Overview: This lecture with question and answer will consider the following topics: how to use broadcast, print, and web vehicles; the questions you need to ask about any ad vehicle; media sponsorships; trade outs versus buys; budgeting; coordination of advertising and other marketing tools; defining target audiences; and how to reach the millions who "like bluegrass," but don’t come to bluegrass events. Attendees will leave with a defined set of principles for promoting their events.

Introduction

Advertising, and marketing in general, remain among the weakest areas in the bluegrass industry. Advertising is, in fact, a weak link across the entire festival business, not just bluegrass. Although we avoid ad campaigns so artistic that they aren’t clear about what they’re selling, and bluegrass festivals produce lots of singularly brilliant marketing ideas, few coherent, coordinated, planned marketing and advertising programs exist.
A look through the pages of any folk, acoustic, or bluegrass music publication for festival ads proves disappointing. You’ll find lovely work from instrument manufacturers and record labels juxtaposed with unattractive, ineffective pieces from festivals. Rather than ad copy that sells, you’ll find event ads crowded with details that don’t belong and often discourage folks from attending. Rather than art work that shows how much fun you can have at a festival and what a great time the performers have on stage, you see static promo shots of the entertainers, as if we don’t know what they look like. You see examples of the egregious error of trying to use a flyer as an ad, when the two pieces have quite different functions.
And that’s just the surface. What doesn’t become apparent when perusing the journals proves even worse. We have presenters putting their entire ad budget into one vehicle. We have promoters marketing only to the hard core bluegrass audience, ignoring everyone else, and then wondering why only the hard core shows up. Others advertise where no market for them exists. Free and low cost outlets and methods are ignored. People lose business because they don’t make a small front-end investment in professional services. We have people conducting marketing and advertising without any plan or strategy or even a budget. We find folks promoting only the talent line-up and not the event itself, a most shortsighted approach.
Things are better than they used to be before IBMA. Still, in short, we all too often have folks who don’t know what they’re doing with inadequate resources handling the single most important area for determining an event’s success.
But it isn’t their fault nor is it unusual in small businesses like ours. Marketing and advertising involves both hard work and creativity, number crunching and day dreaming. It requires looking at your event from the outside in, from the ticket buyers’ points of view. It involves spending money that seems, most inaccurately, less essential than talent, venue, staffing, and sound & light. It involves planning, on paper even.
Ultimately, marketing demands enumeration and evaluation of every point of contact, direct or indirect, between the event and its actual and potential audiences. Yes, we’re talking about relates to one of the classical four P’s – placement, for it includes positioning the product (your festival) in the minds of our audience. This requires pulling the entire event in the same direction. Advertising provides, in the big picture, just one of many marketing initiatives, along side providing clean sanitary facilities with hot showers.
On the other hand, bluegrass festivals have advantage which derive from scale. Unlike in big corporations, the manager of a festival can still infuse the entire organization with a marketing based approach to doing everything well and consistently with the event’s marketing and image. Guerilla marketing approaches fit the bluegrass field well also. We also have so much to gain by devoting more effort and resources to marketing.

Advertising Strategies Derive From Your Marketing Plans

Without marketing plans, you’re shooting in the dark on advertising and media relations. Advertising strategies must be developed within the context of an event’s overall marketing strategy. This derives from your target audiences and the image you develop to reach them. For each market segment or audience, you write up a marketing plan that includes what benefits – everything from lineup to amenities -- you provide to that segment, the means to reach that audience, and what you will do to retain them. Marketing and image thus become the architecture for processing the overly rich symbolism of musical events, and advertising not forms a component of that structure, but employs this symbolism to promote the event. Your ads, web site, direct mail, and media relations all have to work together with every other aspect of the event as a team to insure your success.

Image
Establish an image and remain true to it. This requires a good deal of thought and refection, which too few in bluegrass take the time to do. Put in some work here, and you’ll gain on the field. Think not about what you love about your event; think about what the people who buy tickets love about your event. Think about the audiences detailed above and others in which you might be interested. What would they – not you – like enough about your event to give it a try?
Once you have selected and cultivated an image, it must flow through everything you do – not just advertising and marketing, but the entire festival. That image should, in turn, involve almost every aspect of the event – programming, how parking and camping are handled, volunteer recruitment, how the entrance gate looks and operates, and the way security is handled. The image becomes the personality of your event, your marketing, your brand.
An image is the core of developing your festival as a brand, trusted for quality so greatly that price isn’t that important.

