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5.10.2005
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Volume Three
Issue Five
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Welcome to May's Arts Marketer of the Month. This issue features an interview with Angus Watson, Director of Ticket Operations at North America's oldest summer music festival. Read on...
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Featured Arts Marketer: Angus Watson
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Angus Watson, Director of Ticket Operations at Ravinia
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Our featured marketer this month is arts industry leader Angus Watson who holds the prestigious job of Director of Ticket Operations for the Ravinia Festival. Held every summer just outside Chicago, Ravinia attracts 600,000 listeners to 150 musical events throughout its three-month season.
Angus also serves as a board member and leader of INTIX, the ticketing industry trade association, and is a frequent and popular speaker around the country. It is as a result of hearing one of his recent presentations that we decided to feature him as our Arts Marketer of the Month so that we could share some of his story with you. We hope you enjoy and learn from this enlightening interview.
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Q & A with Angus Watson,
Director of Ticket Operations at Ravinia
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Ravinia Festival
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Angus, you're an industry veteran. To begin, can you tell us a bit about your background? How does one get to run one of the most prestigious arts ticketing operations in the country?
I started my career as an intern at the Oxford Playhouse, under the direction of the legendary arts administrator Elizabeth Sweeting. My first job was working in the Box Office. It's the only time I've worked a "hard ticket" system! Since then, I was Marketing Manager for English National Opera; Head of Marketing for London's Barbican Centre when it opened in 1982; Sales and Marketing Director for the ticketing system BOCS and I have been at Ravinia as Director of Ticket Operations since 1994. It is a job which provides me with the perfect outlet for my marketing, technology and customer service skills, in an environment where I am able to experiment and innovate with the full support of our President and Board of Trustees.
For those who are unfamiliar, give us a quick intro of Ravinia and the scope of your operations and offerings each summer?
The Ravinia Festival is North America's oldest summer music festival. The park was founded in 1904, and since 1936 has been the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The CSO is the core of our mission, and they are in residence each summer for about eight weeks. We program a wide variety of other events around that residency: in 2005 there are approximately 114 ticketed events between June 7 and September 10. With few exceptions each event is a one-off, so we present a different event every night of the week for 14 weeks!
In addition to the symphony concerts we present pop, country and blues concerts (Cheap Trick, Lyle Lovett, Buddy Guy, Los Lonely Boys, Elvis Costello, Tony Bennett, Aretha Franklin, Alison Krauss to name a few from this summer), jazz, music theater (Stephen Sondheim's "Anyone Can Whistle"), dance, opera, children's shows, live broadcasts ("A Prairie Home Companion" with Garrison Keillor), puppet shows and symphonic "pops." In addition to reserved seating for 3,300 in the Pavilion we can accommodate approximately 15,000 people on the lawn. Chamber music and recitals, and our cabaret series take place in the historic Martin Theatre, which seats 900.
Ravinia is a not-for-profit arts organization, with an annual budget of $20 million. Ticket revenues account for 55% of our income; the rest comes from annual fund raising. We are supported by a very loyal group of generous contributors and corporate donors, who receive advance ticket ordering privileges among other benefits of being a donor.
You were a visionary when it came to e-mail marketing and the web. First, for those who are just getting started, can you share what it was like in the very early days -- when did you get started, what did you do, and what were your results in the first year or two?
We launched our first web site in 1996. From the very start we offered customers the opportunity to place a ticket order electronically although in those days it was no more sophisticated than an e-mail containing the relevant order details. The huge advantage of real-time online ticketing is the fact that the customer does all the work, and receives an immediate confirmation of their order (it also means that we don't have to manually process all those faxed or mailed orders!). We were first able to achieve that goal in 1998 when our web site was engineered to "talk" directly to our in-house ticketing system. Online sales have grown since then to represent more than 50% of our advance sales. To give an idea just how much volume has grown, we sold more tickets online in the first five days in 2005 than we did during the entire 1999 season. To date, online sales for 2005 are running 100% above those for any previous season.
