Of interest to actors and marketing geeks.

From a recent post in 2AMt, a theater blog devoted to many aspects of the business and a place for “thinking outside the black box,” Pete Miller writes about the value of including unknown actors’ names in marketing materials for shows, touching on the idea of “narrow fame.” He is pretty much against the idea that small arts organizations, which even most large theaters are, should not waste their time with mass marketing techniques, because they have little effect for the price. Instead he is an advocate for extremely targeted marketing, and keeping a company’s most coveted audiences continuously informed and knowledgeable about the work presented, basically enabling the core audience to become the company’s advocates. He has written a series of posts related to this subject. (And I may have butchered his central thesis in my paraphrasing.)

Tying in somewhat to this theme is his post Invest In Unknowns To Make Them Stars, in which he advocates the common sense of including “unknown” actors in promotional materials. He writes:

“Celebrity is one of the strongest social forces in America. Increasingly, though, people are responding to apparently oxymoronic ‘narrow fame;’ that is, being highly salient for some quality among a modest sized niche of people. Theatre companies can take advantage of this phenomenon by promoting their currently unknown performers as though they were already well known.”

READ THE FULL POST HERE.

–Said Johnson