Who forms your audience is a fundamental question
Everything in your marketing begins with your target audience. Audiences is the correct word, especially if you want those folks who tell the government that they "like bluegrass music," so your approach likely will require prioritizing among several target groups. For bluegrass festivals, several potential target audiences – some depending on the lineup more or less than others -- appear:
1a) hard core bluegrass fans – these folks are the core audience for bluegrass festivals. The most likely to purchase weekend camping tickets. The campground picking quality is often a key factor, as are the general reputation of the event and whether their friends go there each year. Whether particular artists are on the lineup is often not a key deciding factor. The most likely to grouse about prices, this is in truth the least price sensitive group. They are the most willing to endure rain and mud, limited food vendors, primitive sanitation facilities, picking next door until dawn, out of the way locations, and other inconveniences, if the picking off stage and on is good. These good folks are also the ones with the most preconceptions of how a festival ought to be and thus least likely to put up with rude treatment, off site parking and camping, overly officious security, being left off the mailing list, and poor campground picking arrangements. They are best reached by direct mail and bluegrass print and web media. It often proves hard to get them to add a new festival to their rota, but once you get them coming and they like your event, they’ll be loyal patrons.
1b) pickers and instrument traders – Campground picking and old instruments provide their focus, with instrument workshops sometimes appealing to them. Augment your marketing with instrument and picking oriented publications that include bluegrass.
2) soft core bluegrass fans – These folks usually make the difference between red ink and black, consuming a lot of one day tickets. They form the bulk of the bluegrass radio audience and are reached most effectively via that medium, followed by direct mail and webzines. Lots of these people don’t decide whether to attend until they see the weather Saturday morning. Price and line-up sensitivity prove much higher than among the hard core. The soft core folks often identify as fans of specific acts more than bluegrass music in general. They are less likely to travel long distances to events.
3) new grass and new acoustic fans – Now middle aged and better employed than their tie-dyes would suggest, they’ll turn out for anybody who was in New Grass Revival, Peter Rowan, Doc Watson, and folks from the new acoustic movement like Pyschograss and Tony Rice, in short a ‘70s retro audience. Lineup rather than price sensitive. Reach them through radio, especially bluegrass, college, and public radio, newspapers, especially entertainment weeklies, and print and web media that covers bluegrass mixed with other genre.
4) roots music fans – This is another sort of soft core audience, those who like traditional sounding or based music in general. This is rather a polyglot category that lumps together old folkies, the alt.country scene, one time country fans discouraged by the current sound, and the young fans of Rowan, Bush, and jam grass. Any serious investment in marketing to these audiences would require a line-up justifying it. Several of the segments grouped here would be willing to travel and purchase weekend camping tickets. Although some of these folks no doubt consume some bluegrass media, they’ll be better reached through college radio, folk programming, mainstream media, and web and print media dedicated to specific movements such as No Depression, Dirty Linen, or Sing Out!
5a) family events audience – These are folks looking for fun, safe, and wholesome events for the entire family. Reaching them requires a kids-friendly event, often with specific children’s activities and ticket discounts with free under age x, names recognizable in the mainstream such as Ricky, Alison, or Doc, and, in most cases, a fairly convenient location. They expect fairly high level amenities such in sanitation and food choice, but are more accepting of off site parking and tight security than bluegrass fans. They need to be reached through mainstream media such as public radio, TV, and newspapers. These are to whom one reaches out with feature articles and listings on TV bulletin boards and print media event listings. Not for profit organizers can take advantage of PSA’s here.
5b) vacationers – This is a critical subset of the family audience. Their needs prove similar, but these people will travel, camp, and buy weekend tickets because they seek festivals, music events or otherwise, as cornerstones for family vacations. They can be reached through the travel media, particularly newspaper travel writers, state and local convention and visitor bureaus and the like, and event listings.
6) RV campers – these are folks looking for safe and fun events with RV camping. They expect a high level of RV amenities such as hook-ups and dump stations and tight security. They can be reached through mainstream media, direct mail, and RV specific media.
7) local general audience – Simply folks looking for entertainment in the immediate vicinity of the venue, usually responded in big names such as the Grand Ole Opry members. One day ticket buyers, who may, along the East Coast at least, suspicious of the festival name and atmosphere. Family-friendly, well organized day parking, friendly gate personnel, strong amenities all prove pluses for attraction and retention. Reach them through newspapers and entertainment weeklies, country and public radio, TV and cable. Since you ought not to allocate a big chunk of budget in this direction, every thing free or traded out is critical here.

