Life's a Pitch

Two weeks ago, Hilary and I went to LA so she could film The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. You can read all about how I didn't think her appearance would sell any albums here, and watch her performance on Hulu if you missed it. But I can't imagine any of *my* readers missed it.

For me, the strangest part of this experience, perhaps besides watching Hilary Hahn and Andy Richter get their make-up done at the same time, was that I, Classical Music Publicist in NYC Who Doesn't Really Watch Late-Night TV Unless Frasier and X-Files Re-Runs Count, was not so many degrees of separation away from one of the biggest media stories of 2010. Because of this loose personal connection and despite my previous disinterest in late night, I obsessively followed the immediate media fall-out and ensuing commentary of The Tonight Show drama. The piece "Jay Leno triumphs over what's cool"  in the LA Times was especially interesting. In it, Neal Gabler posits that Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno are on opposing sides of a variety of cultural, geographical and generational divides, and that the decision to reinstate Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show was "a function not so much of money or ratings but of demographics." His point, which I'll delve into further in a moment, is that it doesn't matter what the Conan or Leno audiences look like; all that matters is that Leno's audience is larger.

Since Alex Ross came out as Generation X yesterday, I feel confident coming out as Generation Y today. When I was heading to LA, friends and colleagues who are my age said, "Tell Conan we're 'Team Coco'!" When I returned, my dad and grandmother said, separately, "It was nice to see Hilary on the show, but we're happy Jay's coming back. We don't really 'get' Conan."  It's completely inconceivable to me that anyone might enjoy Jay Leno's general presence or sense of humor. I don't "get" him. The night Hilary was one of the guests on Conan's show, a man who could kick himself in the back of the head was a guest on Jay's earlier show. Sure, there have been plenty of self-kicking-esque stunts on Conan's shows, so perhaps my bringing this up is unfair, but the juxtaposition that night was especially striking.

But back to the LA Times piece. Neil Gabler writes,

Everyone agreed [in 1992] that Letterman was edgier than Leno, more iconoclastic, and, to a lot of people, funnier. Letterman wore the self-deprecating dork's mantle, but it was a ruse. He was the cool, droll kid who had reinvented late-night television, and NBC decided he might not be the best fit for the square "Tonight Show," where middle-American Johnny Carson had held forth for 30 years.

As it turned out, NBC was right. Leno had been an edgy -- and very funny -- comedian once, but he had gradually drifted to the center where the larger audience was. If that meant blunting his comedy, Leno was willing. By the time he took over "Tonight," Leno's basic commodity was not his humor, which had become toothless, but his likability. He was your grandmother's comedian -- the comedian of the Silent Majority.

Meanwhile, Conan O'Brien was handed Letterman's vacated spot after Leno. O'Brien had never been before the camera. He was a writer. But he was a great idea for a late-night show host: Harvard-educated, then trained at the writers' tables on "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons." It didn't get any cooler than that. Even if he was as jittery as a nervous Chihuahua and milked his handful of jokes for everything they were worth by shameless mugging, he was young and different -- a hipster.

The most noteworthy line of this piece, at least for the purpose of this blog post, comes next, when Gabler explains why NBC wanted Conan O'Brien for The Tonight Show in the first place:

Younger viewers, they said, were better viewers. They were more susceptible to advertising blandishments. They were more likely to decide on a product and maintain loyalty to it for life. And they were harder to reach and therefore more desirable. Whatever the excuse, the result was that older viewers -- and old meant over 50 -- were suddenly worthless in television terms. Losing Conan O'Brien, should O'Brien have gotten restless and decided to leave NBC when his contract was up, wouldn't have been much of a loss on its face. Even if he had gone to Fox or syndication, there was no way he could have competed against Letterman, much less Leno. ... [but] If [NBC] lost him, it would lose his cool. Leno, for all his ratings prowess, was just too square for NBC in the age of the almighty 18-to-34 demographic that everyone now lusted after. In a way, NBC, like an aging suitor, was addled by youth. There was just one complication. Leno, unlike O'Brien, actually could take his Silent Majority elsewhere, uncool or not.

I have made what can loosely be described as a "career" of assuming that younger audience members are better audience members. When I left my job at IMG Artists two and a half years ago, someone offered that I was "pretty young for a classical music publicist." Turning the dial to 99.9 Cocky FM, I responded, "I"m exactly who everyone wants in the concert halls and I know how to get me." (What a prize.)

