The producers of the shows have a big incentive to get conference attendees to see their shows.  The result is that as an attendee, you can go see a show (or more) a day.

My favorite by far this week is a play at the Lyceum Theatre called Venus in Fur. I’m not going to do a critique or a review or anything, but I’ll give you some basics and then make a point about it.

It’s simple: it’s two people and a single set.  A playwright is auditioning actresses for a part in a risque play based on an obscure Victorian-era book (which may or may not exist…I didn’t check).  He’ s frustrated with everyone he’s seen, when this brash young woman walks in who seems totally wrong in every way for the part (and she’s late for the auditions anyway and he’s about to head home), until she starts reading the lines with him, and she’s perfect.  As the play goes on, it gets weirder and weirder.  Her true identity becomes more and more mysterious and the heat between the two characters goes from cold to simmer to boil.  It’s a seriously grown-up play with a heck of a lot to like about it.

But the kicker in all this, the thing that makes it boil is the actress, Nina Arianda.  I don’t even know how to describe her performance and I’m not going to play junior critic and try.  Suffice to say that for the entire 90 minutes or so of the show, her pace never really slows down.  She’s playing a complex, screwy, multi-leveled character doing different parts as that character and she makes it feel totally organic and real.

I take away a couple things: first, as big a fan as I am of spectacle in entertainment, this show proves that you don’t NEED spectacle to dazzle an audience.

The flip side of that coin is that this play does not, in my opinion, justify the purist argument that “all you need is actors and a set so why should anyone add to that?”

Yes, actors and a set or a singer and a guitar CAN work, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best a show can be.  In this case, the actress is an incendiary device (and the actor, Hugh Dancy, does his job well too, but I think everyone would admit he’s a foil to her).  Not every show does or can have that.

Another way of looking at it is to say that every show needs something extraordinary.  Not just really good, but extraordinary.  If you have one extraordinary thing, everything else has to be merely really good.  The extraordinary thing could be anything, but there needs to be one.  More if possible.

As many as possible.  But at least one.  A cabinet full of really good, whether spectacular or purist, just doesn’t do in an age of entertainment competition like ours.

For example, did you ever notice that baseball games get canceled right about the time people take out their umbrellas?  From that, I could conclude that when people use umbrellas, it causes umpires to cancel baseball games.

Wrong.  Rain causes both.  Rain is “causal” but umbrellas and baseball cancellations are “correlated.”  They happen together, but they don’t necessarily cause each other.

This is what I think when I hear people talk about arts education.  Arts education and arts consumption are correlated, in that people who’ve done something related to the arts in their formative years tend to show up later for shows.

BUT…

Was it the education or the shows themselves that caused this?  It’s quite likely to me that a parent who loves to see theatre, dance, music, even sports is the real cause of the “education” in the first place.

And why would a parent be a fan of those forms?  To me, there’s a great chance that a person is a fan in the first place not because of what they were forced to do in school, but because there was a show (or shows) that were so exciting, so compelling, so much fun that they just had to go see it and just built a habit from there.

I can’t say I know this; but I can say that the thinking around education in arts never gets past the ‘correlation’ phase, and I’m not sure it’s not the other way around.  In fact, one thing I can say for sure is that being excited and enthralled by something definitely makes people fans, both short and long term.  Not everyone, perhaps, and there might be other factors, but it definitely works.

So how about that as an approach?  The best ‘arts education’ program is one that creates exciting content that everyone would like to see.  Would be dying to see.

Imagine doing that for a generation.  What do you suppose would be the result?

So are we just being played by our biology?  I remember reading (but can’t for the life of me cite this…maybe one of you can help me) a psych experiment where people were asked to identify an object’s color, for example, and it was totally obvious was that color was.  Of course, people had no trouble doing this, until they were put into a room with other “subjects” who were really confederates of the psychologist doing the experiment.  They said, for example, that an obviously green object was red.  Most people could resist saying their own (obviously correct opinion) until about 4 other people went first and said something different.  And then most people looked right at something they KNEW was red and said it was green.

