momorantings

Doug McLennan, Editor of ArtsJournal , invited me to participate in an online debate on leadership in the arts. To kick things off, a panel of bloggers were asked to respond to the following prompt: "Increasingly, audiences have more visibility for their opinions about the culture they consume. Cultural institutions know more and more about their audiences and their wants. Some suggest this new transparency argues for a different relationship between artists and audience. So the question: In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?" There has been vigorous debate on this issue, and to check out all the arguments, please visit the "Lead or Follow" online discussion here . As for me, below is my response to the aforementioned prompt: This week we examine the nature of leadership in the context of developing the most fruitful relationships with our audience

There's liked and then there's popular. Marketers must be alert to the difference and remember that awareness is only part of the battle. If they had been genuinely popular, they wouldn't be closing down.

My apologies for the poor photograph, but it's very lack of detail actually serves to back up one of the points I'm going to make. It features one of a series of advertisements that have appeared in train carriages in recent months and illustrates some dangerous business thinking. It's technology-centric, marketing-focussed and customer-indifferent. It's technology-centric because it's promoting some dubious technology-enabled utilities. In this case, "travel alerts"; in another, "personalised timetables" and; in all of them, services that are cheap add-ons derived from the train company's ability to manipulate data rather than from any genuine customer need or request. It's marketing-focussed because it's promoting these services by intruding on the eyeballs of paying customers who might prefer the inside of their carriages to be more aesthetically pleasing. And it's customer-indifferent because of both its technology-centrism

This week Nike launched its FuelBand accelerometer. It’s the latest extension of their Nike+ ecosystem and is predicated on the conclusion (derived no doubt from all the data Nike+ has allowed them to collect) that goal-setting is the key to successful exercise campaigns. The FuelBand represents this through a single number that users can use as a measure of their progress. Its simple and elegant, but I was struck by their suggestion that people don’t need extreme granularity. I can see why they might conclude this. Most people are looking for an easy life and tend to characterise extra detail as complexity and when I first started hearing the term (a couple of years ago) I had no idea what it meant. But the time I’ve spent around “self-quantifiers” has shown me that “amateurs” will go to extraordinary lengths to acquire granularity once they know what it is. This and the time I’ve spent with the VRM movement convinces me there's a big group of people who would be thrilled with ext

A little more than a week ago, the Washington Post in an extraordinary effort by a daily newspaper, published a series of articles on the state of theater in Washington , DC. As part of that series, Nelson Pressley, a frequent contributor for the Post, wrote an interesting piece on the financial status of the community . In it, he notes that in terms of capacity, the Washington theater community has grown tremendously over the past decade, while government funding has decreased significantly and according to theaterWashington , the annual theater attendance has remained the same since 1988. Mr. Pressley also cites that each theater that has expanded reports significantly increased audiences, and several have recently set all-time sales records. In the Twittersphere, this article raised the same question that NEA Chairman Landesman asked in his now famous " supply and demand " speech given at Arena Stage in January 2011. Is there enough demand to support the increase in sup

  It's not marketing of course. It's an amalgamation of ideas that have been knocking around for the past few years bundled together with nonsensical jargon and a ripped-off presentation style. The thinking isn't bad, but the most impressive thing is being able to say "Liquid linkage to big fat fertile spaces" with a straight face.