The art of promotion
by Louise Kennedy for Boston Sunday Globe
Who couldn’t use a makeover? One local communications firm helps arts groups put a fresh face forward
How do you get to Symphony Hall?
Buy a ticket.
It really is that simple, but somehow it gets more complicated in people’s minds. They don’t buy tickets, because they feel as if the Boston Symphony Orchestra is an exclusive club, and they can’t join because their grandmothers didn’t bequeath them a pair of seats. Or they think they don’t know enough about classical music to appreciate the experience. Or they don’t know what to wear.
That, at least, is the kind of thing they tell Sametz Blackstone when the South End communications firm conducts surveys for one of its clients, the BSO. Sametz Blackstone—the Sametz is Roger Sametz, but there is no Mr. Blackstone, unless you count the one for whom the park across the street from the office is named— designs programs, billboards, banners, brochures, and just about every other visual representation of the BSO you can think of. But Sametz (both the person and the company) sees the firm’s role as a lot more complex than just picking a pretty color for the Tanglewood logo. They did pick a pretty color, a lovely pastoral green, but that’s not the point.
“Initially, you make contact with someone who says, ‘I need a brochure,’” says Andrew Maydoney, the firm’s vice president. “Our classic answer is: ‘How do you know?’”
The list of clients who have thought they just needed a brochure includes a growing number of Boston’s arts and culture organizations: Boston Ballet, the Boston Public Library, the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, the Fenway Cultural Alliance, and the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs. They’ve gotten their brochures— and their posters and street signs and calendars and subscriber newsletters— but they’ve also gotten an immersion course in thinking about their institutions as institutions.
What Sametz Blackstone does, among other things, is encourage people who have been thinking of themselves as creators and presenters and supporters of the arts to start feeling, instead, like brands.
Especially in a town as tradition-bound and deliberately frumpy— oh, OK, make that “dignified” and “restrained”—as old-school Boston, that kind of talk can make people nervous. But Roger Sametz argues, passionately and with some success, that creating and promoting a sense of brand identity is crucial for arts organizations that want to survive and grow. And helping to develop that sense of an organization’s essential nature and mission is central to how Sametz sees his work.
“Our origins are certainly in conventional graphic design. I have an MFA,” he says. “But it quickly became clear, if you weren’t thinking about effort and messages and programs and communication, you were essentially in the pretty-picture business. And I had trouble grasping how that was going to make a difference.”
Creating and promoting a sense of brand identity is crucial for arts organizations that want to survive and grow.
Boston Ballet has been working with Sametz Blackstone for about a year, and “I have to say that I’ve been amazed,” says artistic director Mikko Nissinen. “Not only is [Sametz] bringing a really nice, fresh, really high-class look into our marketing materials, but we’re starting to talk about branding—creating an institutional image.”
Nissinen sees no contradiction between that kind of “corporate” thinking and artistic risk-taking. Quite the contrary. “If people get to recognize the organization, we will get to take more risks,” he says. “When you sell a product—‘Swan Lake,’ ‘Swan Lake,’ ‘Swan Lake’— then you train them just to come to ‘Swan Lake.’ But if the experience is always rewarding, they trust you to come in. They know the quality of what the organization represents.”
Eventually, Nissinen says, he hopes Sametz Blackstone will help Boston Ballet achieve that kind of universal recognition—much as, he says, the New York City Ballet has done. “I look at their marketing materials; sometimes they’re not selling the product at all. They’re selling beauty and sensuality,” he says. “It’s sort of branding—you know, like Chanel.”
What’s tricky about this kind of work is that it can sound like jargon or hot air; what does it mean, exactly, to create an institutional image? It’s not a thing you can hold in your hand, and that can throw people who were expecting just to order up a brochure and be done with it.
“A lot of it, it’s subtle,” says Sametz of the work he tries to do to build audiences. “But all together, it makes a huge impact. Fixing one piece,” like a redesigned leaflet or a snazzier poster, “will maybe add 20 people. Taking care of the entire structure of communications will net you 2,000 people.”