I’ve noticed a couple things about behavior at theatres and in comedy clubs that I find fascinating along these same lines.  First, at a comedy club, people think the comic, if he or she is halfway decent, is hysterical.  They absolutely bust a gut laughing.  Some people laugh so hard at an average professional comic in a live setting that they hyperventilate, all in a fun way of course.  Sure, you could write some of this down to having a couple drinks and loosening up, but I don’t think that’s it.  Do an experiment and watch the same comic both live and recorded and judge this for yourself.  It’s remarkable the difference.

At theatre events, I’m even more struck by how much and how loudly people laugh.  I’m not talking about comedic theatre events.  Just plays.  Just little moments where a character utters a line that has even a shred of levity.  A non-joke you’d best characterize as “droll” sets some people off guffawing.  Things that I’m not even sure the writer intended to be funny get people chortling like donkeys on nitrous oxide.  It’s strange.

And in sports, a Tuesday night game between one team and the 4th worst team in the league, with little or nothing at stake in the standings can precipitate loud, angry arguments about who’s out or who committed a foul.  It’s irrelevant by any standard, and yet so powerful that people lose themselves in it.

But here’s the point: you could call this a trick or you could call it the power of the medium that we work in.  This is true about human nature for a reason.  Why do we mimic each other?  Why does the enthusiasm and excitement of one person make us enthusiastic and excited?  Are we just suckers for some kind of primitive group think that happened because bands of cave people needed to stick together to avoid getting eaten by monsters?

Possibly.  But is that so bad?  The tribe has gotten quite a lot bigger, and the monsters have changed forms, but along the way, we’ve managed to trick ourselves into thinking that we don’t need the tribe anymore.  We feel self-reliant and independent because we can house, feed and entertain ourselves on our own, when in fact we’re absolutely 100% totally dependent on “the tribe” for all those solitary activities to work in the first place.  We’re far more dependent than those cave people, but we feel just the opposite.

So this response that we have could be nature’s way of telling us that we need this group.  We need to stay in tune with the group because if we do, good things happen.  It feels good to stand up and cheer when your baseball team hits a meaningless home run in the 8th inning of a tuesday night game.  It feels good to laugh too loud in a group of people that are laughing.  It probably even feels good to get goosebumps over the “Gilligan’s Island” theme.  Don’t feel bad about that.  Go for it.  It’s nature’s way of telling you that you need other people.

And if you’re on the selling side of this business, remember this.  The production on the stage doesn’t just happen between the show and the individual person. It’s the show, the person and the people around each person.  In a way, that’s the real show and one of the biggest differences between being there live and just seeing what happened.

“’It is of no interest to me,’ he said. ‘It is not a priority. It doesn’t create new audiences either…My time is consumed with making sure the performance is absolutely as good as it can be, and getting that right on the stage, that is hard enough, and that is my focus, on live work.’”

It’s hard for me to criticize the focus on putting on a great piece of live work.  That’s a minimum requirement, obviously.  I do wonder, and would love to know, if the statement about “not bringing in a live audience” is more of an opinion or impression or if  it has a basis in statistical fact.  And if so, I’d love to know how they determined that it had failed in that regard.  In other words, as those who’ve worked with me frequently hear me say, compared to what did it fail?  Almost by definition, if someone in a New York or even Manchester sees a broadcast of a performance in London, that person is not likely to have appeared in the theatre that night under any circumstances.  That’s why I’d be fascinated to hear by what yardstick the English National Opera is evaluating success in this area.  I’d love to hear from somebody there who would like to share that with this audience because I think it would be helpful for others to learn from.

But let’s take that as a given for the moment.  I know something about creating new audiences for live performances after sending millions of people to events over the last decade or so, almost 85% of the time to people who weren’t in the market for that even when they came to Goldstar.  And here’s what I know:

If you want to get new people to try something, you’ve got to give them a new reason.

