Let’s talk promoting for a second.
Last weekend the Barenaked Ladies performed at the Sandman Center in Downtown Kamloops. The Barenaked Ladies is a big get for Kamloops. They are a quintessentially Canadian band, an icon. The Barenaked Ladies are a band that feels like the guys you played Timbits hockey with for a few years made the big time. Their the hometown heroes.
This is why I was shocked to learn of their presence only a few days before their performance. As an arts editor, I keep tabs on what’s going on in town, so I was shocked that this had fallen through my fingertips. I did a little searching online and came tot he conclusion that the marketing for this event was not well handled. The way I learned about the show was by combing through the City Events Calendar when doing research for my next pitch meeting at The Omega. For most of the major performances in town, press releases are sent to media outlets like our paper, but we did not get so much as a heads up.
Online marketing is more important now than ever. Word of mouth now means more than just talking amongst friends with similar interests, it means trending topics and viral content that defies geography and whether or not you actually know the mouth through which you hear the word.
The Barenaked Ladies show was mostly promoted on local radio. This may have been enough to create buzz years ago, but the audience for radio is shrinking, or at the very least aging. My parents are both still avid listeners of radio, specifically CBC. My mother, a Barenaked Ladies fan, learned about their performance even later than I did. The fact that someone who spends a lot of time listening to the medium through which the show was advertised had no idea it was happening until the day before shows how ineffective it was.
The first mentions of the show showed up online in April. This was well done by the promotional team, because it attempted to build buzz long before the actual performance (August 24). However, there was little maintenance advertising. To put it bluntly, we forgot.
This how not to market a show. The early advertising was smart, but that only works if you make sure to keep the show on peoples’ ‘top of mind awareness’.
Backstage BC 