What’s also tricky is that this kind of big-picture restructuring takes place in part through a thousand tiny details. On a recent, fairly typical day at the Sametz Blackstone office, Sametz, Maydoney, and assorted designers and project managers met with one client after another, with occasional input from Sametz’s Scottish deerhound and Tibetan terrier. Everyone but the dogs was focusing on the kind of minutiae that, Sametz hopes, will eventually add up to something more.
With people from the Ballet, Sametz and his staff talked about the “Nutcracker” posters and critiqued a recent redesign of “Sightlines,” the newsletter that goes to Ballet subscribers. The discussion got down to the level of how many kinds of subheadings to use in the newsletter’s text, whether the photographs should “reflect the dancers as dancers, not mowing the lawn,” as one Ballet staffer said, and what kind of paper stock might make the colored type easier to read.
That’s all familiar stuff to anyone who’s worked in design, but it’s at a much more nitty-gritty level than the “institutional image” talk might make you think. And that’s the point: Image is in the details.
With representatives of the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs, meanwhile, a look at the most recent edition of “Boston Now,” a neighborhood-by-neighborhood cultural calendar, segued into a brainstorming session on other ways to market small arts groups on a shoestring. Maybe a cart at Faneuil Hall? Maybe some kind of holiday ticket promotion? Coffee mugs? T-shirts?
The conversation wheeled and tumbled, ranging from questions such as “What is culture, anyway?” to “How much would it cost to print gift tags?” The upshot: Get some prices from the printer, and keep thinking about which cultural organizations to include in the next “Boston Now”—assuming, that is, that there’s some money somewhere, even in this economic climate, to keep funding such a thing. Sametz Blackstone, in fact, is actively engaged in helping the city look for possible sources of support for “Boston Now,” Maydoney says.
Money is always an issue, of course, for arts organizations, but never more so than now. So Sametz Blackstone adjusts its fees for cultural and nonprofit clients, particularly the smaller ones, and the firm has a long history of making contributions of money and time to arts groups.
“This year was tough because there was less corporate work,” Sametz says. Even so, on the firm’s client list, “there isn’t a single cultural organization to whom we don’t contribute something.” What’s more, it’s Sametz’s contention that focusing on the larger question of brand image saves money in the long run.
Case studies in image-making
The problem
How can the Boston Symphony Orchestra attract younger audiences?
The Solution
Sametz Blackstone helped the BSO develop and market its “Repartee” series, which invites 21- to 38-year-olds to subscribe to a three- or four- concert series. Subscribers come early for a cocktail party and lecture from an orchestra member or other expert, then they can come back to the same room to mingle during intermission. “There’s a 10-to-15-minute chat, nothing too heavy,” says BSO marketing director Kim Noltemy. “It’s intelligent but not too ‘in group.’” The program succeeds, she argues, because it reaches out to new audiences without being gimmicky.
“We’re about great classical music. We’re not going to try to trick them,” she says. “For me, that’s critical. We should not sell something different than what we are.”
The problem
How can the Boston Ballet project a more sophisticated image and appeal to new audiences?
The Solution
In posters and programs, Sametz Blackstone replaced the color production stills of dancers onstage with elegant black-and-white photos of dancers. Program booklets have also been reworked to include more information for new audience members. “Both at the Ballet and the Symphony, they have a front of the book now to talk to people that are not part of the club,” says Roger Sametz. “Before, it was all about the product. Now it talks about what the experience is like.”
The problem
How can the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs promote small arts organizations’ events on a shoestring budget?
The Solution
In posters and programs, Sametz Blackstone replaced the color production stills of dancers onstage with elegant black-and-white photos of dancers. Program booklets have also been reworked to include more information for new audience members. “Both at the Ballet and the Symphony, they have a front of the book now to talk to people that are not part of the club,” says Roger Sametz. “Before, it was all about the product. Now it talks about what the experience is like.”
Sametz Blackstone developed “Boston Now,” a pocket-size monthly guide to arts events throughout the city. The twist? It’s organized by neighborhood, in hopes of encouraging residents to realize how much is going on right outside their doors. “The concept behind ‘Boston Now’ is ‘the neighbor in the know,’”—the friendly tipster who tells you all the most interesting things going on in town, says Sametz vice president Andrew Maydoney. Sametz Blackstone is also helping the Office of Cultural Affairs find ways to keep funding “Boston Now.”
