As March settles in, making no signs of forgetting February’s weather, it seems crazy to think that it might be almost time to embark on another year of Edinburgh Fringe adventure. The next couple of weeks will prove busy ones in the offices of Fringe venues and producers across the UK and around the world as the reduced price Fringe registration deadline rolls around on Friday 19 March.

If you are bringing a show to the Fringe this year and don’t have all of your ducks in a row just yet don’t worry too much, Fringe registration only opened on 1 March and the final deadline for inclusion in the Fringe programme isn’t until 21 April 2010. So what is the cost of missing the early deadline a week on Friday?

The price of being included in the Fringe programme and registering to sell through the Fringe Society / Red 61 Box Office jumps from £289.05 to £385.40 (both prices including VAT) leaving a grand total of  £96.35 difference. Against a typical Fringe show budget of anywhere between £10k to £12k (I know there is no such thing as a typical Fringe show so take this numbers with a pinch of salt) this might not be the end of the world. However that £100 might be far better spent getting a couple of your cast and crew on the train up to Edinburgh or adding a few thousand more fliers to your print run. Most venues and producers looking to bring multiple shows will certainly be working at the moment, trying to get as many shows into the system as possible before 19 March 2010. It is worth looking into whether your can register your show at this stage, even if you haven’t got a confirmed venue offer yet, as you may be able to change the venue on your form at a later date and still take advantage of the discount.

Is not getting into the Fringe programme by meeting the 21 April deadline the end of the world? It used to be that my answer to that questions would be a very simple, “yes”. Its worth mentioning, although its not widely reported, that venues and the Fringe Society will take show entries after 21 April. For a discounted fee late shows can be added to the central Fringe Box Office, added to the event listings on the Fringe’s website and your venue will still be able to sell your tickets through their own box offices. Shows, albeit rarely, have been known to rock up to Edinburgh late in the day, make a splash with a nice PR angle and sell lots of tickets in spite of not having a programme entry. This might not be considered the most organised / best thought out way of executing an Edinburgh Fringe run.

So we move onto the question of whether bringing a late show to Edinburgh or, possibly, deliberately not putting a programme application in by 21 April will spell automatic death for your show? A fantastic example of a company successful without any entries in the Fringe programme would be the Forest Fringe, an incredibly diverse collection of immersive, promenade and generally wacky (free) performances which has operated in a venue opposite the Bedlam Theatre on Bristo Place for the past two summers. The Forest Fringe describe themselves as a “miniature festival within a festival” and have had both critical success for their Edinburgh work, winning a Peter Brook Empty Space Special Mention, a Total Theatre Award and enough positive news print to wallpaper their respective bedrooms as well as a post Edinburgh schedule to make most Fringe producers jealous. The Forest Fringe will be producing a microfestival at the BAC (the Edinburgh season operates their support) on 2 and 3 April as well as producing projects at the Arches in Glasgow 16 and 17 April.

So the Forest Fringe show us that there is a workable model for producing successful Edinburgh work without the obligatory Fringe programme entry but is it a path you should choose to take? On reflection I would probably have to say, “no”.

In the Fringe programme you might feel that you are incredibly small fish in an incredibly big pond. This is in many ways true – you only have 40 words to present yourself and your show and you will be one entry amongst over two thousand others – but paid for advertising aside, every show is given exactly the same tools to promote themselves, those 40 words. Choose them wisely. Remember that a URL to your show or company website only counts towards one word in your 40, giving potential audience members opportunities to learn far more about you and your show than 4o words will ever allow. Its also worth remembering that people who are serious about coming to the Fringe and seeing your show are serious about the Fringe programme. You will often see Fringe-goers arriving at box offices with an array of post-it notes sticking out the pages of their Fringe programme, lining up show after show to see around the city. Reviewers can also be expected to use the programme as their Fringe Bible, I assume there is something slightly religious or ritualistic about the way they choose what to go and see, there never seems to be any deeper logic to it.

A final note would probably be to say that there are few other places where you will get as much exposure to an audience, ready and willing to buy a Fringe ticket, as is offered by the Fringe programme. In your greater production, or even marketing budget, £300 might not be the biggest single line budget amount, but I think it might be one of the best investments you make for your show.

