggest the best possible combination of our services to reach your audiences and promote your events.

What We Ask

The easiest way to get started on a campaign brief is to consider the Five Ws (and one H).

• What type of event are you promoting and where is it happening? The foundation of your campaign.
• Who are you trying to reach and why? This helps us match our runs to your target audiences.
• When are the start and end dates? Useful for determining the duration of your print display and how best to weight the coverage.
• How many pages or panels thick is your print? We use this to determine how many copies we can place in each rack and holder.
• What does your print look like? Being able to see an advance copy of the print can often help us make better recommendations and more focused campaigns.

With this information in hand we will work with you to create a proposal tailored to the specific goals of your campaign and get your print out on display…

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