Correlation or Causality? Why Asking Why is Important

This amused me: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/05/the-ab-test-results-are-in/ I like the bit that says “Don’t question why, just make the change.” The claim is that the movement of a button on a website by a couple of inches caused a 264,000% (sic) increase in clicks. I’m not saying that didn’t happen, because I don’t know, but it’s such a [...]

Why does nobody in the theatre look at ROI when committing marketing spend?

I don’t know if it’s declining educational standards these days but nobody in theatre marketing seems to do their sums (apologies if you’re one of the 2 or 3 who actually own a calculator). The nearest I ever get to an ROI calculation is “well, it went OK the last time time we did it.” [...]

The Dangers of A/B Testing

The following is not for people who are experienced in A/B Testing and who carry this technique out regularly and professionally. Rather it is a word of warning for people who are maybe thinking of trying it for the first time and are tempted to take a superficial view of what it will do for [...]

Further Thoughts on Two Boys Marketing

Now that Nico Muhly and Craig Lucas’s Two Boys has opened at the London Coliseum and had a few performances, it’s possible to re-assess the show’s apparently brilliant marketing campaign. At the centre is the great success of the promotional video, which has now had well over 1 million hits on Youtube. But does viral [...]

ENO’s Viral Video Hit

English National Opera has found the holy grail. Not a reference to their recent revival of Parsifal but to the fact that they’ve achieved the digital marketer’s elusive dream of creating a viral video. Their 3-minute film called Can I be your friend? has now had almost a million hits on Youtube. Its aim is [...]

End of the call?

I’m involved in a project at the moment which is basically selling a product (only loosely arts-related) B2B and the traditional way of generating leads is through cold-calling. It works but I’m trying some digital methods to see if it can be as effective (in which case it’ll also be a lot less time-consuming and [...]

Head in the Clouds?

Last night I attended a meeting of a group of arts marketers, on the subject of web analytics. Unlike me, most of the people there were from funded organisations and there seemed to be a lot of confusion about how and what to measure. The problem is that there’s a ton of data out there [...]

Facebook Advertising

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been playing around with Facebook ads and I thought I’d say a bit more. I’ve run a number of Google Adwords campaigns and I must say I enjoy this type of activity. It’s high maintenance but I get a kick out of the monitoring and tweaking, [...]

Research Matters

I’ve carried out a considerable amount of audience research over the last 15 years, both qualitative (including many focus groups) and quantitative. The latter began with self-completion questionnaires which then had to be fed into the computer but I soon moved on to a customised online package, which I then exported to SPSS, the superb [...]

First Impressions: Assessing Google Adwords & Twitter’s Reach

I recently had a discussion with the marketing director of a large theatre, where my touring play was showing for one week.  He was trying to persuade me to run a Google Adwords campaign and I was resisting.  I’ve said below why I decided against a generic Adwords campaign and a localised one for a [...]