Tag: marketing

Collect and Analyze Materials: Signs, Billboards, and Banners

For my last post about collected materials I’ve chosen some unusual marketing materials:

When I think of my favorite sign I automatically think of Portland’s famous white stag sign over the Burnside Bridge. A giant neon sign for a city is not what you usually think of for marketing, but I would argue that this sign has been a great marketing tool for Portland. When people think of the Portland sky line they think of this sign. This image represents Portland. The “old town” part of the sign is often replaced with “made in Oregon” and stamped on products. This sign has become iconic to Portland. If an organization could recreate this kind of branding, that would definitely be a marketing success.

And I shall end this logbook an a comedic note. This is a simple sign but you would be amazed how many shares it has on the internet. Years after I first saw this sign, I still see it posted to Facebook once and a while. We should never underestimate the impact of comedy, even with a sign. I used a picture of this sign to advertise the Whiskey Bike Ride for Pedalpalooza (yes there is such a thing: Portland) on my old blog and that post had more hits than most. I quickly learned when running a blog that comedy is what people repost, what people remember. Marketers should remember this when they design signs, billboards, banners or any marketing material.

Collect and Analyze Materials: Social Media Tools

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, HootSuite has saved my life. Here is a screenshot of my HootSuite account.

As you can see I have many feeds. I have two personal twitters and the ELAN twitter, plus Facebook. As the Social Media Chair for ELAN, it is very important that I keep these separate. It is easy to tweet on the wrong account and it can get frustrating managing multiple twitters, which is the reason I originally got HootSuite. What I didn’t realize is that HootSuite would allow me to be so much better at Twitter!

Essentially, HootSuite allows you to put the people you are following into categories that are easier to search than one long feed. Then you can actually filter theses categories by keywords. I use this function to look for jobs and internships, which I post to the ELAN twitter every other day at 8pm. I have my feeds sorted by type of connection: Emerging Leaders Network, Eugene Related News, Arts Organizations and Arts & Administration News. This helps me scan each feed to find relevant information to re-tweet for ELAN’s twitter.

Though the feature that has saved my life is the ability to schedule tweets. Each time you tweet, you can choose to schedule it anytime of the day. This way I can spend 30 minutes on Twitter in the morning, but it looks like I’m tweeting all day. This has saved me so much time and it has increased traffic for ELAN’s twitter! People are starting to notice ELAN more often and we even showed up in some twitter arts news blogs! Thanks HootSuite! One day, I want to take their certificate program to learn more about how to use this software better.

Logbook Entry: February 25th

Logbook Entry: List consideration for pricing your product. Consider promotional activity and discounts. When, where, and how will these be implemented? How does “place” influence pricing decisions?

This is definitely a question we should have considered before marketing the event this year. In past years, the price has been a $5 entrance fee that includes 2 drink tokens and food. However, we had a higher fundraising goal this year. After going over the numbers, I realized that we’re probably not going to hit our goal if people don’t either buy a lot of alcohol or spend at least $20 on each art piece. So, we decided to make the entrance fee just include 1 drink ticket. However, we had our event last night and while it was fairly successful (150 people attended, around 70 artworks sold, good reviews), we did not meet our fundraising goal.

I believe part of this is due to the nature of the event. There’s a limit to how much it can grow and how much people are willing to bid on art. However, I did learn last night that $4 was too much to charge for beer. Halfway through the night we realized that we weren’t selling that much alcohol, so we cut the price in half to $2. Though I think it was too late and maybe too cheap. Therefore, I think $3 would have been the perfect price. Cheaper than your regular bar, but still brings in revenue.

One thing we discussed was raising the entrance fee for next year. I’m thinking $8, although I don’t know if that would be too high. Danielle suggested we could sell pre-sale tickets for $5 and charge $8 at the door. Although collecting $8 is always difficult when you are a cash only venue. We need to invest in getting a credit card option for next year. People would be willing to bid a lot more if their bid was not dependent on the cash they had on them.