Allocating Marketing Resources
The tragedy of bluegrass advertising is that it usually looks as if B1 is the only audience desired. That creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. Everyone feels they operate restrained by inadequate resources for marketing and advertising. Thus models for their allocation have appeared. Guerilla marketers tend to employ the 60/30/10 model.
1) 10% to the general public or universe.
2) 30% to those who fit your audience profile but are not part of your core market
3) 60% to your core market.
For a real bluegrass festival, D3 would be segments C1 and C2. C3, C4, C5a, C5b, and C6 would comprise C2. D1 involves C7.
This model means nothing if basic festival budgeting is not handled well and well in advance. A marketing budget of less than $10,000 is going to require a lot of creativity and horse trading to get anything accomplished. Putting too little into marketing and advertising often amounts to little more than throwing some money away instead of spending a bit more to reach your ends. Within reason, money spent on marketing is going to gain the presenter a lot more than money spent adding to a talent lineup. What use having the best talent if no one knows about it?
To digress, all this assumes a rational, real world based financial model. To budget rationally, you need to project all costs for the event – talent, staging, facilities, marketing, staff, sound & light, security, and etc. Then decide on a reasonable profit margin. After all that is compiled, account for projected ancillary revenue (don’t forget that the t-shirts, ball caps, and bumperstickers you sell are advertising that people pay to display) and then derive your ticket prices from realistic attendance projections to cover your nut and produce the intended revenue. Avoid the error of working backwards from anticipated revenue to budget expenses or you’ll end up with too cheap ticket prices and grossly under funded key aspects of the event, like advertising.

Traditional Media Advertising Basics

PULL POWER
1. Pull power provides the heart of music event advertising. Bluegrass advertising must bring people from the targeted audiences to the event. This shapes bluegrass advertising in several ways common to all forms of pull advertising.
2. These characteristics include:
a. short term campaigns
b. limited budgets
c. aim to generate a constituency, actual people buying tickets
d. niche appeal, specific foci, and small budgets demand the creative use of media and resources