Photo credit: Gstei on Flickr

There comes a time where we are all asked to make presentations. For many, and I know I have been guilty of this in the past, it mainly tends to involve working out at incredibly short notice what you are going to say, scrawling it all down into something like a Word document and then copy and pasting the resultant spiel onto an obligatory Powerpoint as bullet points. Depending on how good you are at improvising, you then find yourself reading almost verbatim from the Powerpoint screen behind you, all but ignoring your audience and quickly skipping from slide to slide.

I’ve had to make a couple of important presentations recently: one in front of other management students telling them about the three month academic placement I was on working for Perfect Pitch in London, the other pitching ideas for a dissertation – my Management Research Paper – in front of classmates and academic supervisors. For both of the presentations I chose not to use Powerpoint and instead experimented with a web based alternative called Prezi.com

Prezi is a completely different way to look at giving a presentation. Instead of moving through a “deck” of slides, users are encouraged to think of the presentation as a virtual napkin for them to scribble on. Using the awesome path feature you can set a route, navigating your way around the napkin, zooming in and out, choosing to focus at different heights and different places. This gives the audience and entirely different experience and instead of resulting in the discreet slides Powerpoint encourages you to create, you instead find yourself navigating through the topic of your presentation.

The Prezi I have embedded below gives you a good idea of what I am trying to describe. The presentation was given by the Developer team at Myspace at the influential European digital conference Le Web and does a great job of demonstrating what Prezi can do. Spreading their message across a huge digital canvas the Prezi lets you zoom in and out along your predefined path, with graphics forming a huge part of the presentation. You can also freely navigate around the entire canvas, literally looking at the big picture.

Once you have created your Prezi you can download the entire thing as an Adobe Flash file, which should be opened without complaint on both PC and Macs. If there is a reliable internet connection you can log into the site and load it full screen from your browser, removing the hassle of emailing presentations or juggling pen drives. I have tried both methods of presentation so far and have absolutely no complaints.

My previous party trick with presentations was to control the clicker from my phone or Apple remote, this is not quite as simple as I would like at the moment as the flash controls needed to pad yourself around the virtual track aren’t set up quite the same way as Keynote or Powerpoint. That’s not to say it can’t be done and there are certainly tutorials which I will be putting into effect before having to give my next big presentation, my Contemporary Issues In Arts Management conference paper. More on that conference and the paper I am planning on delivering once I have my abstract approved, hopefully this week.

One of the best things about Prezi has to be the community of active and enthusiastic users pushing the product to continue to innovate and add features. Within the last fortnight the site added a number of new themes for presentations, improved the tools you use to write the presentations themselves and added a two level education licence to their pricing line up making it free for anyone with a .edu or .ac.uk to take advantage of the normally paid for features. Off line access to edit your content is still a paid for option under the Education Pro licence.

There are a few draw backs associated with Prezi’s web 2.0 business model. When I first signed up for the service, pre Education Licence, there was no way for free users to shield their presentations from public search. In creating such an open community the site feels less like  a place to create useful business presentations and more like a YouTube style repository for mediocre presentations. Presumably all of the high flying web 2.0 business men using Prezi for their presentations have paid the 60 bucks to lock their content down.

Very in keeping with the web 2.0 ethos of the place, however, are the sharing features which Prezi has baked in from the start. Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, has licensed all of his presentation for public reuse. Continuing this the very reason I was able to share the Myspace presentation with you on the site is because of the embed feature for public Prezi presentations. This does have the advantage of making the content far easier to share than a traditional Powerpoint where you may have required a service such as SlideShare or Scribd to make your content available following a presentation.

To make your presentations private from public view, go over the 100MB basic storage space or remove the Prezi.com logo in the bottom left corner of the screen you are going to have to shell out $59.00 a year. For those going to experiment with the site for the first time the Freemium model is certainly one which lets you work out whether Prezi is for you. If you get paid to write presentations for work however, you may find yourself wondering what its suitable to write your tester presentation about, as it will be available for the world and his dog to search for, sift through and – depending on which buttons you have or haven’t ticked – embed in his own site. It is worth pointing out that Prezi is incredibly quick to learn, and that I was able to create a far prettier looking presentations within half an our of using Prezi than I have ever managed to get out of a Powerpoint, hard as I have tried.

It handles pictures very well, just make sure that you check the resolution etc you are putting into your presentations as if you start zooming in and out on a poor quality image you will quickly find yourself staring at giant pixels, made all the worse if you are presenting on a large screen. Prezi also has some nice tricks up its sleeves when it comes to other embeddable media, you can, for example drop YouTube videos straight into your presentation.

