The marketing plan was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. You’re the marketing director of a theater. It was your plan, but you knew it was dead. It’s a Wednesday afternoon and the mid-week matinee happening in the theater two floors down was half-full. You can hear over the monitors the actors trying desperately to get the audience to laugh, but it just wasn’t working.
You check the sales dashboard in your CRM and the social media accounts. Your Instagram post with a discount code generated a paltry ten tickets and a comment complaining about the sound in the show. You’ve finished your lunch of a roast beef sandwich with mustard and baked Lay’s. You munch a square of peppermint dark chocolate in a desperate attempt to enjoy something.
Your office feels stuffy and overheated. You’ll just put your head down for a minute.
Suddenly, your door flings open! There stands the Ghost of Christmas Past. In an instant you’re flying through time.
You can’t place the exact year, but you land in the heyday of the 1990s or 2000s (but certainly before 2008). You see a younger version of yourself at your desk, chatting it up with a reporter from the local paper who’s telling you about their new arts “blog”. You smile to yourself: those were the days. Budgets were growing, capital campaigns were reaching their goals, new buildings were going up. You knew what you were doing.
A melancholy washes over you. You didn’t appreciate that era. It didn’t feel easy at the time. You remember that around 2002 you started to notice the small slide in attendance and number of donors each year. But foundation funders and Board members made up the difference, so you brushed it off. You think to yourself, “If only I had started cultivating a new audience then…”
The Ghost of Christmas Past flies you to another time. You’re in your office with your door shut. A face mask with your theater’s logo lies on your desk. It’s the COVID era. You shudder at the memories. The uncertainty. The existential questions about the meaning of live performance. You wait for the go-ahead to start performances again. You wait for audiences to return. And wait. And wait. You don’t know what else to do.
You’re handed off to the Ghost of Christmas Present and fly forward through time. You find yourself hovering above your own desk, watching a meeting earlier that day with your staff in progress. You know exactly what’s going through your mind as you listen in to the brainstorming session: You’re paralyzed. What used to work isn’t working anymore. A good review in the local paper doesn’t generate clicks on the “Buy Now!” button. The slow slide of loss of audience and donors has caught up with your budget. Senior staff and the Board decided to cancel the show that was going to start in January. “After New Year’s is a dead time,” you rationalize. “Even Broadway sees a dip in sales that time of year.”
You tune back in as your staff pitches ideas. “Let’s try something different! How about a Gen Z rom com performed in the park? How about an audio drama as a podcast? How about an AR experience?” But you’ve been burned before by new ideas from optimistic, cheery staff members. Remember the Tweet Seat incident? “No, no,” you see yourself saying. “Let’s stick with what we know. Call the media rep at the paper again; maybe she can shave another 10% off our print buy.”
The light fades and you’re handed off to the Ghost of Christmas Future.
You shiver in your office, the heat to the offices having been turned off. It’s late and you’re lingering after the closing party for the Christmas show. The Board voted to close the theater last summer. Your season dwindled down to just an opener and the Christmas show. After tonight, it’s all over.
When the theater announced it was closing, there were a few comments on the Facebook post of the announcement. “How sad,” someone wrote. “My kids got me tickets for my birthday last year.” You think to yourself, couldn’t you have bought a subscription and sent in a donation? If enough of you cared, we wouldn’t be closing.
You head to the stage. You’re the only one left in the building. You turn off the ghost light, simultaneously flipping on your phone’s flashlight so you can find your way out to get home and start your new job in the marketing department for the regional bank tomorrow.
The Ghost gives you a meaningful look and fades into the abyss backstage.
You bolt upright in your chair. Panicked, you look around to see that your fluorescent overhead lights are still on. You have 10 new emails. Whew. You had only fallen asleep head down on your desk. You’re relieved to notice that your office, rather than being freezing cold like the future the Ghost showed you, it is the normal level of being overheated, which is why you fell asleep after eating your peppermint dark chocolate treat.
You’re back in the real present. But the memories of the dream and the grotesque snapping sound of turning off the ghost light is still with you.
You must do something! You can’t let the Christmas Future you saw come to pass!
You shout down the hallway at your social media manager. “Get your iPhone and get backstage to record the changeover during the matinee! Turn it into 20 posts and post three a day starting right away! We don’t have time for approvals – just post them, I trust you!”
You run into your Executive Director’s office and shut the door. You sit down and take a deep breath. “As a member of the senior staff, I think we need to make some big changes going forward. But right now, I think we need to get everyone together and figure out how we can cut some expenses right away so we don’t end up with that deficit we’re projecting. I’ll offer up the rest of my print ads for the season and cancel the monthly contract with the outsourced PR rep. We need some financial breathing room and the confidence of our donors!” As you rise and dash out of her office, you hear her shout after you, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everyone for months!”
You plunk back down at your desk and call the design agency to cancel the contract with for a rebranding and name change campaign. You tell them, “Sorry but we need the money to hire Jessica (the hilarious young character actor from our last show who couldn’t stop adlibbing funnier jokes than were in the script) to write social media content for us. And our audience knows our logo and our name – why would we start from scratch and throw away all that brand equity? I don’t know what I was thinking!” You slam down the phone feeling freer than ever.
You slide into your artistic director’s office. She’s staring out the window with her chin in her hands, looking like you felt this morning. “Yesterday you said that devised theater company you were bringing in to workshop their latest piece was feeing a bit uninspired and not certain if they wanted to do the workshop after all,” you remind her. “How about we commission them to turn their show into a live show AND a web series as a new start to our YouTube Channel? We can push it out on all our socials including process videos and interviews with the artists and our audiences, all hosted by the new online face of our company, Jessica? It won’t cost us anything extra, they get more exposure, and we all get to try something new!” She looks like a kid on Christmas morning whose dad got them a present they didn’t even know they wanted.
“Will it work?” she asks. “I don’t know!” you answer, “but we have to try SOMETHING!”
As you skip down the hall to your office to call the head of the Marketing Committee of the Board to tell her that, yes, you will take her offer to have her big corporation train the theater’s marketing and development teams on data analysis pro bono, all of the staff have popped their heads out of their offices and over the top of the cubicles to gawk at you.
“God bless us, every one!” you shout, and sit down at your desk to spend some time scrolling Instagram accounts from zoos and travel influencers for new content ideas.
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Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all of my Row X readers. Here’s to new inspiration in 2025!
Photo credits:
Cover Image: Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash
Person with mask looking at lights: Photo by Lisanto 李奕良 on Unsplash
Happy woman in the snow: Photo by Giorgi Iremadze on Unsplash
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