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.”

When she was raising her two children, Kate Stone Lombardi—a seasoned journalist for The New York Times for more than two decades and mom to now-26-year-old Jeanie and 23-year-old Paul—was taken aback by the assumptions of so many people around her, who said it was best to distance herself from her son to avoid him becoming a “mama’s boy.”

But Lombardi’s parenting instincts went against all of the advice that she was hearing. Synthesizing years of research with hundreds of her own interviews with mothers, sons, fathers and experts, she presents a solid argument to those naysayers in her book, The Mama’s Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger (Avery). Both the data and the personal anecdotes demonstrate that fostering a close mother-son relationship results in emotionally evolved, empathetic and successful men.

What inspired you to write The Mama’s Boy Myth?
There was nothing in popular culture that depicted a mother-son relationship in a positive way. The only thing in books [and] movies were negative images of controlling moms and weak, wussy boys who were never going to grow up to be independent. My relationship [with my son, Paul] didn’t look anything like that—I wanted to know where this was coming from.

In your opinion, what is the importance of the mother-son relationship?
Moms teach their boys to recognize what they’re feeling, talk about it and start to develop empathy for others. They work at every stage of the game to develop emotional intelligence—it doesn’t make boys weak or dependent, it equips them to navigate life later on.

Has there been any backlash surrounding the book?
I had an excerpt printed in the Wall Street Journal and some of the comments—more than 200—were really angry, most of them from men. One said, “Your son sounds like the kind of kid they would have beaten up as a child.” This really surprised me, because this book is really good news—I love boys and men, and I think fathers are very important. This book is just about mothers and sons.

Tell me about any positive feedback.
[There have been] a lot of positive comments from sons—one that made me really happy was [from] a veteran of the Afghan and Iraq War, your typical guys’ guy. He talked about how his mom made him a better parent and soldier.

How do these close mother-son relationships differ from helicopter parenting?
What I’m talking about is maintaining an emotional connection to your son and letting him develop into the full person that he is. My generation encouraged what used to be considered masculine traits, like pursuing education, in our daughters, so we should also be encouraging emotional intelligence in our sons.

What kind of dialogue do you hope to spark with your research?
My hope is that we start to have a conversation about some of the assumptions we’re making. We’re still looking at the mother-son relationship like it’s 1955. I’m tired of these old stereotypes. Ten-year-old boys still need their moms, and 17-year-old boys still need their moms.

Freud cannot be avoided with a topic like this!
Freud was clearly a brilliant man, but he wrote the Oedipus complex in 1899. He was not writing a parenting guide for 2012—he was talking about the subconscious and, over the years, it’s [been] distorted into a prohibition against mother-son relationships. He was never against mothers and sons having a normal, close relationship.

Do you think there is a double standard when it comes to the father-daughter relationship?
When dads are close to [their] daughters, everyone thinks it’s great. A dad can do anything with his daughter—she can be his little princess or he can push traditional boundaries by putting her in a football jersey or teaching her something mechanical. If a mom spends too much time with her son or teaches him something traditionally female, moms get pushed back—leave that kid alone, let him be, stop bothering him. Mothers don’t get as much leeway with their sons as dads have with their daughters.

Your book is clearly a study and not a parenting manual. What advice do you have for new mothers of boys?
Follow your instincts. Your son needs you, and it’s good to keep [him] close. Spending time with your boy as [he] gets older, away from the rest of the family, fosters closeness. There’s something primal about the mother-son relationship throughout life at every stage.

What about for mothers of older sons?
It is never too late to reach out and establish a bond. Early imprinting is important, but I’ve spoken to many moms who early on bought into the cultural expectations that they should push their sons away, and later reached out to their sons with positive results. It was sometimes as simple as a mom calling her son and saying, “I miss seeing you. Want to go for a walk?”

You also have a daughter. What has motherhood been like with both of your children?
Raising both a son and a daughter in this culture sometimes felt like a strange balancing act. I was encouraging my daughter to excel in school, work hard, be athletic, not fold when faced with adversity. With my son, I was concerned about not losing [his] sweet side as he got drawn into the male culture of toughness. Really, I just wanted both of them to develop their full human potential.

How does your mother-daughter relationship differ from the one you have with your son?
No one ever criticized my relationship with my daughter, which was equally close but in some ways more intense than my relationship with my son. I think I identified more with my daughter, and that was both good and bad. Adolescence was much rougher with her, too—I think because we are more alike, she felt a greater need to establish a break from me. Now that she is an adult, we are very close. But no one ever criticized my closeness with her, and especially, now that she’s an adult, nobody seems to think it’s weird that we Gchat all the time, comparing notes on the minutia of our day. With my son, I would get messages [from others] to back off at every stage.
Jessica Kobrin Bernstein is a teacher turned overtired, overeducated SAHM of two. She lives with her husband, toddler, kindergartener and hundreds of books in Manhattan. You can find her parenting rants, recipes and reviews at peekababyny.com.

Photo by Samuel Huron, photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

by Adel Manoukian

Despite the positive fact that the city gained about 25,000 jobs in May, the amount of unemployment still rises to 9.7% according to the NY State Department of Labor.

Employers claim that they are hiring more workers, yet finding work has proved to be difficult for residents. The increase in jobs has been great for the spring, greater than it has ever been for this time of year. In this year alone, employment opportunities have increased at faster rates in the city than in the nation.

But economists are still puzzled as to why unemployment is continuing to increase despite the efforts of businesses and companies. The unemployment rate for the city is actually higher than the national unemployment rate.

James P. Brown, principal economist for the New York State Department of Labor claims that although the economy is strengthening by creating jobs, the market is still tough, according to an article published by the New York Times. Brown notes that most of the jobs that have been created are in the professional and business services. These services include careers such as lawyers and accountants, so it really depends on the industry.