In addition, “Boston Now” does “wild postings” on construction sites and other blank walls around town— cheap, vivid posters with information about offbeat events. “Part of accessibility for the arts is having accessible communication,” Maydoney says. “It’s not that it’s just money to make it. The fun is using the same kind of thought processes, probing, and methodology to come up with results.”
Branding is this firm’s specialty
“When you’ve got integration across media—the banners, the press materials, the Web site—it all builds toward something,” he says. “Every dollar costs you 80 cents” because each piece is not only marketing a particular event or product but also reinforcing the overall image of the institution. He concedes, though, that it sometimes causes problems for his firm when it’s trying to market itself because, in the client’s budget, “there is no category for ‘integrated communication.’”
“When you’ve got integration across media—the banners, the press materials, the website—it all builds toward something. Every dollar costs you 80 cents because each piece is not only marketing a particular event or product but also reinforcing the overall image of the institution.” Roger Sametz
Explaining to potential clients what Sametz Blackstone can do is “an elevator speech that takes 80 floors,” Sametz says. “Not a good thing. Especially in our business. But when they get it, we stay with them for years.”
Indeed, the firm seems to win some clients from the many larger design or marketing shops that do similar work because of its commitment to looking at each institution comprehensively. About five years ago, the BSO switched from a larger New York agency to Sametz, says marketing director Kim Noltemy, in part because of the firm’s interest in “getting to understand the organization at a really deep level.”
The BSO is a complicated organization— not just because, with the Symphony, Tanglewood, and Pops, it has three distinct branches whose connection is not always well understood by the public, but also because it has a lot of different constituencies, from musicians to trustees, students, and one-time ticket buyers, and a long history that, while distinguished, can sometimes intimidate potential new audiences.
Meanwhile, it faces the same challenges —attracting new audiences, responding to the devastating changes in the recording industry, and balancing artistic and economic concerns—that have nearly sunk other symphonies across the country.
“The need to evolve is obvious, and yet we have this history,” says managing director Mark Volpe. “The challenge is how to respect that tradition; how do you build on that tradition, but also how do you evolve?” And in facing that challenge, he notes, “there are occasional tensions.”
Take, for example, the question of the colophon vs. the pipes. The colophon is the symbol that the BSO has used for decades: an engraved garland, complete with trumpet-wielding cherubs, surrounding a subdued rendering of the orchestra’s name. And the pipes? They’re part of a new image that appeared this season on the banners outside Symphony Hall and in a few ads inside the program. The name is in a sleeker, more modern-looking typeface, with an almost abstract design of pan pipes and a historical instrument, the natural trumpet.
That image has raised the hackles of some Symphony loyalists. For one thing, they object, the orchestra doesn’t use those instruments. And Noltemy is quick to emphasize that it’s not a new logo, just “a kind of design element.”
The colophon, she adds, “is extremely difficult to reproduce on marketing materials. It can’t really be reproduced on banners” or in electronic media, as it would need to be on the Web site. Beyond that, Noltemy says, the colophon looks like an old-fashioned seal—an image that goes against the more open, egalitarian image the BSO is striving to project. “
A seal kind of contradicts an accessibility campaign,” Noltemy says. “If you have a more kind of open-feel ad campaign, and then you put a seal on it, it kind of contradicts, even if it could be done.” But she concedes that the debate over the images has raised some tensions within the BSO. “It’s very subjective design stuff,” she says. “I think our stuff is more scrutinized than one would expect, by our audience around the city, our board members; we have so many constituencies around the city. We try to have the right balance, reaching out to people and yet not alienating anyone else.”
In the case of the seal and the pipes, the balance will probably remain as it is, with the seal appearing in some contexts but the new mark becoming more common, especially when materials need to include parallel, representative images from each of the BSO’s three branches. But balancing the old and the new is always tricky, especially in a town like Boston.
“I’ve worked in four markets,” says the BSO’s Volpe. “And Boston, much more so than others, has a real focus on heritage and tradition and paying respect to that. I learned that early on here. You push too hard too fast, and the push comes right back at you.”
Who knew that a little colophon could mean so much? Well, Roger Sametz, for one.