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In the 30 years or so that I have devoted to helping people understand how to build audiences for their arts projects I have approached the subject in a way that one might expect from an one-time mathematician who tended not to follow well-trodden paths. I have taken an a priori approach. I have observed, analysed, perceived relationships and named what I have concluded are important and relevant functions. I have ignored what might have once been termed (in pre PC days) the ‘old wives’ tales’ of the various ‘businesses’ of theatre, music, opera and so on. I have attempted to see the extent to which the commercial practitioners of marketing could assist us in our work - and been profoundly disappointed by their rigid adherence to the belief that our world was no different in essence from the one in which they worked. More than that I was staggered by the contempt they showed for people - including myself - who took a contrarian position to the one they occupied so profitably. I have aimed to create an holistic system which, if I have got it right, should apply to virtually all situations where the arts are to be brought into contact with people. My system of marketing takes into account the special status occupied by artists and art in our ‘business’ and does not seek to make them and it subject to the commands of market research. It respects our philosophy and our history which replaces the role of market research with the experience and ‘gut feeling’ of the impresario - or artistic director as we now call them. One of the happiest times of my life was when I was a schoolmaster. Although I was badly miscast as a mathematician I loved to work out ways of getting mathematical concepts across to my students. This is what I set out to do in this field and now, after having lectured to more students around the world than I can enumerate, and seen their interest, their understanding and their confidence grow, I feel I may claim some success. Now why am I telling you this? Well, following one of the central precepts that you will find if you wander through the pages of this website is the importance of credibility to the process of persuasion. It’s all very well my telling you something but why should you believe me? I needed to set out my own stall before I told you about someone else’s. In a world where professional jealousy so often takes precedence over the common good you may take it that if I offer praise it is very well considered. In 1979, after having published one book on arts marketing and just having returned from a long lecture tour of New Zealand and Australia arranged on the strength of it , an American student, who was on the arts administration course held at what was then called the Polytechnic of Central London offered me a book called Subscribe Now! by one Danny Newman. ‘You should,’ she said pointedly, ‘read it’. Read it I did. I had heard about this Newman man. He had been to Scotland where he had advised Scottish Opera and Scottish National Orchestra and to Birmingham where he worked with Birmingham Repertory Company. This Yankee interloper had been doing work that was, by rights, mine! And now he’d written a book! I was prepared to be scornful. As I read this book the scales fell from my eyes and I experienced a sense of awe. This man really knew what he was talking about. His experience was vast. The book was written with compelling verve, lively language and illustrated with countless exemplary anecdotes. What he offered as a way of not only building audiences but keeping hold of them was entirely new to me. It was about selling tickets, not one at a time, show by show, but for an entire season months before the season started. It was about Dynamic Subscription Promotion. One may say ‘What is new about Subscription? Concert clubs in the UK and opera companies in Germany have been selling season tickets for generations. Even Mozart toted subscriptions around his patrons. What’s the fuss about?’ And many people - particularly in the UK - had been saying that. And, sad to say, still say it. This was not about selling season tickets as an option, this was about achieving vast audiences of people who were booked in to see everything that was on the programme for the next three or four months. This was about going for capacity every time! Newman was saying that if you wanted audiences what you sold was Subscription. You didn’t bother with the other - ineffectual he would argue - way of selling tickets show by show. You promoted Subscription and you promoted it Dynamically. You did not offer a package of tickets as an option, as an alternative to selling single show tickets. You made a huge, convincing promise that what people were going to experience would be wonderful and then you sold it to them - immediately. Newman put together sales brochures that shouted their joyful messages with colourful images and exciting prose. He added large helpings of Sales Promotion in the form of discounts, special offers and benefits that would only come to you if you subscribed NOW. He would then deluge a city with these powerful pieces of paper. There would be