IMV19 : Entertainment Marketing & Integrated Promotions

The following is a transcript for IMV19 : Entertainment Marketing & Integrated Promotions. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo Episode 19. I’m your host, Ted Murphy, and with us today is Lisa Jenkins, electronic marketing manager for House of Blues Entertainment. Welcome to the show today, Lisa.

Lisa Jenkins:

Hi. Thanks.

Ted Murphy:

Lisa, we’re here to talk today about entertainment marketing and integrated promotions and I am certainly familiar with House of Blues, but can you give our listeners who may not have a House of Blues locally a little overview of what you guys are and what you do?

Lisa Jenkins:

I sure can. The company was founded in 1992 and we had an initial round of investors that included a lot of entertainment industry luminaries: Dan Ackroyd, James Belushi, Aerosmith, River Phoenix, Paul Shaffer. And their goal, as well as the goal of our founder, was to create the ultimate live music experience in about a 1,000 to 2,000 capacity venue.

They wanted to have a music hall with really stellar sound and great sightlines, as well as a home for folk art, southern-inspired food and our famous Gospel Brunch.

We have a number of other, larger concert venues, amphitheaters which we own and operate across the country, including Gibson Amphitheater in Los Angeles, the Gorge in Washington State, and HiFi Buys in Atlanta. We also run the International House of Blues Foundation, which funds trips for school kids to come to our venues and experience art and music of the blues.

And that’s about us in a nutshell.

Ted Murphy:

So, tell me a little bit about how you’ve taken that experience and you have created an experience online.

Lisa Jenkins:

The overall mission of our company is celebrating diversity and we take a lot of pride in introducing people to new music, so it made sense for us to bring our brand online pretty quickly, where a lot of music fans are.

We began with really basic information on our web site, hob.com, which is venue information, show information, and in the late 90s we built that also into a destination content portal. Our venues are built for digital capture, video and audio, and we had a lot of pay-per-views and other kinds of digital distribution through the web site. Ultimately, I think that we were probably ready for broadband before broadband was ready for us.

Ted Murphy:

Many of us were.

Lisa Jenkins:

Yeah. I think probably a familiar refrain. So we scaled that back and just focused really on the core of what we do, which is show information, artist information, audio clips, just the basics.

And I think around that time, it predated me a bit, was when we moved into the email world. And email seemed to be an easy, no-brainer way to communicate with music fans. We could communicate our pre-sales, our upcoming shows, and information on the events in our venue as well as the kind of experiences that people could have when they went to our venue, i.e., Gospel Brunch or eating in the restaurant in addition to just going to go see a show.

And then about two years ago we branched out into ecommerce and now we sell a portion of our tickets online through our House of Blues member ticketing system, which is our proprietary ecommerce platform here. And I think that we find that our users continue to come to us because we have the most up-to-date show information, and we’re also really respectful with online marketing. She shy away from spam, we try to keep things as relevant as possible, we keep our timing good. And we have a very content and necessary information first mindset, and I think that that kind of trust that we have with our users, to kept us growing. Those kept the people in our database very happy.

Ted Murphy:

So you mentioned email and then you mentioned that you guys have played a little bit with maybe having some audio or video, more specifically, but what are the things that you guys are doing in terms of integrating new mediums into promotions that you’re doing?

Lisa Jenkins:

Well, we are online. We obviously have our emails. We are beginning to move into the mobile world. I think that for us, at least right now, the one thing that we haven’t done is probably blimps or traveling billboards, although I probably couldn’t speak with entire authority on that one.

I think that the music experience at the venue really lends itself to sharing other pieces of content, either online or pushing it to a phone or allowing people to really interact with the artist and the excitement of being at a live performance on a number of different platforms. So we’re always keeping our eyes open to kind of push into new worlds and no idea is too outlandish. So we’re definitely innovating as much as we can and trying to weasel our way into every possible platform.

Ted Murphy:

You guys have been working a little bit with Motorola and moving into the mobile sector. What exactly are you trying to bring to your users there?

