||| December 1, 2025 by Katie iDE

Singing A Different Tune – Changing Your Marketing Message

As someone who works in the performing arts industry, I often feel like if you have seen one performance ad – you have seen them all.  We are trained to use the same components to communicate information about our shows.  Although traditional advertising is often effective in marketing a live performance, sometimes you have to change the message if you want to reach a new audience.

with 40% of the audience being first time ticket buyers and allowed us to be more interactive with our patrons

We recently presented Philip Glass’ The Four Seasons at the Harris Theater and found ourselves struggling to sell tickets outside of the traditional classical music audience.  Explaining the concept of a modern composer re-imaging a classic piece with the violinist who inspired him was difficult if you were not someone who was familiar with classical music or Philip Glass specifically.


We took a second look at the advertising and decided on a new campaign titled “Vivaldi vs. Glass - You Decide” – a contest between the first half of the performance (Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons) and the second half (the re-imagined Philip Glass version of the same piece).  Patrons were told they would be able to text in their favorite version of the piece after the performance and winners would be posted on Facebook and Twitter.

We found this new message was very effective at not only selling tickets but in explaining to a non- classical music audience what the concert was all about.  Instead of feeling intimidated by all the components of the performance we broke it down into a simple idea – playing a popular piece of classical music two different ways and voting on which version was your favorite. 

The new messaging helped us encourage new attendees to the Theater – with 40% of the audience being first time ticket buyers and allowed us to be more interactive with our patrons.  Most importantly, it exposed a group of people to classical music and the Harris Theater for the very first time.

 Our lesson learned from the experience was that in some situations you need to do more to diversify your message to patron segments.  Sometimes, you need to learn to speak about your performances differently in order to bring in new audiences.
 

Tags: Internet Marketing