Publicity

New Perspective Festival PosterYou can start with the best written material, accumulate the finest cast, rehearse your heart out, and achieve a show and performances worthy of off-off-Broadway, but without an audience, what's the point? Even if personal performance improvement is your ultimate goal, the truth is that it's very Heisenberg -- the observation of the act changes the act, whether Act I or Act II. You need someone to watch in order to do your best. So, the challenge is to get folks to the venue to watch the show, something every theatre company since the Greeks have had to contend with. We have handbills surviving from Shakespeare's time; the publicity problem certainly predates the era of modern communications.

The five prongs of publicity for the New Perspective Festival are:

  • handbills, postcards, and posters, just like in Shakespeare's time,
  • newspaper publicity
  • interviews
  • Internet and viral marketing
  • preview performance
The handbill/postcards were printed up by the hundreds and distributed to all participants, and with a cast and crew this big, if every person brings three or four friends we'll fill the house. It's up to each person to find appropriate spots to put the handbills or to give them to people who will actually keep them or hand them to yet others. It's easy to get folks to do this, as a good house is important to all. Large posters are also appearing in a number of locations, and as you can see from the flame motif, they are quite eye-catching.

Newspaper publicity is a bit trickier, and the Festival's association with Vantage Theatre has been helpful. Vantage knows the local print media points of contact and how to put press kits together. These get sent off to the Union Tribune, the Reader, and other publications, and many times they will use some or all of the proffered material. We'll see.

Interviews are always good, both audio and print, and with the availability of the Internet, they can survive their initial publication and continue to be available. Here's a 14 minute interview that's still available.

Internet and viral marketing is a new medium that will help bring in the new generation of folks who get event information from that medium, and viral marketing is, obviously, one of the reasons for this blog. While it can't take the place of traditional theatre publicity, it is an "edge-out" strategy that will bring new faces into the theatre.

Finally, we did a preview performance of The King's English at an event called Sight and Sound at the Bamboo Lounge in Hillcrest on May 29. A couple of pictures are on the web page, and you can see that the observers in the background were actually enjoying the show.