B. AD COPY

1. Ad copy is the text part of your display ad or direct mail piece. Flyers and display ads are two different things. Trying to use a flyer for display advertising proves a common mistake. Sending a flyer as ad copy generally yields awful results.
2. All too often bluegrass ad copy consists only of lists of prices, entertainers, dates, motels, and what have you. This is mostly information for the direct mailer or web site, not your display ads. The purpose of display advertising is to make the viewer think "The Landfill Ramblers Festival in Mountain View, Delaware is the coolest thing to do on June 14-16. I gotta be there." Advertising is salesmanship; the only purpose is to sell. Every ad should be a superior salesperson.
3. When you plan your ads, keep a specific typical festival attendee in mind. Sell to that person. Don’t think of the mass; think of the individual. Place yourself in the position of a ticket buyer. Write to please that person. That person wants a service your festival will provide – the best weekend all year long. You don’t want to be telling them about your festival, but about their good times. Project the individuality and distinctiveness of your event.
4. Do not include prices in display ads. You don’t want folks deciding whether to attend based on price point, which can scare off people before they have had the chance to salivate sufficiently. You want consumers to make a commitment – visiting the web site, requesting a flyer or to be on the mailing list, calling or emailing you – before mere money comes up. Price belongs in the direct mailer and the web site, not advertising in any media. While we at this point, I need to stress to you to avoid price based marketing. As long as your event offers the benefits consumers expect and falls within the expected price range for bluegrass festivals, you have little to fear with price increases and little to gain from lowering them. In fact, if your price is too low, then folks will become suspicious ("Something’s not right here. How can they have IIIrd Tyme Out, Jim & Jesse, Larry Sparks, Ralph Stanley, and LRB for just $5?"). The ideas that people decide strictly on price and that lower is better are simply untrue. Note also that although you may sell fewer tickets at a higher price, you’re likely to make more money in the end. Here’s a very simplified pricing exercise: Suppose your total production and promotion costs are $150,000, you expect $17,000 in ancillary revenue, and you want to clear $50,000 before taxes. That means your revenue goal from ticket sales is $183,000. Your history and growth rate indicates you can expect 1500 people to buy weekend camping prices, 200 folks to buy Thursday or Sunday one day tickets, and 2500 to acquire one days for Friday or Saturday. Thus, $70 for weekend camping, $15 for Thursday or Sunday, and $30 for Friday or Saturday would project to a $183,000 gate.
5. Showing beats telling. Show the people how much they will love your festival. Appeal to their goal – having fun at a great festival in order to achieve yours, selling tickets.
6. Don’t confuse readers and never let your copy distract their attention from your event. Ad copy should prove simple and straightforward, readable, informative, clear, honest, sincere, consistent with image and marketing strategy, motivational, specific, and believable. If your festival has become a brand, you can get away with minimal copy, simply emphasizing the brand and basic information, directing them where to get tickets and details.
7. Words That Sell include: fun, happy, people, you, your, campgrounds, picking, excitement, natural, proud, security, comfortable, safe, magic, people, friends, relaxed, right, proven, healthy, now, introducing, permanent, hook-ups, kid-friendly, clean.
8. Words That Chase Consumers Off include: cost, buy, liability, worry, obligation, failure, details, rough, bad, decision, details, wrong, deal.
9. No matter how strong your copy, the words don’t matter unless folks read the ad. The copy must work with all the design elements of piece.

C. DESIGN

1. Design refers to bringing all the potential elements of an ad – art work, ad copy, headlines, subheads, logos or trademarks, and slogans – together into a piece that seizes the reader’s attention despite a plethora of competition. It includes not only layout, but typeface, font, and leading.
2. Display ads need stopping power, the ability to attract attention, to get the reader to stop. If your event is well enough established as an brand, you sometimes can do it with your name and logo. In other cases you have to use graphic elements, head lines, highly popular or unusual headliners, or other means to stop the reader. Techniques applicable to bluegrass include presenting the usual information in surprising or unprecedented ways for our field, invoking an emotional response in the reader ("I gotta be there!"), stimulating curiosity, and enticing readers to action such as buying tickets, requesting the direct mail piece, or visiting the web site.
3. The most cost effective approach to design is to hire a professional designer to create an electronic template for your display ads and direct mail piece(s) that you can customize with the appropriate software for your specific advertising needs. Otherwise, you would need to engage the designer’s services for each specific ad as per the different specs of each advertising outlet. Businesses in our field, much more so than festivals, often fall for the trap of ordering a volume of ad slicks from a designer in certain standard sizes used by magazines. When they encounter an advertising outlet, such as tabloids and minitabs for festival programs and weekly entertainment and politics newspapers, not using those specific sizes, they are stuck.
4. Borrow from good ideas you see and share these with your designer. Plagiarize, let nothing escape your eyes (I just thought of that all by myself without any outside influences). Copying uninspired, run of the mill designs, however, suggests the same qualities will apply to your event.
5. If you don’t understand an outlet’s advertising specs, ask questions, don’t assume the publication can just deal with it. If the specs say camera-ready, they won’t in any way that looks sharp. The most common example is simply sending a slick of a flyer as an ad since it more likely than not larger than the live page of the advertising vehicle and the photos aren’t half-toned, so they’ll look like no part of nothing when properly sized and reproduced.
6. The design must fit the image of your event. Nothing works less well than static rows of band promo shots reduced to small size. People who care already know what IIIrd Tyme Out and Ralph Stanley look like. The row of mug shots at the post office is not the image you want to project for your event. Show people having fun listening to the music and picking in the campground. Show kids enjoying themselves in the safe bluegrass environment. Remember the secret of cigarette advertising – selling the kind of people you want to be around having a great time. Don’t forget that the eye is conservative – never overwhelm the reader with too many typefaces, fonts, or art work.
7. Unless no better option exists, do not get the publication to lay out the ad for you. You’ll get something very generic that reflects the designer’s image of your event instead of the one you want to push.
8. Sizing your ad: Obviously budget has an impact on the size of your ad weighted against the significance of the target audience(s) the publication reaches. If your design and message are strong, folks are going to notice your ad regardless of size. Often you’re better off with a powerful ¼ page, 4 color ad than with a less strong, full page, 1 color piece. Please note that readership does not increase proportionally with the size of the ad according these industry statistics from a study by Cahners Publishing: 24% read ads less than one full page; 40% read full page ads; 55% read two page spreads.