Lisa Jenkins:

Well Motorola, they have been a really great partner and one of the things that’s so great about working with them is they challenge us every day to think about how we can market in new ways and how can we rethink our previous assumptions or our previous capabilities and content strategies, things that we have perhaps done either offline, online through email, and find a way to make them work for mobile.

Our Motorola team envisions here that a patron can come to our venue, see a great show and then take a piece of that show home with them on their phone via a ringtone from the show, an exclusive photo or audio, a wallpaper, a game, something that gives them a bit of a memento to take home and also an increased attachment or relationship with that artist.

And right now we’re also actively working on selling tickets through the phone. That’s something that, in America - it’s a bit of a Holy Grail in America. I think that they’ve had a lot of success with that overseas as far as much more sophisticated integration of barcodes and so for us, what we’re focusing more on is the transaction through the phone rather than the ticket delivery through the phone.

Ted Murphy:

That sounds like very cool stuff. What about podcasting, blogs, have you guys experimented with any of that? And if so, are you seeing any result?

Lisa Jenkins:

Yeah, we haven’t blogged much. We’re definitely newbies or yet to emerge in the blogosphere although there are a number of people here who do have their own blogs and they bring that sensibility to a lot of the various online projects that we’re working on.

One thing that we have recently jumped into is podcasting and we have done that around a program we have called Ones to Watch. This is my shameless plug for it. It grew from our Emerging Artist of the Month program, which every month features a new upcoming artist. And we’re able to showcase these new and in many cases unsigned artists, definitely people really below the radar, and introduce our users and people out there in webland to great new music and new artists. And it’s a program that we started just because a group of us here really love music and wanted to share that with people out there because we’re in a pretty great position to hear a lot of great new stuff, perhaps before other people have the opportunity to.

So we produced and successfully launched our first round of podcasts a few months ago. It’s called the Artist Experience. That’s my other shameless plug. We’re really happy with the results, especially because it is sort of the first toe in the water and we really wanted to just prove that we could do it and that the concept worked.

The learning that we have from that? I think that it’s best to have the right reporting tools in place before you launch. We used FeedBurner, I believe. So you know how many people are subscribing and listening. It took us a couple of days to figure that one out and so that definitely felt like ooh, that’s definitely a trial by fire, a learn by your mistake.

I think that establishing your goals and success metrics upfront, what you want to accomplish, how are you going to know that you’ve succeeded and, as far as content, what are your own favorite podcasts or radio shows? I think that you can emulate those to a degree, imitation being the highest form of flattery, and hopefully something that you think is really great in radio or on a podcast, you’re going to be able to turn around and share with other people and other people are going to find out it’s cool.

We did find that there was some listener drop-off at a certain point so I would say keep things compelling, and keep them to 5 to 15 minutes which, hopefully, this will be.

Ted Murphy:

Yep.

Lisa Jenkins:

And then also I think that we also found that as podcast listeners and subscribers ourselves, we have a hard enough time keep up with the podcasts that we want to listen to, that we took that kind of respect to the people that we want to listen to ours. So not inundating them, trying to keep things really bite-sized and keeping things as relevant and interesting as possible.

Ted Murphy:

And you mentioned something there that I just want to pull out for a second is determining what your goals are and how you’re going to measure success. How do you measure success for something like a podcast? What was your measuring stick?

Lisa Jenkins:

I think that, again, for us it was really a toe in the water and we were just hoping that someone out there would listen to it and that we would get some sort of feedback on that. So for us the first round we were like hey, if people are subscribing and they’re listening to it, we’re going to be pretty happy. People other than listeners inside this building. We did find that -

Ted Murphy:

[Laughter] That’s key, huh?

Lisa Jenkins:

Yeah, I mean, I did listen to it 20 times hoping that would bump up our numbers.

So with that mindset we figured you know, we’ll be happy if 1,000 people listen to it. So when we were able to track that yes, okay, we have X many listens, we have this many people who are subscribed to it and those numbers, each time we released one of the podcasts, that those numbers continued to grow, that for us was success.

And we’re getting ready to launch our next round of those and I think that we’ll probably sit down and say okay, let’s establish some numbers that we really want to hit and find out how we can better promote them online and see if we can cause those numbers to jump up.

