Raven-Symoné in Sister Act gets a new ad campaign

by Greg Solman

Advertising strategies gearing up for next season take art out the wilderness. CityArts surveys the new media tacticians who bring Broadway shows, museums and other art venues to popular attention. Art and its patrons all benefit from millennial art advertising’s new tactical strategies. Part 1 of a two-part series.

New Yorkers with long memories can’t shake the specter of the TV commercials for the original runs of A Chorus Line and Evita—the same commercial execution, using identical snippets of song for maximum numbing effect, running for what felt like years. The Evita spot became so famously infuriating a fixture it occasioned one of SCTV’s most inspired commercial parodies: Andrea Martin starring in a road show of Indira and—ingeniously intermixing infomercial annoyance—Joe Flaherty as a bandoliered, yodeling Slim Whitman.

Marketing the performing and museum arts today seems like science fiction in comparison. You might be up late watching a WNET symphonic performance when an on-screen icon prompts you to hold up your Shazam-enabled smart phone. The app will sample the sound from the TV, identify the performance and give you the option of downloading the MP3 or ask you a question to win a coupon for a matinee in your neighborhood, having already correlated the cable or satellite box with your ZIP code and assiduously segmented demographic information on your probable age, gender, income, past buying habits and even whether you prefer cats or dogs. Why? Well, maybe dog lovers like Wagner and cat lovers Stravinsky. Who knows? They’ve got their reasons.

Most importantly, the phone will be connected to the sponsoring organization’s seating chart, allowing you to pick a seat for a performance, charge your preloaded credit card and download an electronic ticket you can present at the concert hall by flashing your smart phone at a scanner.

If that interactive/invasive process seems more like something for you than your remote-control-challenged mother, you’re not far off. In fact, the growing generational divide between patrons of the arts and their media consumption habits was the blue-haired elephant queued up for tickets in the living room at the Arts Reach conference at New York University last March. Put bluntly: Can you reach the graying and balding with tweeting and social networking?

Exceptions notwithstanding, there’s no mistaking certain demographic trends. Big-ticket performing arts companies—the symphony orchestras, the chamber music societies, the Broadway belt that needs tourists to shell out $86.28 for the worst seats in the mezzanine—count on a privileged sector of the baby-boom generation and older.

Trends indicate that those might be the last generations who take a daily newspaper. Newspapers’ Internet-edition paywalls are, for most publications that have tried them, useless for converting paid subscribers and generating revenue. Yet, printing is prohibitively expensive and readership is sliding in favor of eyeballs online, where banner ads aren’t making enough money, despite the audience.

Facebook boasts hundreds of millions of users, obsessively checking in several times a day—that’s reach and frequency. But the company’s IPO revealed that although half of Facebookies use mobile devices to access the site, they are devices for which there is no Facebook advertising model…yet.

More than 44 percent of Americans have smart phones, but they skew young. The elderly have gone from the poorest group in America to the wealthiest, with the disposable (literally, some critics would argue) income to pay $262 to watch a play. But arts companies need to refresh their audience with Gens X and Y and millennials to survive as something more than museums of tourism.

“While the traditional media audience has moved on, the rates have increased,” objects Doug Mobray, president of Mogo Arts Marketing in Corte Madera, Calif., pointing to a counterintuitive direction of newspaper ad rates and readers. “The cost per impression has increased substantially.”

The decline of print readership, exaggerated by the generational split between baby boomers and older and nearly newspaper-free youth, is the “first and most obvious change,” says Tom Greenwald, executive creative director at SpotCo, one of New York’s specialized arts marketing agencies.

“It used to be a foregone conclusion that the lion’s share of a media budget would go to The New York Times,” he says. “Now you might advertise there just to please the stars and agents, but the campaign is going to be mostly online banner ads and social networking.”

Greenwald says a lot of live entertainment still targets the 55-year-old woman; though she might not be constantly on Facebook, she’s probably online somewhere, and sites such as broadway.com can gear their initiatives toward that demographic. She may not be tweeting or playing Facebook games, but she will find some online point of purchase.