The end effect of showing your audience a Prezi rather than a traditional Powerpoint can be that you think more about the content you are going to present, arrange it in a more visual way than is possible using a deck of traditional slides, and that your audience is more engaged as a result. As someone who generally thinks and makes notes using spider diagrams and mind maps it very much seems to fit into my way of thinking. It is very easy to get great looking presentations out of Prezi with very little time needed to learn how everything works. Give those preparing to sit through yet another Powerpoint a treat the next time you need to present, go and give Prezi.com a try instead.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk on Flickr
Prezi credit: Mike Jones and Monica Keller of Myspace at LeWeb 09 on Prezi

For Liverpool residents who have not been to the Kazimier, it is certainly well worth a visit. Nestled in Wolstenholme Square next to the Nation night club, Jorge Pardo’s colourful sculpture ‘Penelope’ and opposite the Pleasure Rooms strip bar, it is a venue run by The Arts Organisation, a group dedicated to artistic squatting of sorts, “enabling the legal occupation of disused spaces” as they express it on the Property Solutions section of their website. You will know them, probably, as the folk who run the TAO Gallery on Slater Street and the very well known Mello Mello.

The Kaz, as it is known amongst my friends, is an incredible night club space, apparently abandoned and resurrected by The Arts Organisation into one of Liverpool’s most flexible arts venues. As a club-night venue it appeals to Liverpool’s alternative scene, hosting extravagant fancy dress evenings. As a theatre venue, it has received a number of small independent productions and its multi-leveled interior has given directors a lot to play with.

Last night saw the venue fully tabled with the stage at one end, a formation which worked well as it meant the various levels could be used to give the audience a view of the stage. As an audience member I was not too impressed, having paid as much as everyone else to get into the venue, to be told that there were no more seats left and that I should find somewhere around the venue to perch. Perching as I was at the back of the auditorium may have been fine if the performance had not run for 3 hours, with the entire event going up at least 15 minutes late.

The night’s format gave plenty of opportunity for the performers to show off. In three acts the group managed to at least play fleeting lip service to just about every genre of improv theatre. The first act of the evening took a Theatresports format, with groups battling each other for points awarded both for their completion of improv tasks and for style from a panel of judges. There were some laugh out loud moments in this hour long stint of improv games, as there were throughout the performance, but the entire thing seemed to take about three times as long as it should.

The performers appeared to take a while to warm up, disappointing given the size of the audience they had to bounce off, and the energy never seemed to reach the critical mass needed to keep one gag flowing into another. Our host for the evening, Ian Hayles, did his best to get the audience in the mood, playing around with rounds of applause before bringing the massive cast on stage, but the heckles from the lively Scouse audience seemed to throw him off more than they should. A dedicated scorer for the Theatresports section of the night may have made the comedy flow more easily than the frequent attempts at maths allowed.

The middle section saw Show Off! demonstrate their musical improvisation skills. With suggestions having been taken from the over capacity crowd before the lights went down, the group had a lot of audience material to work with for their take on a musical theatre award ceremony. The format worked well and the group showed off their best voices excellently. Particularly of note were Kenny Thompson and Lauren Silver whose number from the audience suggested ‘Abattoir, The Musical’ managed to hit as many meat jokes as one can imagine. The group’s final musical number was set like all of the worst musicals often are – on ice. The performers picked up on this meaning they would have to mime skating about the stage, an action with nothing but comic potential, but missed that they did not have to sing about the fact they were skating. Maybe few of them have been unlucky enough to sit through any Disney ice spectaculars.

The third act took the same format as the first, however more of the performers graced the stage at the same time, giving the whole thing a bit of a messy appearance. Again, I would have loved to see the entire thing take about half as much time as it did. It was here that we saw both the potential of what Impropriety will hopefully present in future and the reality of what they were able to bring to Saturday evening. Trevor Fleming showed in a brief two handed outing with Lee McPherson what the group can pull out of the bag. Taking the unfortunate situation of a child suffering from leukaemia on a day out with his Dad, the scene was irreverently funny, raising the stakes for both the relationship between the two characters on stage and the actors with their audience. It was genuinely funny, leaving you wondering just how far they were prepared to push the comedy and tantalisingly close to making the show up paced and engaging. The rest of the third act trundled to a finish, with the entire cast getting their own opportunity for a bit of musical improvisation with the closing number.

