New (and old) media challenges…

It’s all to do with advertising…
The New York Times’s president and chief executive Janet Robinson blamed the fact that advertising revenues had fallen across the board for the decline, saying in a statement, “Advertisers pulled back on print placements in all categories — national, retail and especially classified”. The New York theatrical press and publicity agency Boneau/Bryan Brown publishes a daily e-mail bulletin of New York theatre news called The Afternoon Report, and every week they offer a breakdown of the previous weekend’s theatre ad placements. It makes for intriguing reading and shows just how big the problem is for the New York Times: time was that the Sunday Arts and Leisure supplement would be paced with theatrical advertising, especially at this time of year when the season is at its most buoyant; but except for one large colour ad for the newly-opened Rock of Ages, last Sunday’s advertising spend was confined to smaller ads for just five other shows, August: Osage County, Guys and Dolls, South Pacific and Blithe Spirit. Yet there are currently 35 shows on the boards in New York.

Still, the New York Times is doing better than anyone else: the New York Post and Daily News had no theatre advertising at all on Sunday, while Newsday, Star Ledger and Bergen Record had some, including a full page ad in each for Disney on Broadway, who - with three shows on a the moment — are feeling the pinch, too, according to a story in the New York Times last week: “With revenues down — in some weeks sharply — compared with 2008, Disney Theatrical Productions has been heavily discounting tickets to its three Broadway shows and preparing a new marketing plan to attract families and others during this economic climate, in which the three Disney musicals risk vying with one another.” The story goes on to show that, against the same period of 2008, ticket sales for The Little Mermaid have declined 27%, for Mary Poppins by 17%, and for The Lion King by 5%.

Clearly, you still have to speculate to accumulate, in the age-old phrase, and spend money the old-fashioned way, to let audiences know your shows are still there. But money that used to be spent only on print is now being diverted elsewhere; and the newspapers are clearly hurting.

The irrelevance of reviews…
If many theatre producers are giving up on print advertising, some can’t be bothered to court the traditional press properly, either. As Michael Coveney pointed out in his blog yesterday, there was an almighty mix-up over the “opening night” for Calendar Girls at the Novello - no official press night had been designated, so critics were, in Michael’s words, allowed the option “of creeping into previews over the past week and scattering their notices to the winds of chance and indifference”.

As I reported here last week after I did so last Monday, the producers David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers were “not exactly encouraging fresh critical eyes to be cast on the production: at this point it doesn’t need us, so they’re not having an official West End opening night. Instead, we’re being allowed to go - if we must - in anytime from last night onwards. So, even though it was a bank holiday, several papers did, and last night I was there with Dominic Maxwell of The Times (back for a second dose, after giving it just two stars when he also reviewed its Chichester premiere last year) and Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph, amongst others.”

But then the performance this Monday turned out to be an invited gala, which some critics, Michael Coveney included, chose to attend - except that no one told them that the show was starting at 7pm instead of 7.30pm, even though, according to Michael, “The tickets were clearly marked 7pm, and the date and time had been registered with the Society of London Theatre months ago. So why the mix-up? Producer David Pugh faced the first night crowd (Norma Major, Cilla Black, Anthony Andrews, Christopher Biggins, A A Gill, the usual top notch mob) to say that we were being held up by the Press — bloody cheek! — and was met with a chorus of good-natured boos and ‘We love you, really, Nicholas de Jongh’ — before inviting the house to disperse to the bars and swig a free glass of champagne.”

It was bad form to cast the late critics as the villains of the evening; and it does nothing for long-term relations, either, between producers and critics, either. As Michael puts it, “Pugh is entitled to do as he likes, I suppose. But I guess some of us will be a little more guarded when he next comes begging for more coverage — as he did when his presentation of Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter started to flounder in the West End last year. You can’t pick and choose which shows you want the critics to review. It’s all or nothing, matey.”

A different kind of picking and choosing…
But it is, of course, a producer’s prerogative to decide where to spend his advertising dollars. And one way of continuing to advertise - and no doubt at greatly preferential rates - is to set up media partnerships with individual papers. But it has led to a very strange state of affairs, with the announcement of a West End production of Legally Blonde being heralded with an ad in The Times yesterday (and another full-page ad today), before a press release had even been sent about the show at all (it arrived later in the day). So The Times (and its readers) gets the scoop - but how does that make the rest of the media feel? Surely the show will need us all?