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Bringing Sponsor Activations to the Arts & Culture Sector

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By Gene Carr, Founder & Paul Miller, VP Sales – Non-Profit Ticketing

In our last post, we introduced the concept of the “sponsor activation,” which is becoming more commonplace in commercial venues, but less so in the arts. In this post, we’ll give you more detail on how to think about a sponsor activation at your organization — and how it differs from a traditional sponsorship.  

The key element of an activation is that it offers benefits to all participants — the patron, the sponsor, and the arts organization. Read the Article

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AirPod Nation and Transhumanism

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Recently, I went to an all-day conference at Betaworks Studios in New York dedicated to the current and future trends of audio technology. The most eye-opening presentation was by Nick Pappageorge, Senior Intelligence Analyst, Frontier Tech at CB Insights, which opened my mind (and ears) to a change in our society that’s in plain sight, but I had never stopped to notice. 

As a result of his session, now as I walk around New York City I’m noticing more and more people with AirPods in their ears all the time. They go into a restaurant or a store and they don’t pull them out. Last night I was walking down the street and observed two business executives speaking with each other in a normal conversation for blocks, and one of them had AirPods in his ears the entire time. And when I’m in a store, I talk with people who have AirPods on. It’s a little disconcerting because I never know if that person is listening to me. That said, this is becoming more and more commonplace, which means I’ll get used to it. 

Nick postulated that what’s happening is an early form of “transhumanism,” which he defined as “the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.”  Read the Article

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Brand Activations: Stealing a Profitable Idea

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Part 1 of a conversation between Gene Carr, Founder, and Paul Miller, VP Sales – Non-Profit Ticketing, PatronManager:

Gene: During the past few years, I’ve become aware of a trend in brand marketing that flies a bit under the radar in the non-profit world but is big business in the commercial sector. It’s called “brand activation,” and simply put, sponsors of live events are no longer willing to just slap their name on an event or park their luxury car out front of a venue and feel like they are getting value. They (like almost everyone else) want the names of the people who are interested in their products — and to achieve this, an entire industry called “brand activations” has emerged.  

Brand activations are a way for a brand to engage with a passerby who agrees to trade their personal information (typically an email address) in return for some kind of benefit. These benefits are sometimes games — “enter to win” or a branded photo booth where the patron gets a photo to post on social media or share with their friends. Last week at the U.S. Open in New York, American Express offered its cardmembers a free headset to listen to commentary about the matches in progress — and in return, the company learned who was actually at the event. Read the Article

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Three Perspectives on Thriving in the Digital Age

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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Maureen Andersen, President and CEO of INTIX, and Linda Forlini, Vice President of Ticket Philadelphia, for a panel discussion at the League of Historic American Theatres (LHAT) conference in Philadelphia. We were moderated by PatronManager’s Vice President of Business Development & Strategy, Robert Friend, who elicited a surprisingly wide-ranging set of answers to the main subject of the panel, which was to uncover what it takes to thrive in the digital age.  Read the Article

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Mobile Streaming Overtakes TV:
Here’s Why It Matters

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Last month I wrote about how our patrons are beginning to shift their access to the internet from a desktop computer to their mobile devices. Now comes fascinating new data that documents a threshold has been crossed. 

Research from eMarketer shows that, for the first time, Americans are spending more time on their mobile devices than on television, as shown in this graphic: 

In some ways, this comparison isn’t valid, because television is essentially a non-interactive experience and one that is site specific. The consumption of television requires that you be in a fixed place (e.g., your living room) for a set time, whereas the mobile video experience is just that — mobile. You can consume all kinds of content on your mobile device, from news and email to entertainment and social media. But importantly, now your patrons can get access from anywhere and at any time to content that used to be limited to television (i.e., streaming media). Read the Article

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Mobile Friendly or Mobile Only?

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I remember just a few years ago sitting at a crowded tech conference in Silicon Valley and hearing a company say they were “mobile first,” which sounded pretty cutting-edge. Mobile first meant the company’s strategy was to develop a mobile app before they developed a web version of their product, or perhaps their plans were to never develop a web version at all.  

Fast-forward to today, where there is an entire cohort of people for whom the internet is an entirely mobile experience, period. Reinforcing this point, I came across an article on CNBC from this past January titled “Nearly Three Quarters of the World Will Use Just Their Smartphones to Access the Internet by 2025.”

According to the article, “Almost three quarters (72.6 percent) of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025, equivalent to nearly 3.7 billion people.” Furthermore, TechCrunch recently published an article titled “Google Makes Mobile-First Indexing the Default for All New Domains,” which means that starting in July of this year, “mobile-friendly content will be used to index any new website’s pages, as well as to understand the site’s structured data and to show snippets from the site in Google’s search results, when relevant.”

Our own research confirms this direction. In our 2018 national survey of arts patrons, 36% of those aged 46-55 said they had bought a ticket on their smartphone in the previous week — and that number increased to 45% for those aged 26-35. In many ways, the future these articles are heralding is nearly here now.

So what does this mean for you?Read the Article

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