The Long View | Can we leave marketing to the professionals?

While the upper echelons of English National Opera’s (ENO) management are busy attempting to contort our national opera company into the unquantifiable shapes prescribed by Arts Council England, someone lower down the pecking order has taken their eye off the ball. Pages of sloppy marketing copy did the rounds of social media a few weeks ago. Many presumed ENO had commissioned these gems from our new buddy ChatGPT – among the tell-tale clues being the suggestion that Benjamin Britten might yet knock out another operatic masterpiece (aren’t facts the one thing AI is supposed to get right?). Others took umbrage at ENO’s suggestion that first-time opera attenders might find an easier entry point into the esoteric world of lyric drama in a foreign language than those offered by Jenůfa and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

It’s easy to argue that anyone would enjoy Jenůfa, drawing on our collective experience of what an astonishingly powerful piece of theatre it is. I didn’t learn much during my lamentable five-year stint in arts music marketing, but I did learn that it’s often not as simple: that many attending classical music or opera for the first, second or third time – the people you write copy for, in other words – do actually crave an experience rooted in the subconscious idea of what popular culture tells us classical music and opera consists of (advanced research tells us this, not gut feelings nor our own conditioned emotional responses to works we have lived with for years).

I acted ludicrously as an arts marketer. Among the absurd schemes I was directed to enact was sending a special offer for a concert that included Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead to every funeral parlour in the vicinity, with the instruction to call the box office and quote ‘Undertaker Offer’. If a concert wasn’t selling – in one case because it included a mammoth piece by an unknown central European composer on an equally intangible theme – we gave away tickets for free, even offering selected punters a free beer afterwards. I may have found said piece fascinating and emotionally engaging, but I had a music degree, a penchant for contemporary music and had been listening to it for a month. At the drinks reception afterwards, it became obvious most had been bewildered by their first taste of live orchestral music and wouldn’t be coming back in a hurry.

I found that attitude mystifying at the time. But I’ve since learned that our emotional reactions to art are highly conditioned by our varying expectations and experiences. We know many under-fifties interested in the arts shy away from attending classical music and opera events because such events don’t promise as much as those theatre, cinema and dance performances that take place under similar circumstances (again, research). Among that cohort, there are plenty I would recommend see Jenůfa. There are far more I would recommended see La bohème, Figaro, Dead Man Walking, Innocence or even Tannhäuser.

One thing I wasn’t too bad at in my marketing roles was dreaming-up half-decent marketing copy. This is where you’ll be relieved to know that belligerent, know-all trolls did actually exist before social media. At one orchestra I worked for, I tried to change the way marketing copy was written so that it put readers in the shoes of a composer: Dmitri Shostakovich against Stalin; Josef Suk against the mortality that appeared to be decimating his family. Emails dropped in, claiming I had sensationalised and cheapened the symphonies in question. I thought I’d done the very opposite: tried to persuade fellow humans that these concerts were a matter of life and death.

Both patrons who emailed had already booked anyway, a good demonstration of the fact that the marketing copy wasn’t written for them, but for people who wouldn’t recognise the verbal shorthand we use to describe what a concert will include – an enterprise in which a degree of sensationalism is fair game, particularly if it amplifies a truth and approximates the experience the evening would likely bring to anyone truly alive to the music’s spiritual message. In that sense, what I wrote was far more honest than much of the marketing copy we were desperately scribbling for contemporary music that wasn’t selling. In that respect, I always worried we were tricking people into buying tickets for an experience that would likely do nothing for them, and possibly do irreparable damage to their perception of orchestral music.

This is difficult to get right. Sometimes there’s sufficient communal knowledge of an iconic artist or work to rely on those elements alone (around 2% of a major city’s population would probably be considered high), but most of the time there is not. Even less of the time do the other 98% share our highly cultivated ideas of what particular works represent – emotionally or artistically.

ENO’s marketing drivel has either proved AI’s ineptitude, or that an inexperienced staffer shouldn’t be left to write copy without sufficient support and supervision. In both cases, when it comes to the disciplined, sharp and ‘results-is-everything’ world of marketing, many of us who presume we could do better might well prove even worse.

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