Greenwald says more than half of Broadway ticket sales happen in online transactions rather than phone sales. “It’s gotten to the point where they don’t even put phone numbers in the ads,” he points out.

Now Greenwald oversees Facebook campaigns that celebrate the 20,000 fans of Chicago with ticket giveaways. Samuel L. Jackson tweets to Twitter followers about The Mountaintop. A “nun” from Sister Act performs a video blog. Most shows, Greenwald says, use a combination of “social networking presence and refreshing websites. The great thing about the Internet is that it is an extension of the show. In the tradition of those Evita TV ads, you can run video content with sound.”

He “roadblocks” (commands all of the display ad space) select sites. Banner ads can be programmed with Flash and HTML to sport animation and sound. Live clips can be constructed from B-roll of the shows themselves, but they can be cinematic and even conceptual. Advertising on TV is now supplemented by so-called earned media—working the morning news shows least likely to be DVRed. “It’s expensive to buy TV,” Greenwald says, “but everyone works it.”

Soliciting the South Park generation for The Book of Mormon means a website with a working doorbell and online campaigns imploring fans to “Like us on Facebook” and “Follow us on Twitter.”

It’s not as if Spotco abjures traditional outdoor advertising or print, but “spending $110,000 on The New York Times won’t pay off,” Greenwald declares.

Clint White, president of New York’s WiT Media and lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, acknowledges the arts audience is “growing older, absolutely. But the good news is that those patrons are converted and believe in chamber music—or theatre or causes or art—and all have made it clear that they’re interested. All we have to do is tell them what’s going on and they’ll sign up. It’s the other [younger] audience that has to be introduced.”

“What’s disgusting? Union busting!” screamed the protesting Teamsters outside of Sotheby’s Yorkville digs this past Monday. While they recently lured younger Occupy Wall Streeters to their cause in a robust protest outside of Broadway’s “The Mountaintop,” the Teamsters’ numbers tonight were thin, although the 10 union members present were certainly leveraging their whistles, megaphones, and loud voices to create quite a ruckus.

“This is our normal night crew,” Teamsters Local 814 President Jason Ide told me. “During the daytime we have about 30 to 40 guys.” They’ve been organizing against Sotheby’s refusal to grant union members benefits and raises, all while the company posts record profits, bumps its CEO pay, and hosts star-studded events like Monday’s “Take Home a Nude” auction, which raised $800,000 to benefit scholarship funds at the New York Academy of Art.

“We’ve been locked out for 2 and a half months,” said Ide, whose boyish looks made the 30-year-old seem even younger than his mostly older fellow Teamsters. “We’d like to come back and do our jobs and work as art handlers. I actually worked as an art handler for 6 years before I was president of the union. But the company won’t let us unless we take big concessions.”

The various socialites, art-world heiresses, and bona-fide celebrities assembled on the seventh floor of Sotheby’s for the benefit auction didn’t seem to pay much mind to the Teamsters. “One sympathizes,” said NYAA board chair Eileen Guggenheim when asked if they were putting a damper on the evening. “Although one doesn’t seem to be related to us. We don’t really know what their issues are. But I think everybody’s mood is high.”

It was hard not to be cheerful in such a lavish environment. Where the Teamsters outside had an aesthetically unappealing giant blow-up balloon—a fat cat dressed in a business suit, holding a helpless worker in its paw—we had quail egg hors d’oeuvres on polenta cake with caviar, world-class artwork selling for up to $45,000, and the likes of Padma Lakshmi, Marcus Samuelsson,Angela Bassett, Nicole Bassett, Andre Balasz, and Sean MacPherson.

Not all attendees were as accommodating of the protesters as Guggenheim. Richard Blumenthal, vice chair of the board of trustees for the NYAA, said a Teamster spat on him because he refused to take a handbill. When asked if he sympathized with them, he said, “No, I don’t sympathize with them! They’re one of the most crooked unions out there, and they have been from the very beginning.”

