Is ‘amateur marketing’ one of the ‘greatest tragedies’ of the arts?
Trevor O’Donnell says amateur marketing is so deeply ingrained in the arts the damage it’s doing is not questioned – “give professional marketing a try”.
History will probably tell us that one of the greatest tragedies in the arts was that our generation gambled away the survival of professional art forms on the false promise of amateur marketing.
Classical concert music, for example, employs the most talented, highly trained, technically proficient professional musicians in the world, yet we market their output with the efforts of workers who rank nowhere near the top of the marketing profession. Arts marketing is somewhat of an oddball in the broader marketing realm. It stands apart from the mainstream, it answers to its own set of quirky norms and traditions, it doesn’t evolve with the markets it expects to influence and it takes its marching orders from executive leaders who have severely limited marketing expertise. Unlike artists, who at the top of their professions work for nonprofit arts organizations, the world’s best marketers work well outside the cultural sector in successful businesses, corporations and political campaigns where strategic communications are far more sophisticated.
I mean no disrespect to arts marketers. There are many talented, experienced arts professionals who do marketing, but the standards the cultural sector sets for marketing fall so far short of the standards upheld by the marketing profession in general that any critical comparison will reveal a disturbing imbalance.
What fascinates me about this imbalance is that amateur marketing is so deeply ingrained in the culture of culture that we rarely, if ever, step back to consider the damage it’s doing or bother to ask if we should expect our marketing staff to perform at the same level of professionalism as their counterparts on the stage. Venerable institutions that represent the highest imaginable achievements in artistic excellence are either tanking or teetering on the verge of insolvency because they “can’t” sell enough tickets – yet they refuse to apply the same rigor to the process of persuading new audiences as they do to producing or presenting art.
History will probably tell us that one of the greatest tragedies in the arts was that our generation gambled away the survival of professional art forms on the false promise of amateur marketing.
Classical concert music, for example, employs the most talented, highly trained, technically proficient professional musicians in the world, yet we market their output with the efforts of workers who rank nowhere near the top of the marketing profession. Arts marketing is somewhat of an oddball in the broader marketing realm. It stands apart from the mainstream, it answers to its own set of quirky norms and traditions, it doesn’t evolve with the markets it expects to influence and it takes its marching orders from executive leaders who have severely limited marketing expertise. Unlike artists, who at the top of their professions work for nonprofit arts organizations, the world’s best marketers work well outside the cultural sector in successful businesses, corporations and political campaigns where strategic communications are far more sophisticated.
I mean no disrespect to arts marketers. There are many talented, experienced arts professionals who do marketing, but the standards the cultural sector sets for marketing fall so far short of the standards upheld by the marketing profession in general that any critical comparison will reveal a disturbing imbalance.
What fascinates me about this imbalance is that amateur marketing is so deeply ingrained in the culture of culture that we rarely, if ever, step back to consider the damage it’s doing or bother to ask if we should expect our marketing staff to perform at the same level of professionalism as their counterparts on the stage. Venerable institutions that represent the highest imaginable achievements in artistic excellence are either tanking or teetering on the verge of insolvency because they “can’t” sell enough tickets – yet they refuse to apply the same rigor to the process of persuading new audiences as they do to producing or presenting art.