I think it was more than just the fact I was left standing against the back wall of the auditorium for the duration of the performance that made me think the night had gone on too long. The group are obviously familiar with the long format that improv comedy can take: I have watched two of their associated improvathon performances and have been impressed with the results. The launch night of this new group however, should have been a short, snappy, high energy performance, not the marathon we were presented with.

The group will return for The Last Resort, The 2o10 Minute Improvathon set in a 1950’s summer camp on 10 and 11 April at the Kazimier, which should be well worth a watch. The event last night was a launch and as a starting point they have certainly put a stake in the ground for both production values and the size of audience they can attract. I think the quality of the output over all can only rise with time, the individual members have certainly demonstrated on previous outings what they are capable of. I look forward to seeing it once it has reached its full potential.

Photo credit: Hdod on Flickr

Nine sucks us into the tumultuous world of Guido Contini, Italian film director just 10 days away from creating his next masterpiece. It is widely acknowledged, by everyone from Contini himself to a Cardinal that he meets on retreat, that his last two films have been flops. His next piece, however will be a masterpiece called “Italia” and will be the epic tale of the country of Italy. Contini however, it is quickly established, is about as flawed a character as has ever been written. The women appearing in his imagination and his reality appear to do a terrific job of ruling both his life and his sub-conscience.

It should probably be stated early on, as it is everywhere else, that this film is bursting at the seams with A-list talent. Daniel Day-Lewis, leading, does a fantastic job of portraying Contini, and I was not surprised to read in my research for this blog entry that he is an immersive actor, living the character for the entirety of the schedule. Every move he makes as Contini reflects the character and is probably the one thing holding the musical together. Contini’s long suffering wife is played by the gorgeous French actress Marion Cotillard, his mistress by Penelope Cruz, his muse by Nicole Kidman, his mother by Sophia Loren and his costume designer by Judi Dench. Kate Hudson – you know, the one that’s done every romcom since You, Me and Dupress – also makes an appearance as an American Vogue reporter whilst Fergie of Black Eyed Peas fame is given an interesting role as the village whore.

What the all star cast can’t cover up however is how shockingly bad this piece is as a musical. This film, based on the musical 1982 musical with book by Arthur Kopit and Mario Fratti and music and lyrics by Maury Yeston is in turn based on the 1963 film 8½. I know what you’re thinking – “what’s with all of the numerical titles?” Well that’s only the start of the questions really. The most pertinent would probably be, “where is the plot?” The entire film lurches between portraits of Contini’s women, eventually building towards, well, nothing. The story is initially driven by the time constraints of his new film and its schedule but really the entire film drives towards an inevitable ending which I will not spoil for you now because I might die of boredom writing it down.

Another huge issue I have with the film is the way that Rob Marshall appears to approach musicals on film. If you have seen Chicago you will know exactly what I mean without much need for further explanation: the basic premise is that although you are watching a musical, none of the characters will actually sing in the reality which is has been created in the main narrative. Instead all the musical numbers are either dream sequences or take place in surreal alternate universes where people do nothing but perform to camera, their emotions then cunningly inter-spliced once they have crossed the dimension gap back into the main timeline of the film.

This does mean that Marhall manages to set some of his musical numbers in spectacularly theatrical locations, the one that springs to mind is Penelope Cruz’s burlesque routine (I’ve got no idea how they managed to sneak that into a 12A rated film but I’m not complaining), establishing her character as Contini’s mistress and allowing her to dance in her stockings and bustier for a bit, but it in no way develops the narrative of the film. Much like Chicago what you end up with is a relatively all right film, inter-spliced with music videos every time a new character is introduced. The way musical theatre was best described to me, and I can’t remember who’s description it is now, was as theatre where the emotional states of the characters portrayed is so heightened that they can express themselves in no other way than through song. I personally think this captures what musical theatre is, or should be and can be, but is an idea completely thrown out the window by Marshall.