Expected till the day of, Blake Lively failed to show, perhaps because she is off in Boston continuing her ragtag romance of Ryan Reynolds. Hopefully Karl Lagerfeld won’t be too peeved at her for skipping out on the event, though apparently Chanel employees are already upset that she’s the face of Karl’s handbag line. An unexpected visit from Mary-Kate Olsen certainly upped the celebrity factor of the room. The young billionaire—probably the wealthiest person in the room—failed to bid on anything at the auction, and refused to let me snap a pic of her with leather-daddy/architect Peter Marino.

I then asked if she’d talk a bit—another “no.” Not even about her sister’s movie—a softball topic if there ever was one. “It’s so hot in here,” she said, changing the subject ever so subtly while she fanned herself with the night’s playbill. After fanning herself for 5 minutes, she finally took off the huge fur vest that was likely the cause of her heat issues.

Other interview turner-downers included Angela Bassett, who grabbed me by the arm and fabulously said to me, “Not right now, honey. I need to shop!” before jetting off to the live auction. I’m assuming she came post-performance of “The Mountaintop,” in which she’s co-starring with Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Martin Luther King Jr. in it (and whom I spoke to two weeks ago).

Coincidentally and ironically enough, the play’s already been the target of the Teamsters’ ire because it’s part-financed by Sotheby’s evil overlord/chairman of the board Michael I. Sovern. (I did search for him on behalf of the Teamsters, to try and stick him with some hard questions, but after asking two old men if they were Michael Sovern and getting blank stares, I gave up my quest.)

Also declining interviews was Padma Lakshmi, who had two publicists ready to shut down any snoopy reporters who gave it the old college try. Padma yukked it up with buddy Eileen Guggenheim, but didn’t bid on anything this year, unlike last year, when she, Eileen, and I had a funny little meet-cute over her winning bid for an Eric Fishl piece. I also had a funny little chat with Robert Verdi last year, but my milquetoast editors at New York Social Diary, who I was covering for, cut out his off-color line. This year it happened again, but I have the liberty of virtually printing all his dirty talk. I leave you with my and Robert’s little chat from this year, in its entirety.

Me: You always give me pretty funny stuff.

Robert: Funny shit, I say funny shit.

Did you see the Teamsters outside?

I did!

Did you take one of their pamphlets?

I did not. I’m all for tyranny and conspiracy against the Man. I think it’s fantastic. I think there should be more conspiracy. I think people are conspiring against me, quite honestly.

Oh really? Who?

I dunno. Everybody. The entire television industry, but whatever.

Why is that?

I don’t know! I think I’m totally hateable for some reason.

Do you want your own TV show?

No, no. I watch porn.  It’s just more entertaining than anything I could ever do. And it involves some very interesting acrobatic moves.

I never can print this stuff.

How come? I always give you porn.

I tried to get something in the New York Social Diary last time, and they cut it out.

They refused? They never did it?

Yeah.

That sucks.

I asked, “Do you come here often?” And you said something about coming often.

I know. I always make gross jokes. I remember.

And then I had that thing about RuPaul, which I sent to the Daily News. You said that Heidi Klum was channeling RuPaul with her Halloween costume last year.

I was right! They didn’t run that?

No, they did. 

Oh, it slipped.

No, it was there.

No, I mean, it slipped, I didn’t mean it. I meant it, but I didn’t mean it.

Yeah, we weren’t supposed to bring our voice recorders into that party, but the red carpet was so ridiculous, all the reporters just descended and hunted for quotes.

Here?

No. At the Heidi Klum party.

I was gonna say, that’s ridiculous. These people wanna be recorded. Especially this one… [points to the lady in front of us, Joanne Herring, a Houston socialite who was portrayed by Julia Roberts in “Charlie Wilson’s War”]

I thought she [Joanne] was Joan Rivers.

Which one?

