• Home
  • About
    • Life’s a Pitch
    • Amanda Ameer
    • Contact
  • AJBlog Central
  • ArtsJournal

Life's A Pitch

For immediate release: the arts are marketable

1-800-Tickets.com

February 2, 2009 by Amanda Ameer

I was just (remortgaging the house I don’t have and) buying flowers online, and this popped up:

1800flowers.jpg

I’m always “chatting” with Verizon reps, too. Sometimes they suggest I call the 800-number with my question, but often they’re quite useful online, and I don’t have to listen to hold music.

I’d love to see a presenter box office live chat option. “Need help picking the perfect concert? Let one of our experts help you. CHAT NOW.” That way, venues could have trained box office representatives who work from home. Call them “experts”, too – not “representatives” – because they usually are, and it’s more encouraging to the buyer that way.

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra used to have a Leonard Slatkin hologram on their homepage. I don’t know where he wandered off to, but it would be fun to have an orchestra’s music director be the equivalent of the blonde 1-800-Flowers gal above: the icon of a music director helping you personally choose tickets to the orchestra’s concerts. You’d have to clarify that it wasn’t actually Slatkin responding, for our more oblivious friends, but I think it would be a nice image. “It’s my 81-year-old grandmother’s birthday on Sunday, Alan Gilbert Hologram Man: what concert can I take the whole family to see?”

Pittsburgh Opera (congratulations to you on your big win yesterday, by the way) has The Opera Lady and The Metropolitan Opera has Ask Figaro: both great, but not live.

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. Ray says

    February 2, 2009 at 3:23 pm

    Atlanta Symphony had a chat for the subscription department.

Amanda Ameer

is a publicist who started First Chair Promotion in July 2007. She currently represents Hilary Hahn, Gabriel Kahane, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sondra Radvanovsky, Julia Wolfe, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Lawrence Brownlee. She thanks Chris Owyoung at One Louder Photo for taking the above photo very quickly and painlessly. Read More…

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 … [Read More...]

Archives

@Amandaameer

Tweets by @amandaameer

Interviews

Talk to me about marketing Shakespeare

Oh gosh: let's see if I even remember how do to do this. Back in the day, when I didn't have clients playing everything Ravel wrote for the piano etc., I did interviews with Industry Professionals. … [Read More...]

Talk to me about Music Marathon

Remember when I was really awesome and posting interviews every week? Well, I'm less awesome now, but here's an interview with Billy Robin of Northwestern University. He started Music Marathon on … [Read More...]

Talk to me about BBC Music Magazine

As often as possible, on Fridays I will post interviews with colleagues from the field who are far more knowledgeable than I am on various marketing and publicity topics. In honor (-our) of all … [Read More...]

Talk to me about Metropolis Ensemble

In the immortal works of Todd Rundgren, "Iiii don't-want-to-work, I just wanna write-on-this-blog-all day." That's not entirely true: I love my job, but it does make things I also like to do--coming … [Read More...]

Life’s a Twitch, Part 3 (The Journalists)

Though many, many more music journalists are on Twitter, these are the people I noticed interacting with the publicists I interviewed the most. Oodles of thanks to  @nightafternight: Steve Smith, … [Read More...]

Talk to me about ‘Opera News’

As often as possible, on Fridays I will post interviews with colleagues from the field who are far more knowledgeable than I am on various marketing and publicity topics. This week, we have F. Paul … [Read More...]

Talk to me about not music blogging

At the ends of weeks, I post interviews with people who know a lot more about aspects of the proverbial business than I do. Two weeks ago, theater blogger Jaime Green told us she would blog … [Read More...]

Talk to me about theater blogging

Happy Friday! It's not raining and I actually have an interview to post!  This week we have Jaime Green, Literary Associate at MCC Theater in Manhattan and blogger of 5 years. Below she discusses … [Read More...]

Glenn Petry, 21C Media Group

Because 1. no one wants to read about The Life and Times of Amanda Ameer every day and 2. because there are many, many people out there who know more about publicity and marketing than I do, every … [Read More...]

Talk to me about Dilettante

Sometimes it's hard being Amanda. For example, when I think of lots of cool people to interview for (le) blog, and they say yes, and then I don't have time to write the questions? Yes, at times like … [Read More...]

A Virtual Panel

A Conversation

Jan 18-22, 2010: I hosted a virtual panel on when and how artists, managers, journalists, presenters and publicists single out musicians for being "special" in their promotion and career-building efforts. Participants included musician, pianist … [Read More...]

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in