Archives for 2009

About a year and a half ago, one of my friends from college decided he was going to drop out of his Ph.D program at Columbia and start a band. Thus began a fairly insufferable period of friendship during which everything he encountered was a potential band name. We were at his parents' house for a mutual friend's wedding and his mom said something about packing up a porcelain horse carefully: "Porcelain Horse!!" he blurted. "That's an awesome name for a band." I believe another name possibility was "Rocket Ship" (??) and yet another was "Jungle … [Read more...]

From Wonkette:CNN Sends Very Important Press Release At 11:37 AM On Inauguration DayHey so like half an hour before our very first black president EVER was sworn in, which is to say, when there wasn't a whole lot going on, anywhere, CNN decided to notify various press outlets that they had released a rush transcript of Wolf Blitzer explaining the techmologies behind their new space alien spybot in the sky... On today's special coverage, The Inauguration of Barack Obama, Wolf Blitzer explained the satellite CNN is using to capture the … [Read more...]

Does everyone know about the fantastic daily newsletter 'You've Cott Mail'? If not, I highly recommend getting yourself on the mailing list.On January 13, Alvin Ailey Director of Marketing Thomas Cott wrote:Trendwatching: "One Day Sale"FROM TC: This season, I've noticed more and more major regional theaters have announced a "one day sale," offering low-priced tickets to their productions.  Some recent examples include: American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.), Dallas Theater Center  … [Read more...]

Have you heard the one about Kathleen Battle?The one where she's in the back seat of a town car and calls her manager's office?You know, the one where she says, "Can you tell this driver to turn the air down?"______It takes a village, as they say, to manage an artist's public image. If I am rude or unresponsive to a journalist regarding one client, the others suffer slightly as well. If my artists' record labels, presenters, management companies and I don't put forth a unified message, that's bad public relations in a crucial way. If I take on … [Read more...]

The New York Philharmonic has a new logo:Questions, comments, concerns? I do like this (new?) iTunes cover flow view-esque feature in the About Us section of their site, though: Love the natural-but-professional photos, love the quotes, love the flip animation. The design doesn't quite match the rest of the section, but we'll take it.Update 1/14: the new Philharmonic logo is being analyzed over at Logo Design Love dot com. … [Read more...]

For those of you playing at home, we're officially living in a post-post blog world: As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print.The Printed Blog, a startup founded and funded by former business productivity software entrepreneur Joshua Karp, is launching a twice-daily free print newspaper in cities across the country aggregating localized blog posts.  "Why hasn't anyone tried to take the best content … [Read more...]

My friend is in Detroit and sent me the following iPhone photo: That would be a Leonard Slatkin's head silkscreened on a t-shirt in a bookstore window. (I thought it was another Slatkin hologram.) Now, I say in the mission statement of this very blog that we should imitate successful marketing trends outside of our industry in classical music - I stand by that and thus don't have a leg to stand on -  but just so we're clear: … [Read more...]

I just re-read a press release I sent out about David, and the "For Immediate Release" in the top left corner of the e mail looks ridiculous. What is that?? Why do we start releases that way? Of course it's for "immediate release"; I'm "releasing" the news right now. Does it come from back-in-the-day when press releases were - what's the word - mailed? So the journalists could tell when the news was actually announced? How many classical music press releases are that time-sensitive, though. Come on now. Anyway, it's irrelevant with e … [Read more...]

'Twas the week before Christmas, and I went to see my friend Rob Moose and his string quartet OSSO perform at (le) poisson rouge in the West Village. They played just after pianist Gloria Cheng, whose program Allan Kozinn from The Times describes:The program Gloria Cheng played at Le Poisson Rouge on Monday evening was drawn from her most recent Telarc recording, a compilation of the complete (if slim) piano music of Esa-Pekka Salonen and Steven Stucky, along with a Lutoslawski rarity, the youthful Sonata (1934). But other threads bind … [Read more...]

If you're in town on January 17th, come keep me company at the Chamber Music America conference; it's really awkward if the PR person doesn't have attendees. I'll be yammering away about good arts marketing and publicity for little-to-no shekels at 1:30 in something intriguingly called the Manhattan room. My points are going to be that this is actually a really easy time to be saving money on arts promotion - there is no way I could have afforded to do artist publicity on my own ten years ago...I don't have company letterhead, I rarely spend … [Read more...]

Here is the first annual Best-of Publicity and Marketing list! I thought about prizes, and it's really only fitting to go meta and make free marketing the prize. So I will ask the boss man if winners can advertise on this blog one week at a time. In some cases it won't be applicable/doable, but...you get the idea. Best Publicity MoveJeremy Denk interviews Sarah Palin. Best ReviewRon Rosenbaum walks out of The Metropolitan Opera. Best Artist InterviewAngela Gheorghiu goes nuts in Opera News.Best Feature StoryMark Swed refuses to talk dirty … [Read more...]