D. ART

1. Be particularly careful with any and all art work for nothing creates an image so quickly and lastingly. Pictures take up a lot of real estate for which you’re paying. They must be effective, they must be salespeople.
2. The worst thing photos or line art can do is to cause a reader to avoid your ad or discard your direct mail piece. The wrong art creates a bad or inaccurate impression. Too much or too large art work causes the viewer never to read the text, just look at the pictures.
3. It can take looking through hundreds of photos of past events to find the right one or two. The single most effective image for musical events is a happy, excited audience rising to their collective feet. A big field of campers as far as you can see works well in bluegrass, too. Lots of promo photos of bands is boring, and if small, distracting rather than attractive. A new event has to settle for line art to do the job. In either case, use professionals. Pros who already like your event will likely cut you a sweet deal in return for passes.
Ideally art works with text to covey your message. Drawing the eye to the ad, then to the most important text, text which seals the sale. The art needs to say that this is the most fun anyone can have at that time, anywhere, at any price – the music you want to hear with the people with whom you want to hear it in an environment you enjoy.
4. Ads that aren’t sized or line screened correctly will look bad, and that reflects poorly on the image of the event. If someone can’t prepare an ad properly, reads the unspoken message, how can they produce something as complex as a music festival properly.

E. EVALUATION OF ADVERTISING PROPERTIES

1. The questions to ask
Will it reach one or more of my target audiences in a cost effective manner? Is this the best way to reach that audience?
Is it simply reaching the same folks I am already reaching with my other efforts, reinforcing the message there or just repeating it, or exposing me to new folks that I want?
Does it reach my target affordably relative to other outlets? Inexpensive, in absolute terms, advertising means the vehicle is not reaching a very large audience. Money on cheap ads is wasted unless its going to a very targeted audience of people you need.
Will advertising here reflect positively on the image of the festival?
Can I get a more advantageous deal elsewhere to reach the same audience?
Can in-kind means be used rather than cash?
Does it reinforce or detract from my other marketing efforts?
Are there synergies involved? For example, if I advertise with a radio station will they also do giveaways, remotes, and artist interviews and include my event in their newsletter and web site?
2. Analytical Ideas and Tools
a. Trade outs and sponsorships are almost no brainers. Use them whenever possible except when you’re getting a seriously unequal deal
b. Market share has little reality for bluegrass festivals. For one thing, real numbers for our industry just don’t exist. Second, by very rough estimate, the market share for even the largest festival in the Bluegrass Unlimited listings would be no more than 2.4% of tickets sold, and the average festival holding less than two tenths of one percent of the market, given the numbers little value. The two points to remember are first, the common sense one that the larger the market share of an event, the greater the resources it has to market itself, optimize media attention, provide strong customer service, purchase talent, and partner with media and businesses, and therefore, second, that the larger the market share the greater the return on investment.
c. Marketing changes over the life cycle of the event. At first, all consumers are new ticket buyers. With maturity, comes a balancing act between retention of current ticket buyers and reaching new ones. Despite high retention, however, aging festivals must resume actively marketing to new consumers. For example, 90% retention is very good. Yet, an event with 5000 ticket buyers retaining at 90% loses 2048 customers over five years. In most cases, earning a new ticket buyer, on the other hand, costs more than retaining a current one. If you feel your event has matured to the point where it is reaching its target audiences, shift your marketing resource mix more toward maximizing retention from trolling for new ticket buyers, until the time comes to reinvigorate the event.
