My favourite Email title test

Email subject lines   October 2006

•Dance Umbrella at Sadler’s Wells  

     31.44% opened

•Everybody was Kung Fu fighting!      

     44.30% opened


These titles were tested on a Sadler's Wells email around the opening of Dance Umbrella, London's long established dance festival. It coincided with the opening of Shaolin Monks - Wheel of Life, at the Peacock Theatre, which provided an opportunity to have a little fun. It might be assumed that the people who make up our email list would be much more likely open an email informing them about Dance Umbrella, but in the end it didn't work out that way.
      Often our audiences don't take stuff as seriously as we do. It may be our life's work; for them it is leisure and sometimes the cold facts are not enough to grab someone's attention.
      ps: The open rate was higher for the second title but, as was expected, more people booked for Dance Umbrella shows than the Shaolin Monks. The email list really is a dance list, the huge audiences we got for the Shaolin Monks came from new attenders. 

Wise words, but do they apply to the arts?

Some thoughts that came to me out of things said at the Guardian 2011 Changing Media Summit.

“Self expression has become the new entertainment” Arianna Huffington

Increasingly everybody is the star of his or her own life movie. We can all be filmmakers, writers and artists if we want. In the past just a lucky few were able to be the stars and we had to bow to them. Now thanks to new technology the barriers to entry have been lowered and everyone can join in. 
In the future will people want to passively sit and watch someone else’s vision without having the chance to respond, interact, re-interpret or challenge? What does that mean for the arts, where the artists vision is often sacrosanct, even if funded by the masses?

“Brands are trying to change consumers into audiences, while publishers are trying to turn audiences into consumers” Arianna Huffington

Red Bull, O2, Vodafone, Orange – the relationships these brands are building with the public goes so deep it reaches aspects of their lives well beyond simple product usage. Meanwhile media owners have the challenge of trying to get their loyal (or not so loyal) users to pay for all that online content that has been carefully crafted to their tastes. 
In the arts sector we are fortunate to have passionate, dedicated audiences that are committed consumers. We should not take that relationship for granted. We should also not underestimate how rare that type of relationship is. In that case, does freeness devalue the arts unnecessarily? (Did A Night Less Ordinary actually work?)

‘People are the new content, influence is the new distribution”

I can’t remember who came up with this bit of content but I am going to help distribute it. The opportunities YouTube, Facebook and Twitter offer as a means of self-expression are huge and those people with the widest reach can influence millions. 
In the arts sector every marketing survey cites that old favourite, word of mouth, as the big influencer on attendance. Increasingly that word of mouth will come through social networking and may even come from people you do not personally know (Gok Wan, Stephen Fry, Charlie Sheen!). The percentage of the public citing word of mouth as the reason they came to your show can only increase as we become more connected. We will all need break that answer down in detail to develop effective strategies for communication.

The future is mobile

“If you don’t have a mobile strategy, you don’t have a future strategy” said Google's Ian Carrington at the Guardian 2011 Changing Media Summit

Ian basically said Google are putting mobile first. Apparently 23% of web access is now via mobile and 51% of mobile web users are engaged in e-commerce. Before 2015 mobile internet usage will overtake desktop usage.  


This means we all have to ensure our sites work on mobiles and can take you through the entire transaction process. How many of us can say they can do that? Let's not forget engaging with the arts is a social activity. People want to organise their leisure time when they meet up with friends. If they have to go home to book tickets you may lose them.

The Guardian Changing Media Summit 2011

The 2011 Guardian Changing Media Summit was a big success. A top-notch collection of speakers took part with the added bonus of some impressive big names headlining the second day. Foursquare boss Dennis Crowley got everyone looking afresh at the social network’s potential for businesses (I like many others there swore immediately to re-look at it). Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL was refreshingly honest and engaging about the challenges AOL has faced and its future plans. Added to this was an unbilled appearance by The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington. These three ensured the event ended on a high. Other faves were Ian Carrington from Google doing a nifty demo of mobile apps that included solving a Sudoku in 30 seconds and Madhav Chinnappa talking about Google’s One Pass payment system (of which more another time). 


What else did I take away from the event? The confession from the biggest names in the sector that no one can predict anything and that in the world of digital things can change out of all recognition in a single year. That hopefully saves me having to waste time writing a another pointless three year strategy document. I personally find that type of world incredibly exciting. It has echoes of what I love about the theatre business and what has always fascinated me about film; its inbuilt unpredictability that confounds the bean counters and data obsessives.

YouView - one box does all

Lord Sugar is on board to get things moving at YouView. I’m a big fan of the great man and and his ways and I like to imagine him at the staff meet and greet saying, “I don’t want you pissing money up the wall” (quite literally my No.1 Apprentice quote). We can assume that as the launch has been delayed until 2012 the build up to the Olympics is the big consumer moment when YouView boxes need to be established in the marketplace. Lord Sugar knows his 4Ps so he’ll want to get those bleedin’ boxes out at the right price “as sure as I’ve got a hole in my bloody arse” (my No.2).

For those of you who don’t know YouView promises to revolutionise the way the public use their TV. An HD digital freeview box with internet access and a hard drive, with an easy to use interface that allows you to access application based web content alongside digital channels. All without messing around with different devices. It is the internet access that should get the arts excited as it allows content providers access to the public through their telly. For arts organisations it creates the potential to become broadcasters. The challenge for YouView will be how do you make masses of content accessible in a meaningful way? With potentially thousands of content providers will the smaller niche providers be visible to anyone except those who know exactly what they are searching for?

I don’t have one but apparently 11% of televisions sold in 2010 were internet enabled and that number will climb fast; adding up to a lot of people who may not want an extra box in 2012. I’ve been using my Playstation to watch iPlayer, 4OD and download movies and apart from the fiddliness of using a controller that is designed for gaming it is a pretty good experience. I also get to watch my DVDs and Blu-rays and can even watch Sadler’s Wells videos via our player all through one box.

But it is a mess under my TV. I’ve got an external amp to give extra oomph when watching films and listening to digital radio, a PVR to record programmes, a Playstation (there’s an Xbox and a DVD player somewhere too), and sometimes connect my mac up to browse the web. But I’m the only person in the house who can work the TV. When my Dad visits he has no hope once he touches a button on one of the three remotes. What the buying public need is a single solution that is easy enough to use to get them taking advantage of all this exciting new web based content (I was told that only 15% of those internet enabled televisions are actually ever used to access the web).

There are an impressive array of partners involved in the project, including Blinkbox, Blinkx, BSkyB (which is big news), Film4oD, Golant Media Ventures, Guardian News & Media, IndieMoviesOnline, Lovefilm, Pushbutton, Radioplayer, Stream UK, STV, Travel Channel, Tvinci, UTV and woomi for content, while on the tech side there are Alcatel-Lucent, Capablue, Deluxe, easeltv, IMD, ioko, Kaltura, Nativ, Ooyala, Red Bee Media, Technicolor, TripleSEE and Twofour.

From the arts sector the two biggies of theatre broadcasting, the National and the ROH, are already on board. But one concern is they are quite simply light years away from most arts organisations in terms of the resources they can put into the filming and distribution of their own shows.  The other is that as they generally play to full houses and are London based national organisations the role broadcasting plays in their business plan is quite different from the norm. Smaller arts organisations will be keen to see what they can produce for the platform with modest resources and how they can use YouView to reach new audiences to support their core activity – live performances. The newly announced BBC/Arts Council digital training programme will have a big role to play in the process.