Finally, you might be glad to see the end of this one, I know I will be, I go back to the fact that this is a musical based on a musical of 1982 which managed 729 Broadway performances. I personally have absolutely no idea how! My background research for this blog suggests that a number of the songs from that original Broadway show, including the title song, Nine, were cut for the film. Maybe Marshall managed to cunningly cut every song worth listening to from this musical before he turned it into a film, because I was really, really struggling. Each of the pieces seem to do an excellent job of not only being too bland for me to leave the cinema humming them but also so lyrically thin that I was wondering why they didn’t just sing one word over and over again, they were damn near close enough. The lack of sophisticated rhyming and the apparent obsession with lyrical repetition meant I could probably have written every word of the rest of the song having heard the opening verse. It really was a musical disappointment. On the music side the entire film seemed to be held together by the orchestration. I have made a point of going to the IMDB entry for the piece and giving him his full credit: Doug Besterman you did a very good job with what really was a shoddy musical. (You also oversaw the music on just about every Disney film of my childhood.)

So that’s the end of that. I really did find Nine a disappointment. Its star cast put together some impressive song and dance routines, those set against the backdrop of the Cinecittà Studios sound stages with huge choruses really were great production numbers, but as a musical it really didn’t cut the mustard.

Film: Nine
Tagline: This Holiday Season, Be Italian
Dir: Rob Marshall
Release: 18 December 2009 (UK)
Rating: 12A
IMDB Entry can be found here

Photo credit: Giampaolo Macorig on Flickr

Chris Anderson’s latest book is no less thought provoking. The full title, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing Is Changing the Face of Business” might not roll off the tongue but it does lay out pretty clearly what the book looks to tackle. Kicking off the book with an interesting study of how free gained its place in the marketing arsenal, popularised by the likes of King Gillette with his revolutionary safety razor.

Following the remarkable story of how free was adapted to support business models the world over Anderson makes a point of picking out the most innovative in their fields, including many in the main text of the book and many in his “sidenotes” where he asks and then answers questions such as “How can an electric car be free?” The most important model which Anderson seeks to establish throughout the book is the idea that some products, through technological innovation, can be made to be “almost free”.

The examination of this statement is made through the perspective lens of Moore’s law, the long term trend where processor power, hard drive capacity and even megapixels in digital cameras are seen to double every two years, tied to the number of transistors which can be placed in an integrated circuit.

Breaking down the business models which he examines, Anderson outlines four categories:

- Cross subsidies: where companies give away a products to ensure a lock in to another, like Mr Gillette with his razors.
- Ad supported: a speedy romp through the world of newspapers, radio and television, one of the more transparent free models we encounter in our day to day lives.
- Freemium: a really fantastic examination of how the majority of a user base, using a product for free, can be supported by a small percentage of paid users. This section included a fantastic selection of case studies going into the numbers from specific industries.
- Non monetary markets: in which participants motivated by non-financial considerations develop things like Wikipedia, seeking payment in the form of community recognition and adoration.

One of the most innovative parts of this book and the way that it is being distributed is that Anderson is following through on his own predictions and business models. Initially the book was given away for free in ebook form and as an audio book. Leading up to the US launch of the hardback the ebook has been taken down from Scribd where it was being served, showing that although Anderson is good, he doesn’t have infinite control over his publishers. I downloaded the audio book for free in MP3 form however and listened to it in its entirely, completely legally, for free.

Anderson here is acting out on one of his main take away lessons from the book: things which are made from “bits” like audio books or webpages which are created once and then can be digitally replicated many times without the need for additional resources, can be free. Things which can be made from “atoms” such as a physical copy of Anderson’s book require natural resources to create and the more you create the more resources will be required. Since this is the case you cannot give the product away for free.

Combine the initial free copies, acting as marketing and publicity, building buzz around the product, with the paid for hardback copies of the book which people will want to buy because they have heard so many great things from their friends, and you have what Anderson considers a sound  business model. He might be right. My hardback copy is currently somewhere between Amazon’s supply warehouse just outside Northampton and my flat in Liverpool!

The other interesting aspect of this model is that although the product is effectively the same, a book, the different delivery methods give it a huge range of values. Anderson gives away the ebook for free because it was locked down to only being viewable on a webpage: you don’t have the take away convenience of a book. With the audio book there was no way of using it as a reference or dipping in and out at specific points, if you wanted all the information you were pretty much committed to listening for the whole 7 hours. In a world where time equals money this is a major (theoretically costly) undertaking.

It should probably be mentioned that the Wired Mag’s editor is not without his dissenters. The Harvard Business Review has published some interesting figures and a study challenging Anderson’s Long Tail model. Malcolm Gladwell also has an interesting piece in the New Yorker questioning the logic behind Free. On his blog Anderson doesn’t shy away from highlighting and addressing these critiques of his work with what appear to be solid counter arguments and rebuttals.

