Marketing – Page 2 – Progeny Theatre Company

Posters

May 15, 2013 Jessica Smith

After revising the first set of posters that we created, we decided to create new ones as we were not fully satisfied with them- due to things such as the poor lighting – shown below:

This time we decided to use a royalty free image as we found one which fit our piece perfectly. The image was of a woman holding a rose (one of our motifs). The only part of the woman which was visible is her hand and her lips, on a black background. We like the simplicity of this photo as it is eye catching without giving much about our performance away. So we extended the black background to the right of the image so that we could include the necessary information. We wanted to make our poster noticeable so that it was clearly visible even amongst other posters. The darkness of our poster makes it stand out from others.

Once our posters had been printed and delivered, after getting them stamped by the university, we began putting them around the university campus. Firstly we put them around Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC) and then we put them in the university library so that all students would see them. We then put them in the Media building, the students union, the main building, the Shed (public house) as well as in other areas around the campus. However, as our target audience do not only consist of students, we also went into certain shops and asked them to put them up so that the general public could see them. Many of the shops were extremely helpful in offering to advertise us and some took great interest in our posters and asked us about or show. Our posters have definitely generated the attention that we intended.

As well as posters, we also had a 6ft by 2ft banner printed. This consisted of the same image and information as the posters as we wanted to keep our advertising consistent. Through the Brand Manual (created by Sam Taylor) we learnt that consistency is significant when advertising. This is due to the fact that a company need to make their advertising instantly recognisable. For instance, after seeing the design and layout of our posters, the banner becomes immediately associated with them, and our company, just by having the same images, colours and font type. Unfortunately our banner had the wrong date on it as it had the 17^th of May instead of the 19^th of May, due to an unavoidable mix up. With such a small amount of time and a small budget we could not get this reprinted. The only solution that we could think of was to change the date ourselves. We did this using a white marker pen as it was the only thing that would stand strain against weather conditions. After sending emails and making telephone calls, I managed to get permission to hang the banner outside the main building of the University. I feel that this made a substantial difference to the sale of our tickets. Before putting the banner up we had only sold thirty eight tickets, however, by the day of our show we had sold over 100 tickets.

Word Count: 531

Progeny Theatre Company’s Brand Manual by Sam Taylor:

Brand Manual

Taylor, Sam (2013) Brand Manual, Lincoln: Taylor and Watt Designs

Marketing

Show Copy

April 26, 2013 Jessica Smith

Progeny Theatre Company presents their debut performance A Gothic Tale, an adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. Expect a visually stunning piece of theatre, which creates an impression of standing on the threshold between two worlds.
It is a corrupted fairy tale, challenging the traditions and expectations we have come to expect from “Once Upon A Time”, and tells the story of what comes after the “Happily Ever After”. When the fairy tale world slowly becomes corrupted and cracks begin to show, we are forced to question if any innocence can remain.
This performance is intended for adult audiences only (16+). It contains violence and scenes of a sexual nature.

Word Count: 109

Marketing

Marketing – The process of ‘Tagging’

April 24, 2013 Kelsey Lauren Stirling

To accompany Progeny Theatre Company’s marketing campaign we decided to find a unique way of advertising our company and our show. At first, as a company, we decided that it would be a beneficial idea to associate a phrase with our company – a tag line for Progeny Theatre Company. After developing our idea of making Children’s theatre for adults we decided to have “No one is too old for Fairy tales” as our main tagline. Following this I was playing around with other phrases and created “Once Upon a time will never be the same again…” The idea for this tagline was to intrigue our target audience into questioning why it would never be the same again, what is Progeny going to do with the well known “Once Upon a time”? As a company, Progeny wants to change the perception of a fairy tale, one way that marketing showed this was through this tagline. By stating that it will never be the same again, shows that performance will not be in the style of a traditional fairy tale and will change the way fairy tales are performed – within the company. These two taglines were used on our social networking sites – mainly on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

After these taglines were created the marketing team decided to exhibit these taglines in some way so that our audience could see them, more than them being on our social media sites. We wanted to create a closer relationship with our audience – in a sense face to face, rather through social networking sites. Due to the Progeny’s relationship to stories through adapting fairy tales, it was then decided to hand write our taglines onto paper and place them into books. Although we already had two taglines slowly becoming associated with Progeny Theatre Company, we thought it would be beneficial – for the tagging of books- to create a further two more taglines. These taglines would relate to our shows rather than Progeny as a company. One of the new taglines was our Show name ‘A Gothic Tale’ and the other would be a line from the play.

Choosing a suitable line from the script was not a simple process, which we first thought it would be. The line had to be comprehensible without much context of the play and spark the reader’s curiosity and attention. The line also could not reveal too much about the play – it had to be a teaser. Eventually – after talking to the rest of the company – a decision was made to use the Ex-wife’s line “He will do it again!” (Bull, Chanel, Smith 2013, p.12). I believed that this line would create an interest due to what it is saying, we hoped that the audience would question – who is he and what will he do again?.