Now, taking a longer-view, how has your business changed over the past decade, particularly (and perhaps obviously) in light of the internet as a tool for marketing and ticket sales? You have some jaw-dropping stats... go ahead... make our jaws drop!
The statistic that best illustrates the change is how we sell our general admission lawn tickets.
BTW (Before The Web), 95% of our lawn ticket sales were walkup cash sales on the evening of the show. We might confidently expect to sell 15,000 lawn tickets for a big pop show, but if the forecast on the day was for rain or thunder storms we would watch that potential revenue evaporate. As recently as 1999 we were still selling more than 80% of the lawn tickets on the day of the show. The combination of a self-imposed lawn attendance capacity, online sales and e-mail marketing means that on average we now sell more than 70% of our lawn tickets in advance. For the big pop shows, the lawn will be sold out in advance, and in many cases exclusively online. In 2003 we sold out the entire lawn for Nora Jones within 48 hours of going on sale.
So now it doesn't matter what the weather does! Yes, we are quite tough with our policy of "No refunds, no exchanges," but with lawn tickets priced at only $10 or $15, most people either choose to put up with the weather, or let the tickets go.
The benefit of this? Everything is improved: cash flow, revenue prediction and our ability to book top-name artists with the confidence that we will be able to meet our revenue goals.
Since you were so "in tune" with the online medium years ago, what kinds of things do you see coming down the pipeline? What are you working on and/or what do you see as the obvious next step for Ravinia's online marketing?
Our focus now is on making the online experience as personalized as possible for our customers. Our home page might look static at first sight, but if we know who you are, and what kinds of shows you're interested in, we automatically feature those events for you on the home page. So our symphonic ticket buyers see a selection of Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, while the pop ticket buyers see this year's pop lineup. The system is such that a hundred different visitors to the site see a hundred completely different combinations of highlighted events, reflecting their own particular interests. It's the "Amazon" concept, without being so 'in your face.' We plan to extend this concept to other parts of the site. For example, when you look at the calendar, we'll subtly highlight those shows we think you will want to buy.
Beyond that, paper-less ticketing (print at home, electronic tickets stored in a cell phone or PDA, etc.) is where we would like to be going. Apart from the cost savings of ticket stock, envelopes, marketing collateral and postage, it opens up a whole new world of customer service in terms of ticket exchanges, for example. Equipping a 36-acre park with the access control equipment to implement this is one of the big challenges!
If you weren't in this business, what other profession would you have chosen?
After 32 years in one industry it's very hard to say! There aren't many places where you can enjoy what you do as much as I do, being in a beautiful park-like setting, and watching and hearing a world-class symphony orchestra at the same time.
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Visit Ravinia Festival's web site
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Seminars on E-mail Marketing coming your way!
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Do you want to learn more about how to do professional e-mail marketing?
This spring and summer, we'll be offering seminars around the country to help you get the most out of your e-mail marketing. Here's a quick snapshot:
Chorus America: June 1 - Full-day Seminar on E-mail Marketing at Chorus America's national conference in Chicago, with Eugene Carr. For more information and to register click here
American Symphony Orchestre League: June 17 - "Super Charge Your E-mail Marketing" with Eugene Carr, at the League's annual conference in Washington, DC. For more information and to register click here.
Theatre Communications Group: June 17: "Smart E-mail Marketing for Theater Marketers" with JD Hixson, at TCG's annual conference in Seattle, WA. for more information and to register, click here.
Coming up:
In August, we'll be offering additional day-long seminars on e-marketing in the following cities.
New York --- Los Angeles --- Washington DC --- Chicago.
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Click here to request a 15-minute consultation & PatronMail demonstration
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If
you have interesting and creative initiatives that you would like to
have featured or know of an arts marketer that you would like to
recommend for one of our upcoming editions, please contact
info@patrontechnology.com.
Please watch for the next edition of our Arts Marketer of the Month, coming June 14, 2005.
Note:
The CAN-SPAM act mandates that all commercial e-mail contains a
physical mailing address, and ours is: 850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 801,
New York, NY 10019
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