Industry Observations

A Week to Talk About

/ Jon Keevy / Leave a comment

Grahamstown is a week away. Literally. The first performances are Thursday the 28th – that’s Stories of Crime and Passion, the Shadow of Brel, London Road and Owl. That’s a hell of a day. In the fever of preparation it’s been hard to find time to write a meaning post on something significant like research or practical ideas on marketing and producing. Instead of writing it I have to be doing it. A pretty common excuse for artists, but ultimately we need to be writing down our thoughts for them to develop. Art grows when a thought is planted, in the hurly burly of production we have to find time to sit on a park bench and let our minds wander. It’s not that I can’t work under pressure, I can and do, but I can’t think freely under pressure. That stroke of insight, that ‘Ah ha!’ moment, needs space to happen. The gap between the first musing and the flash can be huge, sometimes years can pass before you’re ready to make an idea you had into art. That’s why I keep a notebook; it’s my external memory.

As much as this is fundamental to the personal act of making art, it is also crucial to the practical and social act of making art happen. The Cape Town theatre industry seems to have academic writing hanging around the university libraries and reviews at various points along a popular/critical spectrum. It’s hard to find out how people actually make art happen. It’s pretty much the point of this blog and I’ve been letting that down for the past month. So on the one hand, sorry, and on the other, let’s start a conversation about theatre that doesn’t happen over beer in smoky bars or in a library or a lecture hall. Let’s start talking about what it takes to make art in this country.

Direct it Yourself

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Warning: This Post May Contain Traces of Nuts

Heeeey… so you’re a writer? You’ve been sitting in front of a computer screen, hunched over and away from natural light or maybe you’ve been sterilizing your baby-maker by perching a humming laptop on, obviously, your lap. I can tell these things. You’ve probably spent a couple of weeks or years working on your script. You’ve revised it, rewritten it, thrown it away and started over a couple of times. But now it’s ready. What do you do now?

Direct it yourself.

No, no, no! That’s what everyone tells writers not to do! You need another mind on it, you need a trained director to shape and mould it – someone who has experience, or a degree, or something.

And they’re right. A good script does need all of that to reach its potential.

But …

Have you ever heard a director say he has an idea for a production and get this advice: “Great idea, go find someone to write it for you. You need another mind on it, you need a trained writer to shape and mould it – someone who has experience, or a degree, or something.” I haven’t.

Writing is regarded as an innate skill in the Cape Town theatre industry. Everyone has it. While overseas the writer/director is a rarity, here it is almost impossible not find a director who is also a writer. And it requires very little to bring out this wonderful storytelling ability that lurks in the heart of talented people. You don’t need to study a degree or even read a book on it; after all you’ve read/watched /listened to stories your whole life. What if I was to say the same about directing or acting? UCT has 4 year long programmes for each of these. But not for playwriting, that’s something you’re meant to have picked up along the way.

When a person is a writer first they create opportunities for actors and directors. They often take on the role of producer too. Look around: Nicholas Spagnoletti and his play London Road; Duncan Bulwalda and Dream, Brother; Louis Viljoen just finished a run of his new script The Verbalists at the Arena; Amy Jeptha who is too prolific to cite only one example;  and, yes, me.

Directors generate jobs often – for actors, designers, techies and musos. Actors generate jobs too. But in all my wracking of my brain the only independent production I could think of where a writer was approached to write something is Damage Control. Well played Lauren Steyn.

Independent theatre doesn’t generate jobs for writers but writers generate jobs for independent theatre all the time.

This is an absurd situation.

That was Owl – Part 3

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The Building Blocks of marketing: A How-to guide to Estimating the Effectiveness of Marketing Strategies

With the tagline and a firm idea of identity I went into step two: drafting press releases and covering emails, creating content for the website and material like posters and flyers. But how do you decide what to spend you money and energy on?

There is a formula I use to work out how valuable a certain strategy might be. I made it up based on common sense, high school maths and general reading. If you can spot any problems I’d love to improve it. Basically answers the question: How likely is it to pay for itself?

Stage 1: How many people does it need to bring into the theatre to pay for itself?

Simple version:

(unit cost x number of units) / (minimum ticket price) = number of tickets you need to sell

Then take that number and compare it to the number of units. How likely is it to bring in those audience members?

