The Objective: Once the Musical isn’t your typical Broadway show. The touching story of an Irish street busker and an unordinary Czech woman brought together by the power of music packs an emotional punch with simplicity and quiet charm.
Adapted for the stage from the 2007 film starring Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, Once brought home eight Tony Award wins in 2012, including best musical of the year. Following the Tony sweep Once had little trouble filling seats—the earned media buzz coming off the Tonys was enormous.
But the producers of Once knew that the best time to strike is when the iron is hot.flo
“We wanted to continue high sales through the end of the summer and into the fall, and one of the things that came to us was that a way to keep ourselves going would be to broaden our audience using the great word-of-mouth we had with the Tony wins,” says Caraline Sogliuzzo, account manager for SpotCo, the show’s main agency.
In particular, Once was looking to tap in to the young professional set. The typical Broadway theatergoer is roughly 50 with a household income of about $150,000. But the tenor of the Once audience was different and SpotCo saw a golden opportunity to increase ticket sales.
“We knew our social pages were very strong and our Web traffic was strong,” says Sogliuzzo. “And we decided to use that knowledge to try and expand our audience to be as big as possible.”
The Strategy: That’s where 33Across entered the scene with its social targeting platform. In brief, 33Across, which has relationships with about 625,000 publishers around the world, allows users to channel the power of the personal recommendation by identifying engaged users based on what content they share and recommend and creating anonymous profiles of them. That data is then used to target messaging at people with similar sharing behavior—for example, those most likely to be interested, in the case of Once, in buying tickets to the show.
“There’s a behavior we know we want to encourage and it’s that behavior we use for our targeting,” says Eric Wheeler, CEO of 33Across. “What we do is put media dollars to work on it and make it scale and capture it all without actually asking people to tell their friends.”
The video and music content surrounding a show like Once is highly sharable. In fact, art (at 5.3%) and music (at 7.6%) are two of the most shared types of content, according to research done by 33Across earlier this year looking at online sharing behavior among 500 big-time content publishers. To put that into context, the average percentage of shares for all of the 24 industries and categories examined by 33Across was only 3.3%.
The Backend: Before launching the campaign, 33Across placed a pixel on the Once website to track conversions and other related behaviors build a dataset of people who were already super-engaged.
By tracking visitors who looked at reviews, shared Once content, watched related videos, or actually purchased tickets, 33Across was able to identify a core group of ideal users, which was then overlaid onto its real-time graph and correlated with anonymous cookies of people with similar search behaviors.
“In that way we find a whole new audience of people who are very likely to have the same interests, search behaviors, and, ultimately, the same buying behaviors,” says Wheeler.
In essence, it’s like a megaphone that amplifies the impact of what’s already happening online earned media-wise.
“In terms of getting people to purchase, this is a secret recipe of using technology to magnify word-of-mouth and directly reach out the people,” says Kristen Bardwil, SpotCo’s senior digital planner.
The Results: To date, Once and 33Acros have run four campaigns together, with an ROI of nearly 7X. Sixty-three percent of those touched by the 33Across initiatives were under the age of 45.
The Takeaway: Buzz is a potent driver for any marketing campaign, but for the theater industry in particular, it can make or break a show.
“Word of mouth is the greatest sales tool we have,” Once producer Patrick Milling Smith told Direct Marketing News. “Personal recommendations fueled by online social interaction between friends has been proven time and time again in this digital age to act as an important trigger for consumers to decide to purchase a ticket.”
