YouTube – Progeny Theatre Company’s Promotional and other video views.

YouTube views 24.05.13

YouTube views 24.05.13

 

Above is the overall views of the YouTube videos uploaded by Progeny Theatre Company. Each video, apart from the video entitled ‘Gary’ which was character work for the Piano Tuner, were uploaded to Facebook and Twitter. Sharing our videos onto our social networking sites is beneficial to the company as it enables our followers to see our vidoes instantly.

Our highest viewed video is one that promotes Progeny Theatre as a company, rather than the show. If Progeny was to continue after this module, the fact that our highest viewed video is promoting the company benefits us. Our on-line followers could recognize us a company from these videos.

The promotional video for our show had to be edited towards the date of our show to include our show title, the new date and the time. We originally had our trailer to promote the company and a teaser for the show, so when the performance dates were released to us we were able to edit the video to correctly promote our show. The new promotional video is as follows;

 

Word Count – 218

 

 

Creating the Program

When making a theatre program, for any performance, we believe that the design of the program should relate to the performance. Jessica Smith and I (the Marketing team) wanted to ensure that our program did this. This was through the appearance of the program – we used a simple yet interesting border which we believed seemed fitting to a fairy tale. It was essential for us that the program looked as if it would fit in with the fairy tale world rather than the corrupted fairy tale world that we were presenting on stage.

We wanted our programs to seem unique to our production – other than the information it contained. This could have been further achieved by the program containing a memento from the performance. The idea the marketing team and the Director had was to include a wax sealed latter from the count inviting the audience into his castle. However, budget restrictions we were unable to carry this idea through. If we were to repeat this process we would ensure to raise money for marketing so unique ideas, such as the aforementioned one, could be used.

The program contained, as any program would, the cast and crew, a director’s foreword, a show copy, acknowledgements and – of course- the details for the show. However the way our program differed from others was that we included a caption that was created by our competition winner. This was displayed on the front of our program underneath the picture. This was used to reward the winner, along with the free tickets; it would also encourage future participants to enter further competitions. The reason we chose to use this caption on our program also shows that Progeny Theatre Company have had an interactive relationship with the audience throughout the process and have continued to build this interaction within most areas of marketing. The program was as follows;

Program v3

Word Count – 307

Progeny Theatre Company’s Press Release

Progeny Theatre Company’s A Gothic Tale.

 

Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC)
Newly formed Progeny Theatre Company’s debut performance of A Gothic Tale will be premiered at the LPAC on Sunday 19th May 2013.

A Gothic Tale is an adaptation of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber. This performance tells the story of what happens to the ‘happily ever after’ once corruption takes over.

Tickets are available from the box office, which is located in LPAC, for £5. They are also available online on the LPAC website. A Gothic Tale contains violence and scenes of a sexual nature and is only suitable for ages 16 and over.

About Progeny Theatre Company
As part of a module at the University of Lincoln, third years have created theatre companies. Progeny Theatre is a newly established theatre company based in Lincoln. We aim to produce children’s theatre for adults by adapting well known children’s stories and enhancing them through the use of elaborate technical elements.

Progeny Theatre Company’s mission statement emphasises that we exist to change the perceptions and perspectives of those who are familiar with children’s stories. In doing so, we hope to alter the genre of ’Children’s Theatre’, to directly encompass the adult audience. We aim to create theatre, which allows escapism for adults by adapting children’s stories. Our theatre company aspires to create that which has not been seen before through controversial and innovative means, which will be enhanced through use of elaborate set, costume and technical elements.

Contact Information
To learn more about Progeny Theatre Company and their debut performance of A Gothic Tale feel free to contact us on;

progenytheatre@gmail.com
 

 

Marketing – The process of ‘Tagging’

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

.tag 1 tag 2 tag 3 tag 4

 

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

 

alex's tags

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;

email library

 

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 tagging cropped

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;

two cropped tweets 3

cropped tweet 1

cropped tweet 2

          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

 

Promotional Video

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)

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