If we don’t take action now, Powell Hall is going to explode. The level of sound bursting from the auditorium will be so intense the seats will shatter into tiny pieces of metal and fabric if they aren’t filled on April 14 and 15. The claim is intriguing and amusing, and almost sounds like a wacky prank.
In reality, it’s a part of an engaging and carefully designed viral campaign that is an extension of a similarly themed 60-second TV commercial that ran in Fall 2010 and Spring 2011, according to Jonna Robertson, the Symphony’s Vice President of Marketing.
“While the overall initiative is to draw attention to the St. Louis Symphony, this year we wanted to take it a step further and try to draw attention to a specific concert,” says Robertson.
The concert in question is Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, which the Symphony last performed 35 years ago. It was one of two choices the marketing firm that the Symphony partnered with had to choose from, the other choice being the more famous Firebird Suite. Both works were considered because they are highly narrative, and each had different advantages if chosen. The Firebird Suite is often and widely performed, and a campaign surrounding that piece would play on its renown. Instead, they chose the Scythian Suite, which is rarely performed and as such is hardly known. But its obscure status gives the campaign more to play with precisely because people do not have set expectations.
“After researching the piece and listening to it, and interviewing our musical director about the piece, they went away and then presented three possible campaigns, and this is probably the most attention we could ever garner for one concert,” Robertson states. “Our creative director from Upbrand called it a ‘disruptive marketing solution’…It’s disruptive in its very nature. It lets the community touch and experience the brand in a different way.”
According to Robertson, this type of viral campaign is much cheaper than buying media spots, and has an immediate payoff built in—as soon as web users view the website, they can click to buy their ticket right on the page. She also claims that the campaign is not meant to skew to one particular demographic.
“It was not my intent to specifically target young people. We want to reach out more broadly to the musically curious,” she says. “You’re either musically curious or you’re not, and you can’t really change that.”
The ‘disruptive marketing- solution’ can be found at savepowellhall.com, which includes posts about ‘The Alarming History of the St. Louis Symphony and ‘Scythian Suite,’” photos of old album covers, phrases like “It’s like a musical wrecking ball,” and an audio snippet of the piece. The site’s purpose is to give the piece some context because it is not well-known, and to subvert some common stereotypes about classical music and its listeners.
The campaign has prove to be a great success, with lots of tweeting and retweeting because of its fun, clever nature. It has gone beyond the St. Louis region, and has captured national attention.
However, it will all come to end next weekend. Robertson says that she would love to create another similar campaign if the opportunity presents itself. In the meantime, everybody should try to fill up the seats and coming listen to the explosion.
The St. Louis Symphony performs Scythian Suite on Saturday, April 14 and Sunday, April 15. For more information, or to purchase tickets, go to stlsymphony.org.
