2008 Best-of Publicity and Marketing Very Official Nominations

THE NOMINATIONS ARE IN! Thanks to all for your submissions. I had to tweak some of the category labels slightly - forgive me, it being first year of the Life's a Pitch Best-of List and all.

And here - we - go:

Best Publicity Move
  1. Jeremy Denk interviews Sarah Palin.
  2. Hilary Hahn records something unplayable.
  3. Lang Lang performs at the Beijing Olympics.
*Super special honorable mention: Alex Ross' 'The Rest Is Noise' multi-year buyer-base-building blog launches his book of the same name to great success.


Best Review
  1. Ron Rosenbaum walks out of The Metropolitan Opera.
  2. Vivien Schweitzer has a two-night-stand with The Emerson String Quartet.
  3. Anne Midgette admits to not liking Brahms, and then reviews it.

Best Artist Interview
  1. Angela Gheorghiu goes nuts in Opera News. 
  2. Gustavo Dudamel speed dates. 
  3. Anne-Sophie Mutter discusses shoulder rests.

Best Feature Story
  1. Alex Ross on Bernstein for The New Yorker.
  2. Mark Swed on "elitism" for The Los Angeles Times.
  3. Jan Swafford on why we like The Art of the Fugue for Slate.

Best Album Art
1. Nico Muhly, Mothertongue (Brassland), for being literal:

Mothertongue.jpg 














2. Franco Donatoni, ALGO IV (Stradivarius), for not Photoshopping...anything:

Donati.jpg














3. Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Shostakovich/Symhony No. 4, for making us look twice:

CSO.jpg















Best Advertisement
  1. Pink's hot dog stand in LA serves up Dudamel Dogs.
  2. The Metropolitan Opera's rollover Doctor Atomic ads.
  3. The Metropolitan Opera's poster campaign for Satyagraha:

Satyagraha ads.jpg


















Best New (in 2008) Music Blog
  1. Mark Adamo Online
  2. Performance Monkey
  3. Scanning the Dial

Best Overall Classical Music Coverage in a Blog or Newspaper
  1. The New York Times
  2. The one-two punch of Opera Chic and Parterre Box.
  3. Sequenza21
*Super special honorable mention: Slate.com, because their coverage is always just so darn interesting.


Overall Best Moment in Publicity and Marketing in 2008
  1. New York City Opera gets back in the game and launches "I am City Opera" video campaign.
  2. The Washington Post actually hires a classical music critic: Anne Midgette takes over for Tim Page.
  3. Classical music community rallies against the Cleveland Plain-Dealer's decision to reassign Don Rosenberg after Tim Smith breaks the news on the Baltimore Sun blog.
*Super special honorable mention: Barack Obama's campaign for President.


E mail me here to vote. Winners ("  ") will be announced the first week of January.
December 16, 2008 10:01 AM | | Comments (4)

Categories:

4 Comments

By PR Girl on December 17, 2008 12:19 PM

If you are going to run a blog on an arts journalism website, and analyze good and bad marketing and PR moves as the main topic, it seems that you are jeopardizing your credibbility to allow your own clients to be part of a "best of" even if they were voted on by others, as you do talk about Hillary alot throughout your other posts....if you were running a blog on a newspaper as a reporter, you would be questioned re: your bias....that's all I'm saying...

Good thing this isn't a blog "on a newspaper" and I'm not a reporter, then! -AA

By PR girl on December 17, 2008 11:39 AM

Isn't it a little funky to nominate Hillary Hahn for best PR move when you handle her PR personally?

About five different people nominated her for the Schoenberg album, so in the spirit of keeping things democratic, I put her on the list. -AA

By marcus on December 17, 2008 9:00 AM

My Tribute to "Mothertongue" from last August:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27992127@N05/

By Yvonne on December 16, 2008 7:16 PM

But where's the cute radio-button voting/polling widget thingy?

Leave a comment

About

Life's a Pitch Why don't we apply the successful marketing and publicity campaigns we see in our everyday lives to the performing arts? Great ideas are right there, ripe for the emulating. And who's responsible for the wide-reaching problems in ticket sales and audience development? Boring artists? Greedy managers? Overstretched marketing departments? We're beyond debating who owns the problem. Let's fix this thing.
more

Amanda Ameer left her position as Publicity Manager at IMG Artists in June 2007 to start First Chair Promotion, and currently represents Hilary Hahn, Gabriel Kahane, The King's Singers, David Lang and Eric Owens.
more

Contact Click here to send an email. more

Subscribe to the Newsletter Fill in your email address here.
more

Subscribe to feed Subscribe to this blog's feed

Archives

Archives: 155 entries and counting

Interviews






more interviews

Sites

Now Play It
This site has musicians teaching viewers how to play their most popular songs on the guitar via downloadable video. more
MOMA - Eye on Europe
This microsite for one of MOMA's 2006 exhibitions is a(n extreme) lesson in what can be done digitally for special projects (world premieres?).
more
Spoon
This website makes me feel impossibly uncool, and I love it for that very reason.
more
The Metropolitan Opera
Sometimes, when the (performing arts) world gets me down, I go to The Met's website and feel better about it all.
more

Resources

RSS Feeds 
RSS is an acronym for "RDF Site Summary," or "Rich Site Summary."  RSS is a family of XML-based Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. 
more
YouTube 
YouTube, created in 2005, is a free video sharing website where users can upload, view, and share video clips.  YouTube uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos.
more
Wikipedia 
Wikipedia, created in 2001, is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project.  Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.  Articles are written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world.  Wikipedia is one of the largest reference sites on the internet, with at least 684 million people visiting the site yearly.  It contains more than ten million articles in more than 250 languages (over two million in English alone). 
more
MySpace 
MySpace, launched in 2004, is the largest social networking website in the United States.  A free-access website, MySpace allows anyone aged 14 and over to create a personal profile.  Unlike other social networking sites, MySpace allows users to personalize their profiles by entering HTML into certain areas on their pages, thus displaying video or flash content instead of text.  Users may also customize the colors, backgrounds, and fonts on their profiles through the use of CSS (cascading style sheets). more
Facebook 
Launched in 2004, Facebook is now the second largest social networking website in the United States (behind MySpace). The free-access website allows users to easily connect and interact with other people, and it is now also possible to create a Facebook profile for an artist, band, brand, or business. Users can add themselves as "fans" of an artist or business, write on an artist/business profile's "Wall," upload photos, and join other fans in discussion groups. more
more resources

AJ Ads

Introducing
AJ Arts Blog Ads
Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.

Advertise Here

AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
CultureGulf
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
Performance Monkey
David Jays on theatre and dance
Plain English
Paul Levy measures the Angles
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

classical music
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.