In other words, if a person made a decision a long time ago and perhaps subconsciously, that they do not like opera and don’t want to attend it, you can’t just make them aware of an opera and make it more convenient by putting it in a theatre.  That’s more likely to serve the latent opera fan who can’t get to where the opera houses are, and in a sense, that’s a new audience too.

But if you want really NEW new audiences, you’ve got to give me something I haven’t yet heard that explains why I should see something.  I have no idea how the English National Opera did on that score in this instance.  Perhaps they did a tremendous job; I’m not judging because I don’t have any information.

But merely delivering the same product in a new form is usually not enough to tap a new set of people.

A few years ago, Baz Luhrmann did a production of La Boheme, and it was incredibly popular.  Everywhere it went, 30 years old packed opera houses, with tickets totally sold out in most cases.  I’m not saying that this is the answer or that this was the “right” way for opera to market itself.  I’m saying that Luhrmann gave people a new reason to go, and it was this:

If you liked the way Moulin Rouge looked and felt, you can come to this opera and see something like that live and in person instead of on the screen.

In other words, he asked a question to which a ‘new audience’ would likely answer ‘yes,’ instead of ‘no.’  If you ask that same audience a question like “would you like to go see an opera, but in a movie theatre where it’s more convenient for you?” the answer is still likely to be ‘no’ if they don’t have an inherent interest in seeing the opera.

Ask me a question I will say ‘yes’ to.  Give me a new reason to go.

That’s the cornerstone of building new audiences for live entertainment.

Well, I’ve got one, and I’m almost serious about this.

The thing with the most potential to kill Facebook is this incredibly annoying, deceptive, tacky, unwanted and ultimately pointless trend toward making a user install an app just to see content that can easily be seen using an app you’ve already got: the World Wide Web.

Here’s an example.  If you use Facebook, I’m sure you’ve seen it:



Let me get this straight…I COULD just play the video right inside Facebook or I even COULD go to a web page and see it, with absolutely no trouble whatsoever, but INSTEAD, I’m being asked to allow some app from some unknown developer to allow them to “post on my behalf” to Facebook.

To quote Dr. Evil, “How about ‘no’, you crazy b*&^%ds!”

But some anonymous app developer scratching and clawing to make a penny or two and then sell their company to a bigger company a few hours before all their users vanish can be understood, if not forgiven.

How about this though?

Yahoo?  The venerable Yahoo?  The company that practically made the WWW happen?  They want to post on my behalf too?  How about posting on their own behalf for starters?  How is this company willing to do ANYTHING that slows a user down from using their content in ANY WAY? Like I said, I could understand a company scratching for survival, positioning itself for sale before all their users vanish, but Yahoo?

Wait…oh, right.  This is embarassing.  But mostly for them.

Enough sarcasm.  Let me explain this if it’s not already clear: these are companies desperate to get traffic, so they’re counting on people semi-knowingly agreeing to this so that they’ll get a lot more impressions in the newsfeeds of that person’s friends.  Impressions that, really, the person probably doesn’t want to put there, but hasn’t clicked on the right drop down menu to stop.  They just wanted to see the video of the dog on the skateboard and figured that the same deal that’s applied for as long as web video has been around would apply now.

Nope.   That’s because “social sharing” is the latest “monetization” scheme.  Argh.  What would be great is if all the smart people who work on developing this kind of garbage would put their lives to some kind of useful purpose.  It could be just about anything, but genning up worthless ad impressions by semi-tricking people into adding an app to Facebook isn’t one of those useful things.  Soap carvings, rocket science, teaching fingerpainting, opera singer: all useful.  This stuff…anti-useful.

But it’s not just you and me talking about it.  This morning PCWorld.com has a story titled “Facebook’s Social Reader Users are Fleeing in Droves.”