The main reason for taking the time to review the book is really this: Anderson uses a number of business cases from the new media and entertainment industries, undeniably two sectors constantly looking for ways to make money in a fast changing business environment. The examples and case studies, backed up with numbers which have obviously been solidly researched, propose models which one should be able to tailor for deployment in any industry. The case studies alone make this book invaluable and really make you stop and think about what are currently considered set rules within our industry. Every time I listened to more of Free I felt inspired to brainstorm ways of disrupting common business models with the arts.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Random House Books
25 June 2009
London
978-1905211470
Hardback format is 288 pages
Available as a book at Amazon.co.uk
Available for FREE as an audio book from the blog

Update:
Free is available as an audiobook, unabridged and at no cost from both Spotify and iTunes! I didn’t find this out until today and thought it well worth sharing with you. The Spotify link is UK only and I suspect, as it is in the US iTunes store, that the iTunes link is US only. You can download the entire book as a PDF or ePub, to read on your iPhone or iPod Touch at this website. The site advises the offer will expire however I’ve just entered my information and downloaded both.

Photo credit: Still Wanderer on Flickr

Operated as a dedicated home for musical theatre on the Fringe, the venue first opened it doors for the 2008 Fringe with programming and leadership from then Head of Musical Theatre Matters UK and ex-Head of Licensing with Cameron Mackintosh, Chris Grady at the helm. Chris has since moved on to become Head of External Relations at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds whilst his job administering Musical Theatre Matters UK has passed to Laoise Davidson. Chris retains chairmanship of the organisation but presumably does not have time to programme and manage a Fringe venue in addition to his new job.

The Musical Theatre @ George Sq venue was an interesting model with a co-production role appearing to be taken by the Edinburgh University Festivals Office, which normally just hires spaces to venue producers such as the Pleasance and C venues. It is also worth noting that technical equipment and staff for the musicals venue was provided entirely by the Pleasance.

Also interesting to see will be what happens to the Musical Theatre Matters Awards ceremony which was last year held in George One. The large George Sq Theatre, a year round lecture hall, has recently been refurbished and there are few other spaces on the Edinburgh Fringe which provide the size of stage and auditorium that the award ceremony has grown accustom to.

The strength of a dedicated musical theatre venue has to have been it was where musical fans and companies knew they could gather. As well as solid programming of full run performances, Musical Theatre @ George Sq also held nightly cabarets and showcase events, all of which drew performers and audiences from across the Fringe.

So Musical Theatre @ George Sq might no longer be with us. Will musical theatre across the Fringe simply find a home at other venues with each company applying to venues of their choice along with the standard theatre and, more often, comedy offering? Will the musical theatre offering at this year’s Fringe be depleted by the lack of a focal point and programming force for the genre?

Maybe one of the other venue chains will see the advantage of pulling together a number of musical companies into a central venue. I suspect many of the standard Fringe venue set ups may struggle in this respect. One of the many things George Sq had going for it was a venue arrangement which paid heed to the fact that musicians, keyboard or otherwise, would need space and that just enough light to pick out a stationary stand up comedian just wouldn’t cut it. The set up and strike of a full band and more complex sound demands can also see musicals struggle to fit into standard in and out in 5 minutes rules the Fringe tends to employ.

The late night offering of the George Square venue could also be something another venue could look to pick up on. Showcase performances would not require long run programming and tend to fall together more like an open mic night provided that a piano is available somewhere near the bar. Is there enough bar revenue there for a cabaret space such as this to work where multiple companies of musical theatre performers can be found?

Next year the musical theatre landscape at the Fringe may be slightly different to the two years of focussed programming and location we have seen. Whether the quality and quantity of the offering is effected remains to be seen.

Photo credit: Christopher Chan on Flickr

I personally would consider myself somewhat addicted to Facebook. Whenever I open a new browser window I find myself drawn to click the bookmark link that sits on my quick bookmarks bar. When I don’t open it straight away I have a copy of my news feed automatically show up on my iGoogle homepage and when I’m waiting for the bus its inevitably the Facebook and Twitter apps that I check whilst waiting for my lift into town.