She’s right there, with her back to us. [I point] You have to see her face.

Oh, they all look the same, once you’ve been cut up and put back together. It’s like… you can’t talk about her behind her back either because her ears are there.

We’re literally talking about her behind her back.

But she can hear. She can hear. She’s genius.

So no plans for TV?

I always have plans for TV, but TV isn’t making plans for me, so I’m going to have to take them by storm.

How about Bravo? What about Andy Cohen? Have you tried him?

Oh, Andy Cohen wouldn’t put me on TV. He doesn’t want to put anyone else who could be competitive with him on television.

Oh yeah? You think you could take him down?

Oh yeah. Have you seen the gay men he puts on the channel? Care to review that? Think about it for a second.

Have you watched the A-List on Logo at all?

No. I don’t really watch television, so it’s not specifically against any show. I just don’t watch any show. I do try to watch the Real Housewives, the recaps on Hulu. Cause I like people who pull hair and scream and call each other names. It makes me feel comfortable, like I’m at home.

Who’s your favorite one?

I don’t have any favorites. I can’t pick favorites. That’s like trying to pick a favorite shoe. I like them all for different reasons.

Are you going to buy any of the art tonight?

I have been collecting art for several years now.  I focus my investment capital in the art world and in the art market. So, yeah, maybe.

Is that risky for you?

No. I actually have a really good eye. I mean, what do gay men invest in? We don’t have children like we’re gonna put through college.

Some do.

Yeah, but that’s just boring. Why would you waste good money on children? Why would you buy a spicy child when you could buy a spicy piece of art?

I don’t know. I can’t answer that.

No more spicy babies. I mean, I’m going to travel far and wide to buy a spicy baby from a far corner of the universe? To hell with that. I’ll buy a spicy nude.

You don’t have to go so far to get a baby. There’s plenty of ones right here. I don’t think you need to go so far.

Art is the only thing that’s hung in my apartment, if you know what I mean.

Send Evan tips at d.evan.mulvihill@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter!

Bernie Mac gives Sam Jackson a tongue lashing in Soul Men.

their heydays ended. Their personal shouting matches resort to that black folkloric pastime “the dozens”—the pathetic assertion of verbal authority by momentarily humiliating one’s social equal.
It’s unjust that Sam Jackson has had a more prosperous film career playing the same superficial, surly character ad infinitum while Mac’s varied, deep-rooted, good humored portrayals in The Players Club, Life, Pride, Mr. 3000 and TV’s The Bernie Mac Show left his career marginalized. This meant that Jackson’s ludicrous, obstreperous stereotype became a Hollywood institution, appealing to racists of all shades. It feels good to see Mac cuss that goblin back to hell.
And Mac does it in character: After Henderson listens to Hinds’ revival plan and then throws him out of his hovel, Mac paces the dank hallway, anger rising up his spine into a storm of righteous vitriol. During the film’s comeback road story, Jackson again plays the badass who gets the duo out of scrapes with the law and various thugs (there’s a nice moment when the team soft-shoe dance on a dirt highway) but it’s already proven that Jackson doesn’t have woof-tickets to match Mac’s splendor or spleen.
Neither Mac nor Jackson have the vocal chops to satisfy nostalgia for a bygone style of pop music and this prevents Soul Men from successfully regenerating soul vibes. It was foolish to cast Jackson as a singer after the rhythm-less way he croaked the blues in Black Snake Moan. He’s worked on his phrasing for Soul Men, yet he and Mac barely carry a few tunes—like those non-singing stars did in Chicago. For the slickly choreographed soul-group routines, there’s fast, crafty editing and body doubles that attempt a Don-Ameche-in-Cocoon illusion.
After the pleasure of that verbal battle royale, Soul Men is the most disappointing tribute to black pop music since the OutKast movie Idlewild. Director Malcolm D. Lee repeats the same faux-nostalgia as his Roll Bounce. Evoking the legacies of The Impressions, McFadden and Whitehead, James and Bobby Purify, The Chi-Lites and Funkadelic (with John Legend impersonating a Curtis Mayfield type) is insufficient for an art form that still thrives—even if only on one’s iPod. A reunion with an estranged daughter (Sharon Leal), an episode with a bushy groupie (Jennifer Coolidge) rehashes clichés. A clash with hip-hop hooligans says nothing about cultural evolution beyond pointlessly satirizing Hustle and Flow. What stands in Soul Men is the spectacle of Mac and Jackson resorting to a verbal street fight. It’s a form of what black academics call “essentialism”—returning Mac and Jackson to the ghetto.
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Soul Men
Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, Running Time: 103 min.
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Samuel L.Jackson stars as a disgruntled cop who terrorizes his neighbors in Lakeview Terrace.

