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From the Globe and Mail, headline: "COC Boss Scoops his Own Publicist":

The Canadian Opera Company is usually tight-lipped about its plans beyond the current season. I thought the tradition would continue under Alexander Neef, the diplomatic young German who took over as the Toronto company's general director last year.

Boy, was I wrong. Neef's blog on the COC website is chock full of hints, tips and informal announcements about his agenda for future seasons, including the following...

"He's interested in giving some hints along the way," says COC director of public relations Claudine Domingue, who usually tries to keep the lid on insider tips about the company's plans. "I think he enjoys letting people see a little behind the scenes."

Neef's prolific July entries are sprinkled with names of the eminent singers, directors and talent agents he encounters at lunch or at performances in Paris and London. The name-dropping is often followed by a more or less direct statement of that person's role in future COC seasons.

For Monday, how artist Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and blogs can cause more trouble than they're worth. As I like to say to one of my clients when we're in public places and spaces, "Lock it down!"

I've been working on two ridiculous things. You know how CD release concerts are usually/mostly boring? Or at the very least, exactly the same as the last one you went to? Right, so, next week and the following week, two people I work for are mixing it up a bit. Both these events are free as birds. 


I'm already planning my hilarious out-of-office autoreply for that day.

And now for something completely different, since Cecilia Bartoli isn't touring in the States this season, we're having a virtual ("  ") release party for her on Monday, November 16th. The release party, at (le) poisson rouge in (le) West Village, will feature a video recording of Cecilia performing selections from her new album, Sacrificium. The concert was recorded on September 10th, 2009 at the court theater of the Reggia di Caserta. The party will include silly door prizes and a drink called "The Castratini".

Keep in mind both these things could be completely unattended and I will go crawling back to the sell-tickets-to-a-live-concert-to-celebrate-a-release-in-one-place method after pounding Castratinis alone. I'll keep you posted.

My client Eric Owens had a recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Hall last spring. Typically, I was doing seventeen things at once, two of which were working with Carnegie's Creative Services department on Eric's program and e mailing Hilary Hahn a photo of a dog wearing a yarmulke. No particular reason for that latter task.

The person I was working with at Carnegie asked which photo of Eric I wanted in the program. I cut and pasted the URL of a recent photo of Eric from the IMG Artists website and sent it off to him. I received an e mail back saying, "Attached is what we have on file for Mr. Owens. I'm not sure you want us to use the photo below."

That would be...of a dog wearing a yarmulke.

Amanda the Consummate Professional strikes again! What PR prowess. What charm, what grace!

Yesterday, I e mailed someone at Decca a response that was meant for someone else at Decca. Something like, "I just don't think that naked statue photo screams 'party'" as a reply to an iTunes question. On the ball yet again! My own incompetence made me think: a while back, we collected a list on Life's a Pitch of the things that annoy journalists about publicists (here) and that annoy publicists about journalists (here). Now I want a list of everyone's biggest PR bloopers. Come on...publicity is funny!

Comment anonymously or as your proud, mistake-making self here.

Let me first say that I hope this blog entry doesn't ruin my sister's chances of marrying Jorge Posada.


I noticed these Jorge Posada/Mayor Bloomberg ads on The Awl last Tuesday. "Did they press 'submit' on those ads the as soon as Posada caught that last Rivera pitch on Monday night?" I wondered. Some deft Google work on my part determined that no, the ads had been running since the end of September, neatly timed with the release of Posada and Mrs. Posada's (err...sorry, Aliza) book. New York Magazine reports that jointly, the Posadae endorse our current Mayor--though poor Mrs. P. doesn't get her photo in the banner ads--saying in a press release, "He can hit, throw, field and lead a team, all without missing a beat. We proudly pledge our support to the City's all-star Mayor, Mike Bloomberg."  Oh-boy.

I have never worked in politics, but as a casual observer who thinks a lot about publicity, I don't think it's a good idea to have a player from only one New York sports team endorse you. Sure, the Mets were an unmitigated disaster this season, but that's hardly germane to their having many, many fans who are voters.  I asked my friend Ben Wyskida, Publicity Director for The Nation (see the **exclusive** Life's a Pitch interview here) for his thoughts:

"The Yankees are Manhattan's team and Bloomberg is Manhattan's Mayor. I'm not sure what a Mets fan would think of this. Also, I wish these ads reminded voters what a horrific stadium deal Bloomberg cut with the Yankees, costing the city millions in revenue and leaving school children in the Bronx playing baseball on Staten Island, instead of on the new parkland they were promised. But they won't. Frankly, I do think in local politics it's good to get sports heroes involved, but you have to get a few, from the different teams."

