Marketing Vs American Theatre

Marketing tactics have been used by multiple businesses, including theatres since the industrial revolution. Throughout history and continuing on to present day, marketing techniques were and are best seen through the printing press, newspapers, magazines, posters and flyers, billboards, television and most popularly, social media. Today, business marketing has reached a point where fully integrated systems and departments must work together for maximum efficiency. Social media marketing, email marketing and every other aspect of the brand must be on the same page, leaving business marketing a multi-billion dollar industry year in and year out. In the theatre business, marketing is the single most important function that must be executed properly

While American and British theatre may seem similar in production aspects, they actually have different marketing techniques. Specifically focusing on the United States’s Broadway, and the United Kingdom’s West End, theatre marketing is a case of old versus modern marketing. “New York’s theater world is, in many areas, years behind the other entertainment industries in the way it does business and finds customers” (Robertson paragraph 5). Many theatre goers find this comforting because marketing endeavors are believed to be a distraction from the art. In London’s West End, along with social media, productions are marketed by social modern resources, specifically public transportation like the underground, double decker buses, and taxis. “We’re constantly trying to come up with new, pioneering things. It’s a big theatre and we have to fill it many times a week” (Wicker paragraph ?). New York’s Broadway in comparison to London’s West End demonstrates different, but specific marketing techniques in order to operate efficiently and gain the most success for their

Every business in America is motivated to be the first marketed ad seen when a person first opens up their social media accounts, so why is Broadway not as eager to use it to market their productions? According to Ken Davenport, author of How Broadway Talks to its Audiences Using Social Media, Broadway producers do not sell products directly to their customers. All tickets are distributed through third party ticket agents, therefore the producers do not take part in the transaction process. This indirect ticket distributing makes it impossible for producers and marketing directors to know who exactly is purchasing the product, therefore, retracts the opportunity to market to customers directly. Instead, since Broadway has such a fragile economic model, they rely on direct response accounts like, direct mail and email, for example, Campaign Monitor, which is an easy-to-use, professional-grade email marketing, and automation system. In the West End, social media marketing brought rise to many productions. For example, when Wicked arrived in London from Broadway with a North American fan-base, the West End began to realize it was not a traditional West End audience. “We were very much riding a new way of people communicating with each other, and we pushed hard,” McCabe says. “It was the speed with which word of mouth could spread: what would have taken months was taking seconds. A huge