Thursday, June 30, 2011

Promotional

At the moment, life is a bit of a juggling act in relation the musical I'm writing: Grimhilda!

On one hand I'm getting close to finishing the music and that's taking up a lot of brain-space, and on the other, I'm involved with some other people in figuring out how to advertise the piece so that it gets plenty of coverage well in advance, and so that it's not an unknown quantity when it finally gets to performance stage.

Perhaps I should use some promotional items: pens with Grimhilda! on them, for instance, or promotional t-shirts. It's an idea that's been used before with some of the other musicals put on in town. I need to find out how effective people think it's been to do this.

One of our team talked about having an advertisement on the back of a bus - though this can mean that your show is still being advertised several months after it's finished! Still, people do see these ads. As well as some of these well-worn routes (well-worn not meaning they're no longer effective) I'm leaning also towards using clips on You Tube, and MP3 versions of a selection of music from the show, so that people can get an idea of the music before they go. My instinct is that people like to have some idea of the music beforehand, so that they're not faced with a wad of unfamiliar material. And of course I'll continue blogging and facebooking and twittering about it - hopefully not to the point where everyone is sick to death of it!

I only heard about the group, Phantom Billstickers, the other day. They're the people who paste up all those flyers on hoardings and purpose-built round thingees and fences and special boards around the town. Rather than you going out in the middle of the night in your black gear (looking like a burglar without anything to burgle) and sticking up a pile of posters, they'll do the job for you. So they're on the list too. As are many other things....which seem likely to eat up the budget before we're started!

You can see what I mean about juggling.

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