Of the 600 or so friends I have on Facebook 400 of them are probably directly involved in the performing arts. I can’t guarantee you that number as its a rough estimation, based on how I have acquired Facebook friends over time. One thing I can say is that I know all but a handful of my Facebook friends personally. Each of them I have met either through my performing arts school (LIPA), the Edinburgh Fringe or other jobs, mainly in the arts. The few I don’t know personally tend to be internet personalities of one kind or another who should really be using fan pages but haven’t hit their 5000 friend barrier yet.

Having this number of Facebook friends who are directly involved in the arts gives a few interesting side effects to my online experience:

1. I tend to see a lot of opening night cast photos and show photos pop up in my news feed. Particularly with drama school productions, I can see the same cast gathered around onstage or in the dressing rooms shot multiple times from slightly different angles as everyone gets their chance to capture the moment for prosperity on their own cameras. Sometimes good quality production photos will turn up later, again adding to the prosperity value (rather than the marketing value), digitally archiving (possibly in breach of the licensing conditions) the production.

2. A lot of my Facebook friends have black and white headshots as their profile pictures. As I mentioned in my post about how artists can use social media to their advantage, one of the best uses of a headshot you are proud of is being able to consistently brand social networking pages. Those you are using to promote your personal brand can be kept professional and, hopefully, find work.

3. On a regular basis I am invited to become Facebook Fans of performers and companies that I know. In addition to having the opportunity to advertise my allegiance to big named stars, my friends ask me to support them online. In addition I am often targeted to join groups for theatre companies and venues, opening me up to barrages of messages directed at all group members advertising events and happenings. Which bring me on nicely to my last point…

4. I am invited to a huge number of Facebook Events. Not for people’s birthday parties or celebratory trips to the pub, but for live music gigs, comedy nights and theatre performances on one kind or another. Nearly every time I log on to Facebook there is an event invite waiting for me. I am now so desensitised to what I am being invited to that I almost always just click that I will maybe attend and forget about it. I rarely decline invites unless its geographically impossible for me to attend or I know I won’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

Its mainly the last two point above that I want to tackle with this post. Where is the innovation in how we advertise performing arts on Facebook?

I know myself that in promoting an event through Facebook the natural course of action seems to be to create a Facebook Event page; invite all your friends with little or no filtering, hoping that each of them will be so excited about your event that they will invite their friends; and wait with baited breath to see how many people click that they will be there at the event.

Of course, the number of people who say they will attend doesn’t bear any resemblance to the actual number who will turn up. Some who know that they can’t be there might take the time to leave you a comment explaining they will be on the wrong side of the world to enjoy your shindig, but they will inevitably click that they won’t be attending. I suspect most of your Facebook friends will simply click “maybe” and then forget about it.

Is it a failing of Facebook that so many people are using the same basic tools over and over again, trying to achieve a successful internet marketing campaign and at the same time devaluing the tools they are using? Are there smarter, cheekier, more interesting things that we as Facebook users should be doing to attract an audience using the world’s biggest social network? Is Facebook doomed to become the equivalent to the trusty poster or billboard in arts marketing, something that you notice when its right in front of you but never seems to make much of a lasting impression? Social media is meant to be about engagement and interaction, are marketers still able to achieve this by using Facebook?

It had been a long since I’d seen any kind of advertising, user generated or paid-for, on Facebook that made me think “wow” or really give any kind of impression at all. That was until I saw a Mashable article including the video I have posted below.

Swedish digital agency Forsman & Bodensfors set up a Facebook account for the store manager of a new branch of flat-packed-heaven Ikea which was opening in Sweden. The really clever bit was also starting a competition where the first person to tag themselves in photos of Ikea showrooms won you the tagged item. If you saw a bed in the pictures they posted on Facebook, and were the first to tag yourself as the bed, you won the bed!

The really clever aspect to the campaign was that if you went to see photos of your friend, somewhere in their photo collection, their news feed and probably yours, they were advertising Ikea products, at no cost to Ikea. The viral nature of the campaign was baked into the means of entering. The networked nature of Facebook not only promote and self perpetuate the competition but also spread the Ikea brand further on more pages, integrated further into people’s personal web activity than any paid-for marketing could ever achieve.

What examples have you seen of companies getting it right on Facebook? Where is the arts marketing best practice hiding? Following my 129 Theatre People to Follow on Twitter I know I have a few theatre Marketing and Communication departments following me. I’m really interested in your feedback, so tweet it or leave it in the comment section below.

