Putting audiences centre stage

What we learned in the past 10 years

The last 10 or so years revolutionised communication, thanks to the omni presence of the internet on smartphone. 10 years ago, most patrons of orchestras and opera houses checked their emails twice a week.

Thanks to the mobile internet and smartphones, we are no online and connected al the times. Add to this social networks like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and the revolution on how to reach and communicate with large audiences is complete.
With their customised feeds with more personalised content than anyone can read, listening to or watch, they got us hooked and used to uniquely tailored online experiences. Based on what we like and what we want to see.

There is nothing comparable to date from cultural institutions. No promoter, theatre, opera house or orchestra know enough about their audiences to even dream of building personalised feeds for their audiences. Cultural institutions did not gain any meaningful additional insights into their patrons interest in that “decade of the feed”.

Why is that and how could it be fixed?

What we still don’t know

To fix the problem you need to accept that there is a problem. Cultural institutions know little about their patrons interest and motivation to visit a given concert – not in general, but a specific one. Why do they buy a ticket to the concert with Beethoven’s 3rd symphony but not the one with Beethoven’s 4th?
Although there is a long standing tradition of surveys and traditional market research nobody would claim any digital platform could offer a personalised content feed based on surveying their user every second year.

The matter of fact is, cultural institutions do not know why people visit. They have indicators and theories and many individual team members know the reasons for a general visitation behaviour of (perhaps even of a reasonable proportion) their audiences, but there is no data about that. This knowledge cannot be used to send out concert recommendations to individual patrons and it cannot be used to tailor the online experiences to each visitor.

To welcome patrons on the front door with their names, welcoming them back and engage in a discussion about their experiences is without a substitute. But that is a touch point when they are on-site. And it it cannot be extended into their home.

18 months of pandemic have brought tectonic shifts in preexisting habits. From buying tickets to visiting concerts and performances. There is a growing demand for getting back to “pre-pandemic” times and habits. But patrons reorganised their lives and filled the spaced with other things to do. In addition, there is a lot to catch up. Meeting friends and family, taking vacations, weekend trips, getting married or finally going out to their favourite restaurant. This means competition not only on the wallet of patrons but mainly on their time has increased several times over.

To get them back, not only once, but consistently will be hard work. And it will require to reconnect to their original motivations to come. This means understanding their interest. If the last decade was about digital communication, the next decade is about interest-based personalised communication.

Focus on WHAT and WHY not WHO

Search for your last patron survey and count what share of questions you asked about them, their social demographic or educational status, how they heard about your organisation, how they arrived at your venue, or anything else not connected to the actual concert or performance. It will be the majority by a wide margin.

We tend to focus too much on WHO comes through the door, not WHY they come. Not on a level of “music”, “atmosphere” or “going out”, but on a level that would set every single concert apart from any other you ever offered.

Chances are high that on your last survey not one question could answer that. But it would be the most relevant one to understand why this specific person is able to answer the question in the first place.

To get back to the original question on why a patron bought a ticket for a concert with Beethoven 3rd but not for Beethovens 4th, it becomes clear that knowing that this patron is female, 45 years old and lives in zip code 10119 does not help in any way.
But if you know that the first concert was conducted by an upcoming female conductor and the third symphony of Beethoven is the start to a new era of symphonies your understanding of her interest in music does help you make better recommendations to her. Interest-based customer insights delivers that level of understanding – automated.
With that understanding you can know look for a suitable next event for that patron and discover that Beethoven is not the relevant feature but the upcoming female conductor. Suggesting more and more Beethoven concerts does not add any benefit for that patron and is not a good “user” experience. Better recommendations could include programmes that feature category defining works and upcoming female artists.

Income is another example for a useless segmentation metric. Yes, ticket prices are sometimes limiting access for patrons. But targeting high income people for an opera performance because of high ticket prices misses the point. Take an music festival. Audience age is around 26, not a typical high-income demographic. But they spend hundreds of euro on tickets, travels, accommodation and (yes) drinks. And to extend the argument to the above mentioned opera. Perhaps income or age can be help to predict if someone is likely to visit the opera. But the more interesting analysis surfaces you who is likely to visit a specific play or performance, not “opera” in common. For that knowing a patron is 59 is not helpful at all.

Marketing professionals will counter that Persona driven approaches and segmentations tactics incorporate that idea. But I rarely come across any company or organisation (from Bundesliga to world leading opera house live-entertainment corporation) that can handle more than 5–7 Persona. And then there is the challenge of divers taste and interest. No patron is interested in only one genre, kind of artist or aesthetic. Traditional customer segmentation methods cannot cope with diversity. Most of the times customers interest is severely limited through feature reduction to ensure a manageable amount of customer clusters/persona. As one can have only one age but several interests, you always end up with social demographic features dominating your customer clusters or personas.

Interest-based customer insights are the future

As dire that all sounds, thanks to improvements in technology and large scale experiments, there are answers to all those questions.
Understanding the interest and visitation motivation is the holy grail for marketing concert or opera performances. Thanks to companies like Netflix, their scale and a tech mindset of trial and error the search for a way to answer those questions has ended.