people waiting to open the envelopes with the cheques therein and people to take the telephone orders. Then there would be people to telephone recipients of the brochures who had not yet placed their order to ‘save them the trouble’. Then those had bought subscriptions would be asked to mail out more to the friends on their Christmas card lists. Newman didn’t miss a trick. Oh how difficult some of the precious souls in the art world found this to take! Where was the room for artistic experimentation in this scheme of things? Everything would have to be popular if it were to work. ‘No it doesn’t’, Newman would say. ‘Subscription actually increases the artist’s freedom’. In Subscription selling the strong helps sell the weak and as the Seller’s Market develops the organisation has increasing ability to programme new work without prejudicing audience figures. Newman’s Dynamic Subscription Promotion is not a theoretical thing (as I would, in substantial part, admit of Audience Development Arts Marketing which was developed from practice into a teaching system). DSP is practical and it WORKS. The man has worked directly with over 650 arts companies! The Epilogue to Subscribe Now!, ‘The Proof of the Pudding’ (in my 1983 edition) lists 6 pages of companies with subscription increases like: 2000 up to 20,000; 1,800 up to 16,000; 3,300 up to 29,095; 3,515 up to 38,000. Capacities and frequencies of performance create different maxima but count on it that Newman’s results very often mean capacity sales. One of the saddest things in our world of the arts today is the number of people, senior and junior, who still find reasons why their organisations should not adopt the Newman method. I have even heard one objector say that if Subscription were to achieve its goal of selling all the seats for a season then it would deny access to those who hadn’t bought a subscription and that would be politically unacceptable. I suspect that the principal reason for objection is that following the path of Dynamic Subscription Promotion needs great creativity and enormous energy and these qualities are often lacking in Newman’s detractors. So, what did I do when I read this book? First I realised that nothing I had ever written or lectured upon conflicted with Newman. Indeed, my analysis of arts marketing showed me that everything that Newman said was right. His work and mine truly complemented each other. I could see with clarity exactly why his approach was so successful. I was an immediate convert. Within a few months I had flown to Chicago to meet Danny and invite him to come to Britain to conduct seminars for the UK arts administrators. We would follow up his visit by offering advice through a company we would form called Subscribe Now! (UK) Ltd. And we did that and it was, where the idea was taken up, successful. The story is told elsewhere in my book ARTS MARKETING. Twenty years or more on, Danny Newman, now in his eighties, continues to devote much time to the propagation of his gospel. His book has gone through countless reprintings and has sold some 50,000 copies all over the world, including a Japanese translation. Yes, his ideas have been challenged. Sometimes on sound bases - does the Donmar Theatre in London, (and to which I refer in the article "It's Good - Believe Me!" in the KEITH DIGGLE ARTICLES SECTION of this website) with its large numbers of people apparently willing pay extra in order to obtain priority booking to buy, in advance, press reviews unseen, whatever it chooses to present, need Subscription? Other times the adverse criticism comes from ‘new kids on the block’ who resent his pre-eminence and want to build their careers by coming up with new things to say at annual conferences - in much the same way as people have said ‘Arts Marketing is such an old-fashioned thing. Let us go forth and practise Audience Development instead’. What I say to anyone interested in audiences is ‘Read Danny’s book and just absorb the amount of experience the man is offering you. Admire his energy. Above all take away with you the passion for success that he so amply demonstrates. There have been other people gifted in the art of drumming up audiences but none - none - has so convincingly demonstrated the strength of an idea and a technique and no-one else has given our world such a book the value of which will live long beyond the span of its author’. To Danny, whose failure to come to terms with any technology beyond the manual typewriter and the push-bike is legendary and who will probably never see these words on a computer screen: I salute you. You are a genius. Around May in each year I receive a press mailshot from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where Danny was Maestro of Subscription for nearly 45 years and where he still exercises considerable influence. It tells me that for the umpteenth season the ticket sales have exceeded 100% (this paradox being explained by the fact that subscribers return tickets for resale if they are unable to attend performances) and that more than 300,000 tickets have been sold. Follow my example. Buy the book, Subscribe Now!
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