Beth Malone

Audience is something we think about every moment. How are viewers engaging with our exhibitions? How are they responding to the organization’s methods of outreach? Are they even showing up in the first place?

From very early on, Dash has had a large outpouring of community support. My partner and I are both Atlanta natives and were lucky enough to leverage relationships we had with press, artists, and musicians in the city. As we continued to grow within our mission, we cultivated (and continue to cultivate) a solid, committed constituency. Efforts to engage an audience outside the traditional art-viewing public such as university students and faculty, small businesses, and city government, paid off. Quite literally, we were networking – meeting with leaders in these industries to explain our work and ask for their support via their own promotional tools like social media, web links, etc.

Ariel Fielding

How does a marketing director with an audience-centered approach reconcile the growing primacy of data and digital marketing? Would it be possible for such a person — me — to collect, analyze, and mobilize data without reducing patrons to strings of zeros and ones? Would the things I love about my work — using images, language, and design to entice people to join the audience, and to give them a larger context for understanding the performing arts — would these things become less important in the headlong rush towards data? These are a few of the questions I brought to NAMPC2014, and the answers I found were more compelling, nuanced, and heartening than I expected.

Data. The word casts an attentive hush on any crowd gathered in a subdivided hotel ballroom. Data. The solution to every problem, the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, the alpha and the omega, the Holy Grail. Data. It will make your marketing smarter, faster, better.

Well, yes and no. There are variables to whether or not your data-driven marketing strategies are good ones. One of those variables is the “heftiness” of your data, and the “heftiness” of your data depends on the source(s).

Ron Evans

As a starter conversation in advance of the customer loyalty preconference that I am teaching with Carol Jones at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Atlanta, a question for you. How does loyalty begin?

I had just moved to the area, and I was looking for a place to get my hair cut. I remember driving by a place near my house, and deciding to check it out. The available stylist was Lan. She called me back and talked with me about what I wanted in my cut, and we joked about various things. She did a great job with the haircut, too – I was happy.

Elias Gross

Submitted before Americans for the Arts' National Arts Marketing Project Conference (NAMPC) on Nov. 6, 2014:

As an Atlanta (well, just north of Atlanta) native, I’m beyond thrilled that the National Arts Marketing Conference let out a hearty “it’s fall, y’all!” and headed south for its 2014 conference.

From receiving the first conference materials to downloading the Guidebook app, I’ve been looking forward to absorbing the marketing expertise gathered together for NAMPC. My position with the Lexington Philharmonic requires me to manage all of our marketing, PR, design, and the infamous field of “other duties as assigned.” Now in my third season with LexPhil, I am wearing and delegating the wear of all these hats better than ever, but I have gaps in my knowledge that need to be filled.

The banner is dying. It has served us well, but after two decades in the spotlight, its time is coming. Don’t get me wrong, banner ads continue to be extremely effective, but something has arrived that aims to blow banner out of the water. Welcome, Native.

Native advertising has been around since the early days of print media. They are ads that read like content, an advertorial.