Overall, if we want to raise more money, we will have to change some pricing. The places we have the event at often limit the number of people allowed in the building to 100, so we can’t increase the attendance, but we could charge more to attend. Through the question still remains: how much to charge at the door? Or should we make money another way?

Collect and Analyze Materials: Posters

When I tried to think of advertising posters that I consider successful, the first one that came to mind was the posters for the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall:

May not be the first poster to come to most people’s minds, but it had an impact on me. I remember walking around San Francisco and seeing these posters everywhere. And then I ended up discussing them: What did they mean? What were they for? Have you seen that poster? This could have been a bad marketing campaign since it was so mysterious, but I think the sheer amount of them made me actually look them up. I then discovered it was a movie and that it looked like it was going to be amazing. I do know these posters didn’t have the best reaction from all audiences. Some people were offended by them, some didn’t understand them, but the movie was a big hit. And now that I’ve seen and love the movie, I remember these posters fondly and the time I spent discussing them.

Another technique I think works for posters is making them collectible. I used to be apart of the San Jose Bike Party: 1000s of people joining up for one epic bike ride once a month and their posters used to be just as epic:

These posters were actually made by a local music legend Benjamin Henderson, which gave them an added prestige, but look at them: they are great pieces of art, even hand colored! Then they sell them as limited edition artwork! I bet they made good money on these. I mean there are literally around 2,000 people who go on these rides and a unique poster could be a great way to remember such a great event. I sure wish I had one of these posters. Bike partay!

And speaking of posters made by the right people. Check out this poster made by Carson Ellis, famous animator and resident of Portland:

Talk about leveraging a name for a community event! Carson Ellis is known throughout the animating world. She’s married to the lead singer of the Decemberists and they’re a well known Portland couple. They were selling these posters at the event and let me tell you: they were popular! I almost bought one mostly because I love the St. Johns Bridge, but I didn’t know it was designed by Carson Ellis till afterwards. They should have been broadcasting that like mad. I definitely would have bought one if I had known that.

Logbook Entry: February 18th

Logbook Entry: Note and comment on the marketing research presentations, listing and describing new information and marketing strategies that interest you.

I really enjoyed listening to everyone’s presentations. It’s always so interesting to hear about what everyone is studying and you get learn about something new in a short presentation! I wish I had taken notes, but I actually remembered everyone’s topics!

One of the ones I found most interesting was Ed’s presentation on transmedia. After hearing him describe how transmedia could be used to market a ballet like Swan Lake, I realized that transmedia is essentially the process of creating a fandom for a product. I had always thought of a fandom as a following of people who are dedicated enough to a cultural product that all of these side projects are born, but I had never thought of creating a fandom through building these side products first. Furthermore, I had never thought of this concept of fandom through transmedia outside of the realm of film and video games. However, after Ed’s presentation, I think this would a great marketing strategy for arts organizations! I mean you could get a new generation interested in classical art through mediums like comic books and games. Obviously this would take a lot of money, but there is definitely an artist pool available.

I also really enjoyed Annie’s presentation on jukebox musicals. I had not heard of that term before even though I’ve been to a ton of jukebox musicals. I had never classified them as a different type of musical, but I now understand why they’ve become so popular. It makes complete sense to create something so expensive like a musical based on already popular music. Now looking back, I realize that I’ve played into that marketing scheme. A musical based on Louis Armstrong? I’m there!

There were a lot more great points brought up in the presentations: Kelsie’s look at dynamic content for Kickstater; Brent’s description of the adjectives used to describe New Mexico; Amy’s comparison of subscription formats. Though I wanted to share one video based on Sarah’s presentation about guerrilla graffiti marketing. I found this when I was researching moss graffiti, though this video is about reverse graffiti. The girl in this video cleaned 350 reasons to act against climate change into an exhaust stained wall. I thought one that this was a really interesting marketing technique: right message with right mediums. But also, I found it interesting that she gets into an argument with a guy accusing her of graffiti. Even after explaining it, he says “I’m sick of people graffiting the street!”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmZVoQynqp0&list=PL76D2A96256A1A0B4[/youtube]