Moving on from Bloomberg's PR choices, I was thinking about how interesting it is every time a baseball player (orchestra player, ensemble member) is pulled out of their group into the solo spotlight. I don't think I've ever seen Posada on his own; Jeter, yes, all over the place, including in bobblehead form on my desk and in my dreams every night, but not Posada. I spent a good chunk of last week in Utah with my clients The King's Singers. Even when a new member joined the group last year, we didn't concentrate the press on him. Sure, he did a few interviews about "being the new King's Singer," but the focus was on how his joining would affect the group, what the group's process for selecting a new member was, what was ahead for this new incarnation of the group. Watching two of their concerts last week, I noticed that the individual members don't even bow after one has a solo. The soloist may gently nod slightly more than the other members during the applause, but even in performance the emphasis is completely on the group.

On the one hand, I think orchestras, baseball teams and ensembles are significantly more interesting to watch when you know the personalities and interests behind the players. One of the New York Philharmonic musicians, for example, was profiled in Runner's World because he is, you guessed it, a runner. Similarly, one of The King's Singers, Paul Phoenix, loves cars; would his being profiled in Car and Driver help the group reach a different audience? Of course. Would I, as the group's publicist, feel strange about pitching a solo profile of him without pitching solo profiles elsewhere for the other five? Absolutely. I felt weird typing his name just now! David Hurley, Timothy Wayne-Wright, Philip Lawson, Christopher Gabbitas and Stephen Connolly - there! Now I've mentioned them all.

I'm curious to hear how other publicists for organizations and ensembles handle this. Is it more effective to divide and conquer--that is, pitch stories for individuals when and where they come up--or to push a group's image and persons-alities above all else?  Individuals are what make the groups, and basically everything in this world, interesting, but the group is what's powerful and, ultimately and presumably, what people want to see and hear.  How much stronger would a Yankees endorsement of Bloomberg have been, for example, rather than just a Jorge Posada endorsement?

All that said, let's go Yankees! It is my opinion as a Public Relations Professional that winning the World Series in your new stadium will result in Good Publicity. That's a little free advice from me to you, Joe Girardi.

Maybe I was sleepy, but last night I was actually convinced Mel Gibson had named his new child "Media" and I thought, how amazing is that! Stick it to the press! Upon closer reading, I think ABC News just wrote a bad headline.

As you may (or may not) have read, I signed up for that coy mistress Twitter a couple weeks back. Here's me, tweeting my life ((career)) away. I joined for the sake of research for this blog, but am actually rather liking it as an information conduit. It's much easier to read than my current Bloglines sprawl, and since I'm fortunate enough to have smart, funny friends, I enjoy their updates throughout the day. In the interest of full disclosure, though, you should know that I've chosen to unfollow my die hard Phillies phan of an ex boyfriend for the remainder of the World Series. (Seriously.)

Poking around the 'sphere, I've noticed a lot of users don't like the news alert-esque tweets from arts organizations. The largest arts organization I follow is The Metropolitan Opera (@metopera), and, surprisingly, I am liking those same basic, personality-less informational tweets everyone seems to dislike so much. For example, I wouldn't have known about the free House of Dead lecture with Esa-Pekka Salonen, swoon, tomorrow were it not for following The Met on Twitter. The same information, of course, could be delivered to me if signed up for their e mail list, but I find tweets less intrusive, and as you've surely read, e mail is dead.

The reason I started following The Met in the first place, though, was because they responded to one my tweets about the donkey on stage in Barber of Seville.  They did not respond to my tweet about one of the leads looking like Cogsworth, but no matter. (That's right, donkeys and Disney: my Twitter feed is some high-brow stuff, friends.) It was a personal touch, then, that hooked me. They even said "LOL" in their response to my tweet! Did I actually make The Metropolitan Opera Laugh Out Loud? The Entire Metropolitan Opera? The building?

Obviously not. I (maybe) made the person running their Twitter feed laugh (and I'll take it), but who is that person? Who's running Carnegie's Twitter feed? The New York Phil's? I realize these accounts are meant to represent the organizations as wholes, so perhaps revealing the tweeter behind the keyboard is not in line with their broader "social media" marketing strategy. Not surprisingly, Wired magazine has figured out how to give their Twitter feed a voice---various voices, actually--while maintaining a branded company presence. I've only been following them on Twitter for a couple weeks, but it seems like they have a different reporter or editor run the account every week. They posted this tonight:

Wouldn't it be fantastic if arts organizations did this? Normally, I would advocate for a consistent voice in marketing materials, but with Twitter, blogs and Facebook, personality is the name of the game, and why not own up to the fact that your organization is made up of a lot of different personalities? Having more than one person at an arts organization tweet each week would give the public a sense of the people behind the scenes in a far more natural way than a Q&A or a special feature on the website. It would also, as I'm sure it does in Wired's case, drive followers to their employees' personal Twitter pages, and assuming they're pro-their organization, that can only raise awareness beyond the organization's normal reach. Most importantly, it would allow an organization to have their news curated in a different way each week; maybe what the marketing director views as news is different from what the artistic administrator views as news, so why not embrace that and the diversified followers that come with it?