Ted Murphy:

So, let’s talk for a second about contests and sweepstakes and promotions. Do you guys find that those types of things work well in your industry? And if so, what types of promotions work well for you?

Lisa Jenkins:

Traditionally, contests have been huge in our industry, in the music industry. You can, I think, listen to any radio station long enough or flip through any magazine and you’ll be just inundated with contests. So offline, those have really been huge.

We’ve had some good successes with mostly online contests and definitely some lukewarm results, so I think that we’ve had an opportunity to really learn as we go and hopefully fine tune our approach. The challenges, I think, for running contests is in many cases online audiences are a bit more jaded. I think that they’re wondering if they enter a contest, are they going to get spammed. Is somebody going to steal their identity? Is it going to be porn which, I don’t know, maybe is a good thing? Does somebody actually ever really win one of these contests? So I feel like there’s a lot of barriers to entry. It’s just a very sophisticated audience.

And then also, if you’re doing contests the right way, then your internal policy on privacy is going to be to collect data as respectfully and as above-the-board as possible. No shenanigans. Everybody needs to opt in. You can’t just grab all those names and begin marketing to them.

So we do learn from every contest and we’re always trying to raise the bar. Each promotion is more successful than the last and if it’s not, then I think that we sit down and have a hard look at why is it that we didn’t get the kind of numbers that we were looking for? Was it that the offer was not as compelling? Is it that we didn’t have the same promotional push, or the right promotional push behind it? So I think that probably the most important things about having a contest is that you’re creating excitement, that there’s a very exciting element to it. And then obviously internally you should be hoping to build your database and possibly rewarding your existing database with exclusive offers.

And this has kind of been our mindset as we open up new venues. We’re fairly aggressive, and as far as the next couple of years go and the new venues that we’re opening, and so to help create contest and buzz around those and to tell people in our database across the country hey, there’s going to be a new House of Blues coming to this city. We do run a lot of contests and we try to give people as much exclusive access to those openings and exclusive information as possible. And that seems to have worked pretty well for us.

Ted Murphy:

So, you mentioned some key differences in terms of online audience versus offline audience when it comes to promotions and sweepstakes. Are you seeing any other demographic differences with your online audience versus your offline audience in other ways that they’re interacting with your brand?

Lisa Jenkins:

I think that we’re pretty lucky. I don’t see a whole lot of difference. I think that the industry perception and I loosely mean sort of entertainment industry or maybe it’s even applicable to other people’s businesses, is that certain people are less likely to buy tickets online or to be engaged in online marketing. And we haven’t found that to be the case. We get a really broad spectrum of people who want to purchase tickets online, want to find out first about presales, and they come from all ages, all backgrounds. I think that most hardcore music fans are pretty savvy when it comes to navigating their way online so we are really lucky in that respect.

I think also we spend a lot of time and energy on targeting people in our database and being sure that, as we’re segmenting, that we’re segmenting the right people for the right show and that we’re reaching out to people with the right offer. And I think that we’re rewarded with people who continue to be engaged, regardless of who they are, how old they are, how computer savvy they are.

Ted Murphy:

So where do you see the future of entertainment marketing heading, and what types of new initiatives do you guys have planned?

Lisa Jenkins:

I think that entertainment marketing continues to move online. I am a big fan of user-generated content, of integrating content into a lot of different platforms and, maybe I’m biased because I am in electronic marketing, but I think that the music industry specifically more than other entertainment industries, TV and film, maybe not print and publishing, has been incredibly slow overall embracing new technology.

And I think that that’s finally starting to change. The success of iTunes and of peer-to-peer music sharing was a big wake-up call for our industry. And I think that people are really beginning to understand that online is where entertainment fans congregate and talk to each other and share news and whip up a frenzy of excitement for cool new things that are going on.

And I think that kind of an extension of that is if you do things right, then fans will trust you. And if you don’t, your brand will be lame. And it’s really simple and, you know, I think that people might try to over think it, but I think that you be respectful of your database, you come to them from a very honest and sincere place, you’re not trying to pull the wool over their eyes and get them to participate in something they don’t want to do, and you have a lot of cool content and people respond to that. So I think that the entertainment industry, luckily enough, has so much cool content that that shouldn’t be a problem.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, you guys are cheating a little bit.