If everyone gets on this, these things could be dead in days.  Dr. Evil, what should we say to social readers and the like?

I agree. Pass it on.

For example, there was this one time when…well, I’ll spare you.  This could go on all day if I get started.

I was fascinated by the conclusion of some research I read about today, which says that fiction changes us, almost literally changes our minds.  Here’s a snippet from this fascinating piece in the Boston Globe:

“… research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds.”

The example in the piece is the TV show Modern Family which among other characters has a gay couple whose relationship is neither frowned on by the people around them nor a big focus for the story.  They’re just there, alongside every other character.  This “nonjudgmental treatment” of gay characters, the article says, leads to an increase in nonjudgmental attitudes about gay couples among those who watch.  In other words, the story doesn’t have to say “you shouldn’t condemn people for their homosexuality” overtly; simply by telling the story the way it does, attitudes change.

This shouldn’t be too surprising.  Think of the patterns people fall into just because of repeated exposure.  The template for a Romantic Comedy becomes for some people the way they want their lives to actually happen (alas).  Even the dumb-ass motifs of reality TV, like “forming alliances” and “voting people off the island” invade real life on a regular basis.

So are stories good or bad?  Or does it depend on the story?

I’ll pass on answering that to make a different point: people in live entertainment need to see that we are in a story war with, well, every other kind of entertainment and even information out there.  I don’t mean it’s a zero-sum game or people in our industry should worry about “beating” books and movies or whatever, but I do mean that strong stories will win the hearts and minds of the marketplace and bring relevance and strength to the business.

What do I mean by a “strong” story?  You can’t define it in your own terms; it has to be customer defined, and it’s rather Darwinian because what I mean is this: the stories that stick with larger groups of people are the strong ones.  Subjective judgments about quality of writing or all of that may be guesses or proxies for a “strong” story, but ultimately, a story survives because somebody who experienced it not only enjoyed it, but carries it with them.  This research hints at that very strongly.

And stories don’t even really have to be literal stories.  What’s the “story” of a rock band or a basketball team?  It could be a stray handful of lyrics or the way a star player brings everything he’s got to the game he loves.  People can fill in the “story” of Lebron James or Elton John for themselves.  It’s no trouble at all, and if that story dominates their minds, there’s perhaps less room for another story.

Which is why I call it a ‘story war.’  The human mind is a bit like a grocery store, in that there’s only so much shelf space.  It may not be a fixed and straightforward amount of “space” but there’s a limit, and for something new to be put on a full shelf, something else has to be removed.

Think about all the shelf space Harry Potter has among the millenials.  That’s a strong story, and I don’t just mean the details of the plots of the books.

So this is another call to avoid any trace of complacency in building great “stories” into our live entertainment.  Live stuff is emotional and powerful in the moment, and part of that is a trick of our biology, tuned to respond to the emotions of others.  And when there are hundreds or even thousands of other people, that response is all the more powerful.

But what happens when you’re not in the room with those people?  We still reflect on the emotions we felt, but if the “story” isn’t strong, we may not quite be able to remember why we were so swept up in the event itself.

So this story war is about working hard not just to give people a great experience during the show, game or performance, but before it and perhaps more importantly, after it, for a long, long time to come.

Eight months later, President Nixon resigned from office because of the Watergate scandal and Ford became President.

Wow, imagine that trip.  Obviously, Ford was far from an unknown, but to go from being a Congressman that most of the general public had only vaguely heard of to the president in 8 months must have made his head spin.  He stumbled into a job that people devote their entire lives to trying to achieve and almost none of them ever does.  In fact, Ford was thinking he’d finish his term in the Congress and retire, until Nixon asked him to be VP.

The reason people liked Gerry Ford was that he didn’t ever seem to lose sight of the fact that he wasn’t that different from everyone else.  A lot of people would have taken these two truly remarkable strokes of luck (from his personal career point of view anyway) as a sure sign that they truly are superior to other people, just like they always believed.