I'm working on the US press for the new Cecilia Bartoli album, Sacrificium, which not unlike Michael Jackson's new album, came out this week. Buy it here to support this blog. Just kidding: album sales have nothing to do with this blog, but it's a good album so buy it anyway.

Somewhere along the line we came up with the idea for a "virtual archeological dig," and today the thing actually happened.

SO, La Cieca over at parterre.com kicks things off. Follow the clues to 8 other sites and answer questions to reveal puzzle pieces here. Last clue is at The Iron Tongue of Midnight.

So this happened: Kanye West mentions (cute and good) Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes on his blog.

We have this thing "Site Meter"--which is exactly what it sounds like--set up for our ArtsJournal blogs, so we can see how many people are reading us, from where, at what time, so on, so forth.

One of the intriguing aspects of Site Meter is that I can see what people have Googled to get to me. "Amanda Ameer" Google Image searches crop up every once and a while and totally creep me out, but most Google searches that get you to home sweet Life's a Pitch are "how to find a publicist," "classical music publicity," etc.. This one, in addition to the recent Yankees' lead on the TV, really made my night, though:


That's right folks: according to Lord Google, this right here is is the second stop for the Best Publicity in the World. You should all feel quite pleased with yourselves for reading. Clients who are reading: consider this your notice that I'm raising my rates.

I carry around big purses a lot, so sometimes I'll see a cute dog on the street and actually think I can scoop him or her up, mush him or her into the bag with my computer, lip plumper and blotting tissue, and continue on my way. These are the things that drift through my head, and for a split second I'm certain I can pull the off the dog heist without getting arrested. If I suddenly stop blogging, it probably means I've actually done it and, in fact, gotten arrested; apologies in advance.

I lugged this white leather and plastic Jill Stuart monstrosity around LA this weekend and had a similar stroke of crazy about Disney Hall and Gustavo Dudamel. They could fit; I'll just take out this map of Los Angeles, ditch the MacBook, move the make-up around...they could totally fit. Disney Hall looks bendable, as does Dudamel's hair. Just come home with me. I love you.

Unfortunately, The Dude was not conducting while I was in town, and instead I sampled the auditory delights of John Williams Conducts John Williams. Even my cold, black heart was warmed by the "Imperial Death March" encore, though getting through the Memoirs of a Geisha suite with applause between all--I think 8?--movements was a challenge. But I've seen Dudamel conduct, and can say for sure that this appointment was not a matter of snagging a cool Dude with great hair from a Foriegn Land That's Not Europe to garner some press and buzz for an American orchestra. This is an excellent musician and a consummate communicator who also happens to be all those other things.  As previously mentioned, I think the "Gustavo" marketing campaign is mildly ridiculous, but it was still encouraging to see posters all over town. I mean, all over town. I got lost on Sunset Boulevard ("twisting Boulevard") and thought I could use the blue "Gustavo Awesome-O" or whatever street light banners as my breadcrumbs; big mistake, they're everywhere.

I realize it's silly to write my impressions of Disney Hall almost exactly six years after it opened on October 23, 2003, but you've read this far already, so just come with me. The John Williams Event was at 2pm, so my friend from college was going to drive me around the city and take me to The Grove for breakfast before the concert. The hall was a few blocks up from my hotel, but I hadn't seen it yet, so when we drove by I started grinning and then, oh no, here it comes - crying! If you don't know me, you probably think "crying" means a few tears running down my face dragging clumps of mineral make-up along with them, but sadly no: I really cry.  "Wait, are you CRYING?" my friend asked. "Should we pull over??"

How cool, though, that this is where the classical music lives in LA. This isn't a museum or a hotel, it isn't some crazy new apartment building for the rich and famous. This is the Home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and I was overwhelmed. I walked around the garden at intermission and took photos like a Proper Tourist. Of course the sunshiny weather didn't hurt the building's cause, but I would go to a concert every Sunday afternoon there if I could. And most importantly, just like its new music director, inside that shiny, wavy, exciting wonder is a hall that sounds fantastic.