When she was raising her two children, Kate Stone Lombardi—a seasoned journalist for The New York Times for more than two decades and mom to now 26-year-old Jeanie and 23-year-old Paul—was taken aback by the assumptions of so many people around her saying that it was best to distance herself from her son to avoid him becoming a “mama’s boy.”

But Stone Lombardi’s parenting instincts went against all of the advice that she was hearing—and synthesizing years of research combined with hundreds of her own interviews with mothers, sons, fathers and experts, she presents a solid argument to those naysayers in her book, The Mama’s Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger (Avery). Both the data and the personal anecdotes demonstrate that fostering a close mother-son relationship results in emotionally evolved, empathetic and successful men.

What inspired you to write The Mama’s Boy Myth?
There was nothing in popular culture that depicted a mother-son relationship in a positive way. The only thing in books [and] movies were negative images of controlling moms and this weak, wussy boy who was never going to grow up to be independent. My relationship [with my son, Paul] didn’t look anything like that—I wanted to know where this was coming from.

In your opinion, what is the importance of the mother-son relationship?
Moms teach their boys to recognize what they’re feeling, talk about it and [then] start to develop empathy for others. They work at every stage of the game to develop emotional intelligence and it doesn’t make boys weak or dependent. It equips them to navigate life later on.

Has there been any backlash surroundingthe book?
I had an excerpt printed in the Wall Street Journal and some of the comments—more than 200—were really angry, most of them from men. One saying, “Your son sounds like the kind of kid they would have beaten up as a child.” This really surprised me because this book is really good news—I love boys and men, and I think fathers are very important. This book is just about mothers and sons. 

Tell me about any positive feedback.
[There have been] a lot of positive comments from sons—one that made me really happy was [from] a veteran of the Afghani and Iraq War, your typical guys’ guy. He talked about how his mom made him a better parent and soldier.

How do these close mother-son relationships differ from helicopter parenting?
What I’m talking about is maintaining an emotional connection to your son and letting him develop into the full person that he is. My generation encouraged what used to be considered masculine traits, like pursuing education, in our daughters so we should be also encouraging emotional intelligence in our sons.

What kind of dialogue do you hope to spark with your research?
My hope is that we start to have a conversation about some of the assumptions we’re making.  We’re still looking at the mother-son relationship like it’s 1955. I’m tired of these old stereotypes. Ten-year-old boys still need their moms and 17-year-old boys still need their moms.

To read the full article at New York Family Magazine click here.

Whither Citizen Connects online chats, the program the Cuomo administration started last fall to let commissioners and agency heads live chat with New Yorkers (or anyone, really) who had questions for them? The chats, which happened on a weekly basis since late September of last year, have been on hiatus since the end of February. No new chats have been conducted since news outlets picked up a story in early March of a FOIL request of the questions Gov. Andrew Cuomo was asked in his own online chat. The New York Times outed one chat participant as Cuomo’s own daughter, who asked a question that was actually an inside joke from a Monty Python movie. A spokesman for the Cuomo administration declined to comment.

To read more from City & State click here.

By Leonora Desar

Devan Sipher made his living for more than five years writing about some of New York’s most lavish weddings for the New York Times’ Vows column, even though he’s a forty-something single Jewish guy who spends Saturday nights alone in his Chelsea studio. Sipher’s debut novel The Wedding Beat fictionalizes his life into the story of Gavin Greene, a wedding writer who’s still looking to find Ms. Right. Over coffee, NYU grad Sipher, who will be teaching writing at The Open Center this summer, chatted about how true to life his book really is.

Was it initially difficult making your living in New York as a writer?

I received my Master of Fine Arts from NYU, and at the time I graduated, an MFA and a buck 50 would buy you a subway token—my typing skills were my most employable asset. While writing, I did day gigs like working for a television and news show. I also started doing IT work that paid well, but the danger is that you become too comfortable—it becomes difficult to really focus on what you want most. I finally decided that I needed to either earn all of my money writing or find something else to do with my life. I made that decision in April 2004 and got hired by The New York Times in August 2004.

What was your favorite wedding story that you covered as a Vows columnist?
I loved all of them and I hated all of them. I loved all of the people. But the day before my deadline, I hated all of them. My process is that when I sit down to write, I spend at least 24, if not 48 hours, going, I can’t write this story. There’s no story to write. The best parts of the story are the parts I shouldn’t say or I’ll embarrass them. But that’s my process. I am actually moved by every story; if I wasn’t choked up at every single wedding, I couldn’t have done my job.

Is The Wedding Beat autobiographical?
It’s all emotionally true, but the story is completely fictional. I was very careful to make sure that none of the weddings Gavin wrote about are weddings that I actually covered. But are
there real-life elements in things that I saw and people that I met? Absolutely.

How heavily is Gavin based on you?
He has a healthier approach to dating than I do; he actually has lower expectations. Writing the character helped me become more aware of my own issues.

How so?
Gavin gets the girl, so he gets his act together. I’m still getting my act together. But while writing the book, I dated much healthier—I don’t think there’s anyone I dated while writing it that I’m not still in touch with and that I don’t think highly of. And I dated for longer periods of time. Although what I consider a long period of time may not be what the average person considers a long period of time.

Do you fantasize about your future wedding and family as much as Gavin does?
Truth be told, unless I marry someone who really wants a wedding, I’d be very happy not to have one. But I’d like to be married, I’d like to have children. I hope I’ll be fortunate enough to have them.

Devan Sipher will read from The Wedding Beat at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble, 2289 Broadway (at 82nd St.), April 19 at 7 p.m. He is also doing a panel at the NYU Bookstore, 726 Broadway (betw. Waverly & Washington Pls.), June 20 at 7 p.m.