Not Ford.  And when he first became VP, he said something that not only helped set the expectations people should have of him, but also stands for me as one of the most perfect positioning statements for any product, service, or person that I’ve ever seen or heard.

Here it goes:

“I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”

Here’s a little marketing history to help.  Lincoln (as in the car) was (and is) the luxury line of Ford Motor Company.  Ford, of course, is the first company that built cars designed to be affordable and available to everyone.

Lincoln also happens to be the name of one of our very greatest presidents.

Ford was saying in six short words that he didn’t see himself as a peer of those great presidents, but at the same time, he could be counted on to do the best he could for the common person.  He put himself right there alongside normal people.

Brilliant.

If you as a marketer of anything can come up with something as succinct and powerful as this, it might be all you need for success, as long as the statement is a plausible match to reality.  I’m not kidding.  A friend of mine who used to work at Starving Students movers told me that the name alone “made their phone ring off the hook.”  They weren’t that inexpensive, but people thought they were.  Their movers weren’t students, but people thought they were.  The name did that work for them.

Come up with something like that, and you are well on your way.
(Yes, I know that Gerald Ford lost the election in 1976, but the fact that an unelected, previously obscure president who saw us through the end of Watergate and the Vietnam war even made it close with Jimmy Carter means that people didn’t exactly hate him.  Or perhaps the fatal flaw in his positioning statement is that he didn’t set expectations too high.  Either way, Ford never seemed to be focused on being President anyway.)

But let’s talk about Junior Seau.  This wasn’t a story of a “life tragically cut short” (though it was) or “a sad end for a special person” (though it was.)  It’s not even like the pointless and depressing story of Steve McNair’s death.

When the news broke yesterday, it was first reported as  ”shooting at Junior Seau’s house,” then that “Junior Seau has been shot and killed,” and then “Junior Seau committed suicide.”  As soon as I heard it was suicide, I knew what was coming next: he shot himself in the chest.

Why? Because that way his brain remains intact for examination after he’s gone.  Because Junior believed that something had gone wrong with his brain.  Because of football.

Peter King  (@SI_PeterKing) from Sports Illustrated tweeted this yesterday:

“‘I wonder how many parents woke up today, read about Seau…and said: ‘I’m not letting my kid near a football field.’”

Which of course is what I’ve been saying will happen for a while now.  Here’s what I said before:

“…football exists as it does because moms put up with it.  This is how it works: for football to be played at the incredible level of preparation and athleticism that we see in the NFL, there must be a robust college system.

For there to be such a system, colleges have to lay out the cash to support football teams, which are expensive.  For them to be able to do that, there has to be a lot of interest on the part of students, alums, and others to go to and watch on TV (in bigger schools) these games.

For that to exist, there needs to be media coverage and a high level of athletic quality in the college game.  For that to be there, High Schools must produce enough football players for 1% of them to be good enough to play in college.

For that to happen, there have to be enough youth programs to produce high school talent.

And for that to happen, moms have to be comfortable letting their sons play.  Yes, I know dads are involved, and they probably are the ones pushing football.  But if it’s just a matter of a scraped arm, a bruise or at the outside, a broken bone, moms are going to allow it to continue.

But if it’s brain damage…

This could be a long-playing issue, but gradually, the mothers of potential youth players could slowly starve the NFL of talent.  Sure, there will always be people willing to trade brain function sometime in the future for the possibility of wealth, fame and glory now, but if you don’t have the numbers in the programs, you simply don’t get the product on the field that you have today.

Since then, the story’s only gotten worse when it comes to head injuries in football.  Coaches deliberatelytargeting the heads of players known to have had concussions?  Former players creating a class action lawsuit over their head injuries?  Yes, and there’s a lot more of this to come

Football’s a tough game, and that’s part of what makes it fun to play and fun to watch.  On the other hand, there are very few fans who want to see anybody, especially their sports idols, reducing to forgetful, hobbling, bankrupt old men just a few years out of the league.  And if there is a subset of those fans, I think it’s safe to say you can ignore them as irrelevant to the success or failure of the league and the product.