Our taglines needed to be both catchy and mysterious enough to intrigue our target audience enough to find out what they were. We also had to have a way for the finders of our tag lines to know who created these tag lines. On these tags, we made sure that we had our company name clearly wrote at the bottom of all of the tags, we also hash tagged (a term used on Twitter) them so the finders knew that they could find us on twitter.

Jessica Smith and I then decided that, to help create the handwritten tags we would ask the group to create a few of each tag. I created a rough version of what the tags should look like and uploaded them to our private Facebook group. I told the group that all tags should be written like this – to keep them consistent – and that the tags should also be written in blue/black ink or pencil. I also noted to the group that these were rough versions and will not be used – and to ensure that the edges of the tags were cut neatly and straight

When the tags were completed properly and combined together, we wanted them to look as follows;

Photo of Alex Urbanczyk’s combined tags.

After the group created the tags we had created 300 small tags. The next step in this marketing activity was to gain permission from the library. This was done through emailing;

Once permission was granted we went ahead with our idea. As aforementioned our intention for tagging was to place our tags into books in order for people to find them, see our company name and become intrigued enough to search for us on the internet. This would hopefully further increase our target audience and social networking followers. After the tagging was complete we updated Progeny Theatre Companies Facebook status letting our current followers know that something was happening. This, again, was to build the relationship between the company and our audience – as well as gain new audiences. The status that tells the audience about the tagging begins with “Calling all students”.

Facebook status – Calling all students!

Once the tags were hidden in differing books in the library, Progeny Theatre starting receiving picture twitter messages containing various tags that people had found. By people responding to our previously mentioned tweets and status about our tagging, showed us that it had created a line of communication between Progeny Theatre Company and our audience. This was shown through people tweeting Progeny Theatre Company and attaching pictures of the tags that they had found;

Although this way of marketing our show and our company did not reach as many people as our social networking sites, we believe it was a creative and unique way of gaining more audience and further building a relationship with them. By doing this type of marketing in the University Library focused on our relationship with our immediate audience and, hopefully, created a more interactive connection with them. By focusing this particular marketing activity in the University Library targets a large amount of our audience –Students of the University of Lincoln. By linking up both our tagging and social networking sites created a way for our new audience members (from tagging) to find us on Facebook and Twitter. The tagging also enabled people who don’t have Facebook to know who Progeny Theatre Company are, rather that primarily focusing on internet users.

Word Count – 1000

Works Cited

Bull, Rob, Lewis Chanel and Hannah Smith (2013) A Gothic Tale, Lincoln: LPAC

Marketing

Competitions

April 18, 2013 Jessica Smith

In order to boost involvement with our audience we decided to hold competitions on our social media sites. The first competition was ‘just for fun’. We took an image of a rose and zoomed in on it. We then uploaded it onto both Twitter and Facebook. The main aim of the challenge was for our followers to guess what image we had zoomed in on. The responses that we got included ‘fake blood’ and ‘red riding hood’s cloak’. All through the day we kept in contact with them by replying to their guesses (without revealing the answer). To encourage responses, from our audience, we revealed the picture at 8pm along with exclusive details about our show. This is due to the fact that if they wanted to find out this information then they would need to participate (even if this only involved looking at the posts, rather than posting an answer themselves). The information that we revealed was the performance date. We did it like this, rather than just posting a status about it, as it was a more entertaining way, that built up tension, as well as enabling us to communicate and engage with our audience.

Although this competition helped to build a connection with our audience, it was just a teaser for the main contest. The winner of the main competition would receive two free tickets to our show A Gothic Tale. To obtain the free tickets we contacted Craig Morrow, the artistic director of Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, and explained what we wanted to do and asked if we able to get any complementary tickets. To which he replied that we were. Again we wanted to do this to encourage engagement with our company and to also generate interest in coming to see our production. The competition involved us providing them with a picture and they had to create a caption to go along with the image. The picture was of a blind man with glazed over eyes. We thought that this was an interesting image, that related to our performance, and one that would cause a response. It definitely generated a reaction as many people got involved. We got entries such as ‘fairy tales belong to the eyes that see them’ and ‘everyone sees things in their own way, one persons fantasy may be another persons nightmare’.

The competition ran for seven days. For the whole week the rest of the group were not allowed on the Facebook site, as they were the ones voting, and we did not want them to see who had written which caption in order to ensure that the voting was fair. Once the contest was closed, I created a post, on our private group, and commented with each entry separately below. Like so:

However, there was a tie in the voting so I made a new post with the three highest ranking entries. And while we established the winner we let the participants know about the tie so that they knew why there was a delay.

The winner was Demi Morrison with the caption ‘Can you really know what you can’t see?’ As well as winning two free tickets, her caption was also printed on our programs along with the image, to congratulate her.

Word Count: 545

Marketing

Promotional Video

March 19, 2013 Jessica Smith

We released two promotional videos. They were both similar, however, the first was just a teaser and the second contained more information.

The first one – Progeny Theatre May 2013 – was released on 7th of March 2013:

(Created by Alex Urbanczyk)

The Second one – Once upon a time will never be the same… – was released on 11th of March 2013:

(Created by Jessica Smith and Kelsey Stirling)

Marketing

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