Photo credit: Glaudo on Flickr

It would appear that the launch and marketing behind this musical theatre bonanza could not have been better primed. The pilot episode was premiered straight after an episode of American Idol in May, capturing a ready made audience of tweens, lovers of all things camp and those who appreciate a tight dance routine – the perfect musical theatre audience.

Glee, based on the American high school tradition of show choirs, is a musical comedy which has some how managed to make its way onto prime time American TV. Musical theatre on TV is of course something we are seeing more and more of across the pond. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long form adverts for West End shows such as ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria’ and ‘I’d Do Anything’ have certainly brought belting to the British mainstream but ITV’s Britannia High, the teen musical sitcom set in a fictitious London drama school, interspersing set piece musical numbers with atrociously constructed whiffs of plot, was quietly swept under the rug after its first series failed to attract audiences or critical acclaim. A little bit of Wikipedia research revealed that after it was exported to Australia it only survived one episode before being abandoned.

Glee is not exactly much better. The entire thing feels like Saved By The Bell with musical numbers thrown in for good measure. The level of cliche in the stereotyped characters is simply incredible with every group we have been taught to expect in an American high school setting being unapologetically represented from the beginning. The jocks, cheerleaders and geeks are all present and accounted for and the predictability with which they interact and conflict is as formulaic as trigonometry textbook. The strength of Glee however, is that it realises as much.

I found myself laughing out loud at some of the more biting slices of satire delivered in the early episodes, mainly by Jane Lynch who plays the ball breaking cheer leading coach who will stop at nothing to foil the glee club’s fun. The constant references made to her past military career, questionable femininity and complete disdain for all living creatures poke fun at every gym teacher you’ve ever seen in a 90s high school romcom.

The real reason that Glee works is that it follows the rules of the Musical. Big numbers are built up to with the star studded Broadway cast knowing that they have to justify their singing, making the songs happen instead of just continuing to piece the dialogue together. I’ll admit that some of the plot development could make Friends look nothing less than Shakespearian but when the musical numbers come they are carried off so well that you can almost forgive what has gone before.

The producers behind Glee also seem to be making some really interesting marketing moves, showing that they understand the audience that they are playing to and how to make money from them. After every episode the cover tracks from the show are available on iTunes for download. There have already been two different CD volumes released with music from the current season and every so often a Broadway megastar trots on for a cameo and, of course, to sing a couple of numbers. The fourth episode of the season centres around a guest appearance from Kristin Chenoweth who gets solos, duets and chorus backed numbers to show off her ability with both showtunes and pop belters. The episodes blend show tunes, the traditional repertoire of glee club choirs, with covers and mash ups of contemporary pop songs and pull all off convincingly. The voices which supposedly come out of the performers mouths’ sometimes come over as slightly over cooked from the pre-recorded mix, in relation to the performances being delivered, but its pretty obvious that singers and large backing casts are slightly distracted pulling off the impressive choreography.

Following a successful run in the States, Glee is set to hit screens in the UK on December 15, gracing the airwaves courtesy of E4. Watching the series this evening I was trying to place where in the UK television offering Glee would best fit. Britannia High showed that even something so blatantly ripping off the High School Musical format, and following immediately on its heals, did not necessarily have the ability to print money or attract automatic success. Hopefully E4, which has shown in the past that it can market big American imports such as Desperate House Wives and shows for an ambiguous young(er) audience such as Skins, will be able to make a success of Glee which does not fall easily into traditional television genres.

Britannia High was cancelled having pulled in viewing figures floating around the 2m viewer mark with peaks of just over 4m for the early episodes in its prime time Saturday night ITV slot. I was slightly reassured that youth centric shows such as Skins on E4 are expected to pull in figures nearer the 800,000 mark on a Thursday. Hopefully Glee will manage to attract audiences of that kind of size with its Tuesday debut and actually make a go of it with a British audience. God knows it’ll be good to see some singing and dancing on TV that doesn’t involve Eurovision, Simon Cowell or reality casting.

Andrew Lloyd Webber has demonstrated that there is an appetite for musical theatre on British TV. Britannia High showed that there was little tolerance for those musicals being poorly executed. Hopefully Glee will make a successful jump across the pond. In spite of being almost painfully predictable, it is knowingly satirical, comically biting and when all is said and done, its cast full of talent and genuinely well done.

Photo credit: WatchWithKritstin on Flickr