Especially compared to those women all across the country who will ultimately decide how their sons spend their Saturday afternoons.”

I said  ”there’s a lot more of this to come.”  I had no idea it would be this.  As a football fan, I feel a certain amount of guilt today.  I don’t hold with the cretins out there who say “I don’t care what happens to these players. I just want to be entertained.”  As I said in the previous post, those people, while they exist, are irrelevant.  They’re not driving the bus; they’re just the noisiest passengers on it because they’re lucky to be there at all, to be relevant at all. Who cares what people like that, who obviously don’t care about anyone else, think?

Here’s the thing: football is going to have to change or this is, as I’ve said, the beginning of the unraveling of the world’s strongest entertainment property.  Forty years ago, boxing, along with baseball and horse racing, was on top of the world.  Arguably the most popular sport in the world.

Boxing?  Horse racing?  Yep.  Big things get small.  It happens all the time.  Horse racing is a different topic, but boxing declined in no small part, I believe, because of Muhammed Ali and his Parkinson’s disease.  To see him go from what he was to what he became was too much for people to bear.

Yesterday, I had the same feeling thinking about Junior Seau reaching the point where this felt like the only option available to him.  This is some seriously dark stuff, and it isn’t over yet.

I’m talking about Amare Stoudamire-style left jab to the plate of glass in front of a fire alarm.  In case you haven’t heard this story, a man who makes tens of millions of dollars a year using his hands to manipulate a basketball decided that the right thing to do when his team had lost an important game was to use one of those hands to give an inanimate object what-fer.

Your winner by TKO in the first round, Fire Alarm!

It doesn’t take me to tell you that this is monumentally dumb.  His team, the New York Knicks, rely to a large degree on his presence, and since they’re in the playoffs, which is the part of the season that really determines everything, missing him because of this is a big blow to the overall success of the organization.

But it’s easy to sit back and mock: here’s a guy who loses a basketball game, for which he gets paid lavishly, who damages the very tools of his trade and makes it more likely that his team will be beaten in this series in a single blow than anything that Miami team could.  Big dumb jock.  Spoiled millionaire.  Out of touch 1 percenter.  Take your pick of cliches you’d like to throw at him.

My experience though is that many people “punch the fire alarm” all the time, some of them almost as spectacularly as Stoudamire but on different scales.  An old friend of mine was the king of this.  We got into a fender bender once in his car, and it was clearly the other person’s fault.  He was so steamed about it that he jumped out of the car, stomped over toward the other person, took off his own glasses and slammed them down on the pavement in anger.

Wha?  How is that helping anything?

Still, I think we all have a tendency to do this in ways even much smaller than that: saying things that express our inner feelings when there’s absolutely no benefit to saying it and quite a bit of potential harm.  Almost any snide comment falls into this category.  Almost any negative comment directed at a person you’re talking to falls into this category.  In fact, just about any negative comment of any kind that isn’t followed by a calm evaluation of what to do to make the best of the situation is another form of punching the fire alarm.  (Side story: when I lived in Japan, I was talking to one of my Japanese co-workers and casually said something like “well, it’s important to express how you feel.” To which she replied, “why?”  That was the first time I’d thought about that, and she had a point.)

I know about this phenomenon because I’ve done this plenty of times myself.  Gradually, I feel I’ve learned.  Sometimes in important meetings, I used to put a mug in front of me that I filled with water, partly because I might be thirsty but also because it was a reminder that whenever I had the urge to keep talking or say too much or say something driven by anything other than pursuing our real objectives, the mug would remind me of this:

Like the G.I. says, think before you say something stupid.  Or punch something hard.