What would you say if over 9,000 of your audience members pitched in to design, produce, and pay for a two-page advertising spread in the New York Times? And what might that say about their common connection to your mission, your purpose, and your work? That exact sort of audience evangelism came to pass on […]
A major league question
NBC news ran a story last night on the struggle for a professional baseball team in Washington, DC. It seems the mayor made a deal with major league baseball that the city would cover the cost of the stadium ($440 million) as part of the package to win the team. Now the city council is […]
Selling what you can’t change
Independent film distributors are a lot like arts marketers — some would say they are arts marketers. As independents, they lack the studio space or production capacity of the major studios. Instead, they look for completed films (at film festivals and such) to package and deliver to the world. Like all other arts marketers, therefore, […]
Convenience at a cost
The grocery store loyalty cards that started to appear in the late 1980s were a first glimpse at a new phenomenon in retail and service industries: the subtle trading of personal privacy for price discounts and convenience. With a grocery loyalty or convenience card, you get access to special discounts at the register, and the […]
The ol’ revenue shuffle
Two separate news items this week made for an interesting contrast. In New York, cultural institutions are mulling or justifying entry fee increases in the face of decreased funding from the city. In London, similar institutions are squirming under a new deal with the government to keep their entry free for another three years. In […]
Monday brain-bender
In my web wanderings, I stumbled once again on the writings of Marvin Minsky, a big-brained gentleman at MIT, who has contributed seminal thoughts to the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics, among others. Within his diverse interests, Minsky also has a fascination for music as a cognitive process…what […]
Myths of the creative workforce
Fast Company has a brief story on creativity in the workplace, and myth-challenging findings of at least one researcher. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School asked over 200 workers to keep daily diaries, and then coded the results for creativity issues. Her discoveries suggest that our common knowledge about creative energy isn’t entirely true, and […]
A bake sale on steroids
This month, the city of Chicago has been taking the traditional arts auction on-line in The Great Chicago Fire Sale, which they claim to be ‘the first-ever municipally sponsored eBay charity auction.’ While it’s an evolutionary idea, rather than revolutionary, it did catch the attention of the UK Guardian a few weeks back. Funds from […]
Another iPod-inspired techno-trend
There’s a new form of audio distribution bubbling up around the Internet, in the form of ‘Podcasting,’ a combination of Internet news feeds, downloaded audio files, and personal audio players like the Apple iPod. Here’s the gist of it: There are a wealth of new ways to automatically grab text-based news and information to your […]
Uncluttered, unmuddled, unearthed
Americans for the Arts has always been a vast resource for data, research, publications, and especially advocacy materials for the arts. Now they’ve finally reconceived their web site so that people can actually get to that material. Chief among the newly organized goodies are: The Arts Education Online Resource Center has stats and resources for […]
