Touring into London: campaign planning
'When Oxford Stage Company brought their production of The Cherry Orchard to Riverside Studios, their marketing manager was on maternity leave so the contracted me to plan and implement the campaign in collaboration with their in-house team. This is what we did:
Paper
Firstly we created, as we always do for touring, specially designed A4 paper, which has an image from the print plus logos. This paper is used for direct mail and press releases. This helps to create a branding and entice people to read.
Direct mail
All in all we mailed about 20,000 people! We bought mailing lists, as well as using the Riverside database. We bought them from theatres in the vicinity of the Riverside, from a theatre where our 'star' had recently performed, from other friendly theatres that had audience members from west London postcodes. We also used our databases from previous shows in London as well as mailing all OSC friends. There were some theatres that slipped their audience, in return for us slipping ours, and somewhere we swapped databases. Rule of thumb; pay no more than 10p a label. We used a mailing house rather than mailing in-house. We used Mailsort 3 - the cheapest method of posting which depended on having lists with complete postcodes, mailing in bulk and sorting them into postcode order.
Distribution
We used London Calling and Impact for posters and leaflets. MandH had solus 300 leaflet racks in Hammersmith that we used. We had to create special A4 posters to back the rack. We also did some house-to-house drops which OSC staff undertook.
Slipping
It is always useful to hand out leaflets to audiences for other events in the venue where we thought there was a potential audience crossover. Although we couldn't afford it, you can also pay to slip Time Out.
Advertising
We felt that the most effective place to advertise this show was in Time Out.
Eflyers
This is particularly useful for last minute offers. We used the theatre database and MandH agency's e database. Whatsonstage.com also have an edatabase. SOLT (The Society of London Theatres) have an edatabase and enewsletter. We also approached large companies in the area and some took an eflyer for their intranet.
Banner
We created a full colour banner with production shot for outside the theatre.'