Ticket sale target / number of units

This gives us a ratio to compare

So Case Study time! The design stuff is pretty straight forward for me, being a designer myself. I decided to make a thousand business card format flyers and distribute them. I handed them to people who wanted to know what I was up to. I left piles at coffee shops, bookstores, back packers, and had the magnificent Mwenya hand them out to her students. Yusrah recommended a super cheap printer out in Kensington 7th Avenue. They were R360 for 500, so we’ll plug that straight in:

R 720 / R50 = 14.4

Which means 1000 flyers need to bring in 15 people to pay for itself, sunk into a single value: 0.0015. We’ll call this number its minimum effective value. Of course this is pretty useless since we’re now just looking at it with our gut. Unfortunately until more people share their strategies and audience numbers it’s impossible to work out a statistically significant average effective value – and even then marketing is a remarkably tangled system. All we can do is rely on our personal experience to try figure out if the minimum effective value is greater or less than the average effective value.

Frustrating.

What we need is a Fermi formula – a means of organizing our ignorance and generating a logical estimate – to find the average effective value.

number of days x number of distribution points x (daily average traffic at distribution points x percentage of population interested in theatre x percentage of people who notice ad)* x percentage of people who intend to come and follow through**

* this cannot exceed the number of units per point if it’s a flyer.

** this is the ‘facebook event’ phenomenon – the percentage of people who rsvp ‘attending’ and actually show up.

This is roughly the way that websites and advertisers work out how effective an advert is, except that they have detailed numbers returned to them so they don’t have to guess.

OK, so plugging in the guesses:

7 x 10 x (70 x 0.05 x 0.6)* x 0.4

This gives us a total of 58.8 to 1000 flyers or an average effective value of 0.058

I’m not going to lie, this system is spotty and I may have missed some obvious modifiers but the margin between the minimum effective value and the average effective value is wide enough that we can safely say that flyers are good value for money.

Is anyone still reading? The point of all of this is that I can remember graduating and planning how to advertise my shows and doing things because they were what everyone else did. Really there is a lot to think about and you can go about it in quite a logical way. You can maximise your efforts by concentrating on improving one or two aspects of the formula. You could increase the number of distribution points, or pick points with greater traffic. You could discard the idea of flyers entirely and concentrate on more noticeable strategies with greater visibility but higher cost, like banners or posters. These formulas also help you to be realistic about free strategies like Facebook events or emails, which is what I’ll be covering next.

With these ideas in my head I chose to do business card flyers, 20 posters only, and to focus on free strategies: emailing, Facebook, blogging and Twitter.

Keep Digging

/ Jon Keevy / Leave a comment

As the winners of the various categories basked in Fleur du Cap’s glow and the spectators and commentators prepared their annual dissection of the event I happily kept working on my own projects. Every year people question the issue of representation. It’s not new. It’s not edgy. It’s not journalism. It remains the stubborn, flatulent elephant in the room that we all know is there. It doesn’t only hang around in the auditorium where the FdCs are being held. It’s at the opening night of Maynardville, it’s in the wings waiting for it’s cue in the majority of productions and also sitting in the audience at most shows.

By far the most articulate of the commentary so far has been Mike van Graan’s defence of the awards. He uses good solid numbers to peel away the first layer of blame that Lara Foot’s speech unleashed. But he could have gone further.

In digging past the FdC panel he showed us the disproportionately white industry – “how can the FdCs show transformation when they must reflect this?” he argues. He raises an example of a mostly white company, the Mechanicals, as something that could offer great experience and training for young black actors. He raises questions about why there are so few. And then he doesn’t deign to do any of that research that made the rest of his article so compelling. He doesn’t ask them to comment on why, he doesn’t propose a theory and look at the available evidence.

Mike van Graan’s article is a successful attempt to exonerate Distell and the FdC awards. He is right. They are not to blame. So he looks around and vaguely gestures at the “theatre managements and independent theatre-makers” who need to be more inclusive, at “the Cape Town’s theatre sector” who need to rise to the challenge, and at “the people of colour across the theatre industry” who need to participate and have opportunities created for them.

In the end, despite Mr van Graan’s well reasoned and researched opinions, he can only cast the blame over everyone. I would appreciate if in the final paragraph he at least had the good grace not to refer to the Cape Town theatre industry as ‘it’ and instead owned up to his conclusion with ‘we’.