Lisa Jenkins:

I know. I’m really lucky that I get to market great blues music at our amazing venues and not widgets.

Ted Murphy:

So we’re going to take a listener voicemail real quick.

Lisa Jenkins:

Okay.

Listener:

Hi, this is Angela and I’m calling from Tampa, Florida. Hey Ted, in one of the first episodes you talked about loyalty programs as related to the food and beverage industry and my question is, how can you use the web creatively to drive traffic to restaurants? Because it seems to me that, as with loyalty programs, the majority of consumers would be driven to the restaurant by the web versus the other way around. So do feel the web can actually be a force of lead generation for restaurants, or do you feel that the web and the Internet are basically a supporting role for the customer experience? Thank you.

Ted Murphy:

All right.

Lisa Jenkins:

Okay.

Ted Murphy:

What do you think about that? You guys are in kind of a unique niche because you’re part restaurant and you’re part entertainment venue so you’ve got both those things going on.

Lisa Jenkins:

Yeah. And again, I feel like we’re lucky and cheating a little bit in that we have so many good things going on in our venue that we can leverage music hall attendance against people eating in the restaurant against people showing up for Gospel Brunch, but I will try to answer that as best as possible.

We’ve dabbled a bit in online reservations, which has been cool. I don’t think that it’s used a great deal by people online, but I think with the success of Open Table and things like that, finding the right partner and if it is an Open Table, finding the right partner to work with and to help drive reservations. And that world, I think, is a great lead generator.

I think that providing information online as much as possible about your restaurant, your menu, what goes on, added experiences that people can have in your restaurant or venue.

And we have had a lot of success cross-promoting the restaurant in other areas of the venues in our emails and online. That can be coupons that we send out that can be, you know, hey purchase a ticket to go see Metallica and you can get 50 percent off of your entrée in the House of Blues restaurant that night. Just show this.

So as long as you find that sweet spot of an offer I think that people really respond to that. And we want people to come to our venue and spend the whole evening there and enjoy themselves and interact with our brand in as extensive a manner as possible. So I would just encourage people to probably be creative and try to come up with new and interesting ideas online that they can leverage to get people in and also hopefully strike up a couple of really beneficial partnerships.

Ted Murphy:

So I’m going to pull you back over to the entertainment side again –

Lisa Jenkins:

Okay.

Ted Murphy:

- and ask you, what are the top three best practices for entertainment marketing online?

Lisa Jenkins:

I would say the top three best practices, for me – we have really found that the more we’re able to target and be specific in our offers, segment the right part of our database to the right offer, that has been hugely successful for us.

I think also it’s really important to be relevant and compelling, and to reach out to people with a message that they want to hear. We communicate with our database a bit more, I think, than most average retailers, online or otherwise, but we still find that it’s very successful because people are always interested in hearing what it is that we have to say, if I may be so bold.

And then also I think that it’s a question of being respectful and following federal guidelines, following a very strict privacy policy and treating your database with kid gloves. Treating them the way that you would hope someone would treat you as a consumer. And I think that that’s three but maybe the fourth would be to bake your IT team cookies. Very important.

Ted Murphy:

[Laughter] That’s the first time I’ve heard something like. That’s great.

Lisa Jenkins:

I think that you want to be good to your IT team and they’re good to you.

Ted Murphy:

And those guys do love cookies.

Lisa Jenkins:

Yes. They do love cookies.

Ted Murphy:

Maybe a little bit too much. Well Lisa, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. For any of our listeners who would like to call in and leave us a voicemail, I encourage you to call us toll free at 866-206-4461 and, as always, you can visit us online at internetmarketingvoodoo.com.

Lisa, I want to tell everybody out there that they should go to hob.com and also if they have a venue in their area, I highly suggest the Gospel Brunch. I love that place.

Lisa Jenkins:

Oh, thanks Ted. Thanks, everyone.

Ted Murphy:

And hope to have you back on the show again in the future.

Lisa Jenkins:

Okay. Thank you.

Ted Murphy:

Have a great day.

Lisa Jenkins:

Bye, bye.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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