Back in the old days (by which my children mean BC, ‘before children’) I was manager of a regional performing arts centre for a couple of years. A key part of my job was managing all the marketing for the venue. And because the staff and resource was small, that usually meant I was literally doing everything, writing media releases, designing press advertisements, writing newspapers, giving radio interviews and, on one memorable occasion the day before a show that we’d sold precisely 10 tickets for, standing in the local shopping mall handing out flyers receiving a strong dose of reality, that the reason we’d sold ten tickets (out of 250) was because no-one was interested in the show, however fabulous we thought it.

The theatre placed a fair amount of advertising with the local newspaper, including a weekly calendar of events that chewed up quite a few column centimetres, plus display advertising for all the current and coming events. Quite often touring productions would have their own display advertising artwork pre-prepared, all we need to do was strip in our venue name and contacts. And just for the old hands, the artwork arrived as bromides (does anyone still use these?), bear in mind this was the early 1990s so we handled very little electronic artwork, although I seem to recall the newspaper starting to accept PDF artwork by email about that time. Read More→