On his New Yorker blog yesterday, where he revealed himself as a Gen X-er, Alex Ross posted a graph from the League of American Orchestras' Audience Demographic Research Review, "in all its scary glory." Previous generations, he writes in his analysis of this data, have increased their participation in classical music as they got older, while "the so-called Generation X, however, has yet to exhibit an upward spike as it moves into middle age." He continues:

If the light-gray line doesn't reverse direction in the next ten years, [classical music] organizations may begin to fold.  There is, in fact, reason to hope that such a reversal will take place. I'm a member of the fatal X, and I've noticed anecdotally that a number of friends who had previously paid little heed to classical music have begun to show interest. It's worth remembering that a great wave of fear came over the classical world in the nineteen-sixties, when it appeared that an entire youth generation--the baby boomers--had lost touch with the music. This specimen of alarmism appeared in Stereo Review in 1969: "Today's dying classical market is what it is because fifteen years ago no one attempted to instill a love for classical music in the then impressionable children who have today become the market." Then again, many boomers were exposed to classical music in their formative years, even if they made a show of rejecting it in favor of Dylan and the Beatles. They had some music education in school; they saw Bernstein's young people's concerts, opera singers on late-night television, conductors on the cover of Time, and so on. Such exposure fell off sharply in the eighties and nineties, when Generation X came of age. Orchestras and opera houses will have to work considerably harder to bring this cohort in.

....the way we danced till three."

via OperaChic, and I really don't know where she finds these things:

EXCLUSIVE: Zachary Quinto (aka Spock & Sylar) Tunes Up For Spielberg's Gershwin

Since he dropped out of Harvey, Steven Spielberg's first project under the reconstituted DreamWorks has been a subject of much speculation. Now I hear who's at the center of the director's biopic of George Gershwin, which DreamWorks acquired last fall. It's Zachary Quinto -- Sylar in the NBC drama-fantasy Heroes, and Spock in the JJ Abrams-directed megapic Star Trek. Quinto will play the famed composer and pianist, who with brother Ira was responsible for more than a dozen Broadway shows before dying at 38. (from Deadline Hollywood)

I think I was the only person in the country who loved the Cole Porter movie De-Lovely, so I have high hopes. When my friend Donnie and I saw it in a Stamford, CT movie theater on a Sunday circa 11pm, we were the only people there and just sang along really loudly the whole time.

I'll be honest with you: this has nothing to do with classical music PR. I just like Star Trek and musicals and OperaChic, and my sister, in addition to those things, really likes Zachary Quinto.

I was cruising around the Washington Post website the other day and saw this banner ad for life insurance:

Having read his music coverage on The Awl, which you should all be reading if you're not, and in The New York Observer, I decided that NY-based writer Zachary Woolfe would be the perfect person to pitch a Gabriel Kahane story to around Gabriel's March 3rd American Songbook date.

When I get it into my head that a writer I don't know will be a good fit with one of my clients or with a specific story, I go into crazy "Discovery" mode and try and find out everything I can about what they've covered and how in the past. Fortunately, I live in 2010 and am in possession of the HTTP://World Wide Web, so this research/stalking doesn't take terribly long.  (A friend of mine constantly gets asked about basic things he's already been asked in interviews, and he always wants to respond--and I think did, once--"Simple. Google. Search.")

All this is to say that in my Google frenzy, I came upon the (new?) New York Observer website, and it's really beautiful. Look how they lay out authors' profile pages:

When you hover your mouse over a photo, the title, author name, and first sentence of the piece appear. It's actually nearly identical in form and function to the old Mac Cosmetics site, which I also loved but that they seem to have changed. We based Measha Brueggergosman's homepage on the old site, to give you an idea of the look. Also, the Stella McCartney online store has a similar feel, though not as bright and snappy (which is fine, because her clothes are neither bright nor snappy):

Exceedingly Unrelated: I'm wondering which of my clients I can talk into adding Disney woodland creatures to their press photos a la the current Stella McCartney homepage:

?

But I digress. My point is, the New York Observer site makes you want to spend your precious time exploring it. They use production photos to draw you into the articles. This is, after all, performing arts coverage: why not use the visuals to your advantage? And performing arts coverage aside, we are just generally a visual people who are, at this point, accustomed to Flash functionality (just in time for web developers to move away from it!). 

One more thing about the Observer's site: there's a feature called "The Big Board" that points their readers to coverage in other publications that may interest them. We'll call this "The Progressive Car Insurance Model": Stick with us because we don't care if you look elsewhere, and actually, we'll tell you where to look. Because we're just that cool and confident.