Jessica Smith – Page 2 – Progeny Theatre Company

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

Market Research

February 12, 2013 Jessica Smith

As soon as we had our manifesto written, as a group, we had a better understanding of what direction we wanted to take our theatre company. As Progeny Theatre Company we wanted to take well known children’s stories and adapt them into adult’s theatre. We decided that our first step should be to go out into the public and carry out market research. Although we did not know our specific target audience at the time, our initial idea was to make theatre for adults so we targeted eighteen years and over. We thought it was of importance to find out what Children’s stories stand out to adults now and what stories they remember from their childhood. We did this to compare what stories children have nowadays and whether they were the similar to what the participants remembered. From our research we gathered that although newer stories were mentioned (mainly Disney), Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White were also popular. The main reason for this was due to reading these stories to the younger generation. We also wanted to discover why these stories stood out to our target audience so that we could understand the popularity of these stories which could help us in framing our own adaptations. We had many different responses to this question; however the main reason was simply because that is what they read as children. We also wanted to find out what genre they preferred as children and what genre they prefer now. We did this to compare the two and see if their preferences had changed as they grew older. We actually discovered that a lot of people who liked fairy-tales or adventure as children preferred horrors as adults (this is shown in the other category). This is the best response that we could hope for as it fits with exactly what we are doing with our Theatre Company, as we are combining both genres. The top genre that people enjoyed as children was adventure; this sparked our curiosity and made us wonder why. So we created a poll on our Facebook page to find out why. The poll results were as follows:

The clear outcome was that people preferred the plot/story of adventures. However, we found Samantha Woodhouse’s response interesting, “The journey you can take with the characters and the adventures you can have yourself with friends when you re-enact the stories” (2013). We found this interesting due to the element of imagination involved within children’s stories as we are trying to recreate this for the adults. We also wanted to know if the public had ever noticed any underlying issues within children’s stories. The example that we used to explain it to them was The Ugly Duckling and how it could be argued that this story sends the message that being beautiful is of great importance and that if you are not beautiful then you will be bullied. Many people did not notice the underlying messages but a few people did. One response we received was “Yeah pretty much all fairy tales tend to have stereotypical things such as the ugly sisters and the roles of women are very set so they can be quite sexist. Oh and then there’s the stereotype of that beautiful princess’ are skinny with big eyes etc.” (Rebecca Walker, 2013). We found this quote suitable to our project. We feel that the fact that many people did not notice any underlying issues will be a benefit to our company as it shows that what we are doing is quite unique. We finally asked the public if they would be interested in seeing a performance like ours and we only received one no from all of the people we asked. The reason that he gave was simply because he did not enjoy going to the theatre.

We have collated all of the data into pie charts and tally charts/graphs so that we were able to visually see our results. They are as follows:

Question One.

Hansel and Gretel	5
Snow White	5
The Gruffalo	5
Cinderella	4
Little Red Riding Hood	4
Beauty and the Beast	3
The Chronicles of Narnia	3
The Harry Potter Saga	3
The Ugly Duckling	3
Bambi	2
Goldilocks and the Three Bears	2
Peter Pan	2
The Hungry Caterpillar	2
The Tortoise and the Hare	2
The Twits	2
Alice in Wonderland	1
Basil the Great Mouse Detective	1
Bear on the Pond	1
Bill and Ben	1
Can’t You Sleep Little Bear?	1
Coraline	1
Diary of a Wimpy Kid	1
Disney Books	1
Dumbo	1
Fairytales	1
Finding Nemo	1
George’s Marvellous Medicine	1
Grimm Fairytales	1
Jack and Jill	1
Little Miss Muffet	1
Lord of the Flies	1
Mary Poppins	1
Moby Dick	1
Mr Men and Little Miss	1
Mrs Frisby	1
Of Mice and Men	1
Roald Dahl	1
Rowan on Rin	1
Sleeping Beauty	1
Tangled	1
The Beatrix Potter Books	1
The Boy Who Cried Wolf	1
The Hobbit	1
The Lady and the tramp	1
The Little Engine That Could	1
The Little House on the Prairie	1
The Princess and the Pea	1
The Rats of Niamh	1
The Secret Garden	1
The Tales of Paddington Bear	1
The Twilight Saga	1
Three Little Pigs	1
Treasure Island	1
Winnie the Pooh	1
Zanzibar	1

Question Two.

Little Red Riding Hood	4
The Very Hungry Caterpillar	4
The Tortoise and the Hare	3
The Ugly Duckling	3
Winnie the Pooh	3
Beauty and the Beast	2
Cinderella	2
Noddy	2
Snow White	2
The Chronicles of Narnia	2
The Hobbit	2
The Twits	2
The Famous Five	2
Adventure Book for Boys and Girls	1
Aladdin	1
Alice and wonderland	1
Basil, the Great Mouse Detective	1
The Beatrix Potter Books	1
Biff and Chip	1
Can’t You Sleep Little Bear	1
The Cat in the Hat	1
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	1
Charlotte’s Web	1
Chip and Kipper	1
Disney	1
Finn McColl	1
George’s Marvellous Medicine	1
Goldilocks and the Three Bears	1
Goosebumps	1
Hansel and Gretel	1
The Harry Potter Saga	1
His Dark Matters Trilogy	1
Horrible Histories	1
Jack and Jill	1
Lord of the flies	1
Madame Doubtfire	1
My Family and Other Animals	1
The Chronicles of Narnia	1
Naughty Little Sister	1
Paddington Bear	1
Peter Pan	1
The Princess and the Pea	1
Roald Dahl	1
Rowan of Rin	1
Rumpelstiltskin	1
The Boy Who Cried Wolf	1
Grimm Fairytales	1
The Cloth of Dreams	1
The Famous Five	1
The Gruffalo	1
The Lady and the Tramp	1
The Land Before Time	1
The Lion King	1
The Little Engine That Could	1
The Philosophy Files	1
The Pig in the Pond	1
The Secret Garden	1
The Silver Sword	1
The Velveteen Rabbit	1
The Wizard of Oz	1
The Three Little Pigs	1
You’re Safe Now, Waterdog	1

Question Four.
Fairytale 21% preferred
Comedy 17% preferred
Adventure 51% preferred
Other 11% preferred

Question Five.

Fairytale/Romance 19% preferred
Comedy 17% preferred
Adventure 15% preferred
other 49% preferred

Question Six.
Yes – 60%
No -40%

Question Seven.
Yes – 98%
No – 2%

Word Count – 1074

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