Putting the audiences and their interest centre stage is not longer a luxury or nice-to-have. It is the most successful, most efficient and most impactful available way in audience development and marketing. No need to complicated and time consuming CRM activities, no guesswork in regards to the right message or image to use, increases in speed on the factor of 10x. All this while increasing independence from big platforms, increase reach and visibility and increasing privacy standards.

Become independent in the digital space

Understanding patrons interest increases independence from big platforms and secures readiness for new platform and networks. Interest targeting works anywhere the same, it is portable and does not rely on years of presence on a given platform. It levels the playing field between well known and smaller institutions. You do not win because of brand recognition. You win because of your relevance for patrons.

Stay relevant everywhere, anytime

Interest-based customer segmentation is two fold future proof. It is independent of specific platforms and does not rely on traditional web tracking methods for targeting new customers.

The ad tech industry is currently undergoing a upheaval. Cookie based attribution and targeting is going away. It will keep working for some use cases for the next 12–24 months. But the majority of institutions will already see big drops in attribution quality.
All proposed solution combine one key element. They are all interest-based. They focus on the most important interests of users. The advertiser who do have the best understanding of their best customers will be able to benefit the most. The ones reliant on ad platforms to find the right users for them will struggle. In an interest-based ad market, lookalike audiences and retargeting campaigns loose their performance edge.

The second aspect has a bigger impact on daily operations for many promoters. Facebook and Instagram are for most advertisers the best choice in regards to reach and efficiency. But competition in the social space is increasing fast. This will lead to a more fragmented market. This means, it will be not enough to have communicate and advertise on one platform. Institutions need to be present on many more.
As early adopters, cultural institutions benefited from the early days when it was relatively easy to grow organic reach. For the next wave of social this will be different.
Interest-based customer insights enables a transfer of knowledge of your patrons from one platform to another, making a cold start on a new platform much easier. For interest-based advertising campaigns organic reach is irrelevant. You targeting interest not existing connections!

Adapt to tightening privacy standards

The traditional customer insights approach is reliant on understanding as much as possible about a given customer. Age, gender, place of living, household size, education status, household income and many more. This stands in stark contrast to an every growing sensibility regarding the use of personal data. Especially important in Germany – only recently found as the most privacy savvy country on earth.
Interest-based methods are privacy focused. They do not need social demographic characteristics at all. No names required, a randomised ID is enough. This makes collaboration with internal or external specialists and partners easier.

Automate targeting AND message

That all sounds good and is still only 50% of the benefits. Let’s take again our example of the concert with Beethoven’s 3rd symphony. With a traditionally approach, a marketing team would have targeted a key demographic and solved 50% of the campaign (who to target). You spent hours sifting through your CRM system to find the perfect filter logic.
How would that work with an interest-based method? The platform will give you an even better tailored list on the press of a button. No work for you at all. In an interest-based world CRM systems for managing newsletter and direct mailing lists are a thing of the past.

Remember that 50%? You now need to focus on the other 50% of your campaign. The “what”. Your manual analysis will not help you to understand which message you should send.
Interest-based customer insights can recommend detailed keywords and topics to use for every part of your message and answer questions like: what to put in the subject of an email, what headline to use or which image should be first.
The last 10 years were focused on finding the perfect audience with every possible data point about each customer. But very, very little time and energy was spent on a insights driven method on helping marketing professionals to tailor the message for each individual audience. This will be the focus in the next 10 years.

What you need to do

The last question would be, how to start. And as it is so often, it start with being aware what data is relevant and should be closely watch and collected.
But chances are high that, regardless of your energy and passion, you cannot get it over line all by yourself. With the right energy and strategy you will be able to deliver 80% with 20% of your time. 80% should go into being an ambassador for change.

Foster a data mindset – but focus on what has impact

The single biggest mistake you can make is to ditch transactional data when switching ticketing systems. In nearly every case, customer master data (like contact info, addresses) is transferred to a new system, although this is the information which actually outdates (15–20% on average per year!). Transaction history (who purchased what) is nearly timeless and worth 10 times. But this is never transferred.
If you care about understanding your patrons, you need to find a way to keep that information. No alternatives.

A second point is important. Keep a clean registry of all events in the past. It sounds basic, but too often the only thing left to consult to understand who and what was played in a given concert 3 years ago is either a PDF or a messy, unstructured text document.
For analytics that is non-existing aka worthless. It should be obvious that you need to have a structured (this can be a clean table!) and consistent registry of every (!) work played and every artist who performed.

Embrace change – the future is already here

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”¹

Gibson is right. The future is already here. Cultural institutions have a choice. Join now and or with everyone else in the next 12–24 months. Pioneers will harvest outsized early adopter profits and everyone else will try to catch up for the next 10 years.
It actually isn’t a choice. Embrace the future, it is already here.

Be an ambassador for change within your team, department and organisation. Have the difficult and intense discussions and don’t let counter arguments discourage you. It is a training opportunity to sharpen your arguments into an even more convincing storyline.

Help others see the benefits for them personally, their goals, their team and everyone around them. Make it specific, make it about them.

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.