It also raises the leprous itch of director Neil LaBute, whose own predictable shtick is to scratch at society’s sore spots. LaBute, like Jackson, isn’t interested in brotherhood or understanding; he likes to irritate. This is LaBute’s first time assaying black racism—a twist on his usual tweaking of misogyny, homophobia and generalized cruelty. That LaBute has nothing genuine to say about these social ills is what has won his acclaim; critics see their own fears and biases in LaBute’s contrived theatrics. Here, LaBute shrewdly evades mainstream white guilt and social responsibility by demonizing black prejudice. LaBute is not the credited screenwriter of Lakeview Terrace; yet it carries his stench.
The film was actually written by David Loughery and Howard Korder and produced by Will Smith, exercising his Mr. Hyde side. That means Smith is responsible for perpetrating the outlandish pairing of Jackson and LaBute, two of the most scandalous scoundrels in film history. This tripartite conspiracy to make a racist thriller lets Jackson be the bad guy, adding to his resume of black male stereotypes; and allows LaBute to continue his crimes against art. Jackson and LaBute are a perfect idiotic fit to distort the race and class issues in Lakeview Terrace. Jackson represents recalcitrant notions of black unreasonableness—as if the already miscegenated African-American social strata cannot make peace with interracial coupling. LaBute’s typical perversity represents the reactionary notion that black authority figures are untrustworthy and abuse their power.
As rogue cop Turner systematically harasses Chris and Lisa (they’re told “He has the color issue on his side; the color is blue”), the newlywed couple’s marriage gradually weakens because of their private doubts and insecurities. If they don’t really love each other, then this relationship—like the specious controversial one in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever—was doomed from its green-lit conception.
Lakeview Terrace’s cynicism is pure LaBute. Even the dialogue has his sour, out-of-tune ring: Turner taunts his fellow officers “What? I heard nigger jokes before.” Chris’ best friend sneers, “I always wanted to date a black girl. Right now I’m doing the Pacific Rim thing.” It’s all part of LaBute’s anti-social pandering. His ugly insensitivity pushes Turner—a bitter widower, mean to his kids—into more hysterical remonstrations and monstrous postures. “God ain’t here! You swear to me!” he bullies a perp (imitating Training Day). It’s not a believable characterization; hellhound Turner gets posed against symbolic California wildfires. Foul-mouthed Jackson merely literalizes Eddie Murphy’s 48 Hrs. joke: “I’m your worst nightmare—a nigga with a badge.”
LaBute’s oddest cultural reference is the Watermelon Man poster that decorates Chris and Lisa’s home. That 1970 Melvin Van Peebles racial role-reversal comedy has no fathomable bearing on this film’s weak social allegory. A poster for Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs might have been more fitting. LaBute isn’t skilled enough to direct an action-thriller that evokes real-world politics. Unable to create tension, he just exacerbates our uneasy social pacts—a stunt that could only be tolerated in a nihilistic age. It’s important to clearly state that Jackson and LaBute’s cynical routines in Lakeview Terrace offend human decency, but I’m brushing their dirt off my shoulder.
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Lakeview Terrace
Directed by Neil LaBute, Running Time: 106 min.
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