d. Since bluegrass festivals have fixed locations, real world limits exist on how far we can expand our market geographically. Although several prominent festivals literally, at least, draw internationally and nationally, your core audience is that which can reasonably drive to the venue. Thus as an event geographically, growth becomes possible in a limited number of ways:
i. Even deeper penetration of the core audiences, in practical terms taking audience members from other bluegrass events – usually attempted by spending even more on talent, while keeping ticket prices below market value. It’s a loss - loss combination.
ii. Reaching out to new audiences to which the event has reason to appeal. This involves risk – higher marketing costs spent in new ways and areas, revamping image, developing new relationships, less predictable response rates, changes to festival structure – such as adding a children’s area or improving facilities.
iii. Changing the event itself in order to attract new audiences carries considerably higher risk; it can offend and lose current fans, and new initiatives often prove revenue neutral at best the first year, just like a new event. This changes not only marketing, but the product itself. This is a dangerous approach better accomplished by evolution than revolution. In other words, it works better to spread the change, risk, and growth over several years than to allow the market to deteriorate to where the festival feels the need to make radical change to survive.
e. Projected consumer response rates for various methods. Caveat: these not bluegrass based numbers, but from standard consumer studies. We have reason to believe that within the bluegrass community pull rates may run a bit higher. The greater caveat is that these measures take components separately and thus do not measure the results of synergies among marketing means.
i. A typical full page magazine ad has a pull rate of up to two tenths of one percent of the readers.
ii. A typical direct mail piece may pull up to five percent. Extremely well targeted mailings, such as people who have asked to be on your mailing list, will do much better.
f. Calculating and Comparing Advertising Costs
i. Comparing advertising costs across different media requires calculating it using a standard measure, cost per thousand.
ii. Since you assume everyone on your mailing list is a potential consumer, the math here is simple. If you have 10,000 names on your list and the total cost of the mailer is $3500, then the cost per thousand is $350. At a 5% response rate, this would compute to a cost of $7 per ticket sold.
iii. With magazines, it gets trickier. With a bluegrass magazine you can assume that every reader within the geographical area your festival serves is a potential customer. You can get the geographical breakout of distribution from the publication. Let’s assume for this exercise, that 1/3 of the magazine’s readers can reasonably drive to your event, and that the publication has 36,000 readers (not subscribers or circulation). You’re running a full page, 1 color ad at a rate of $700, so you can expect 40% to read it (expected notice). So your target audience is 12,000 readers. Two-fifths will notice the ad, or 4800 readers. Thus the cost per thousand to reach them is $145.83. Since these calculations factor out the readers who can’t reasonably be expected to attend, you can up the projected response rate by a factor of three to .6 of one percent. With a bluegrass specific publication, you can guesstimate a stronger response rate than the industry average, perhaps tripling it, so lets project a 2% rate of return. Thus you can project a cost per ticket sold of $7.29, almost the same as the direct mailer.
iv. With publications outside bluegrass, it gets even more complicated for you have to also factor in an estimate of what percentage of the publication’s readers would be interested in the type of event you’re presenting.

IV. Advertising Media for Bluegrass Events

G. TOURISM PROMOTION AGENCIES

One of the least expensive both often overlooked promotional vehicles are your state and local public and private agencies devoted to business and tourism promotion such as Convention & Visitor Bureaus, Chambers of Commerce, and State Tourism Offices. These are your most effective means for reaching the people "who like bluegrass" and those who want to plan vacations around festivals.
2. Their activities can reinforce everything you’re doing in marketing with little cost to you. To wit:
Distribute your direct mail pieces to various public locations including state visitor centers out on the interstates
Include your event in state, city, and county level listings that go out widely to the media, especially the key travel media
Offer opportunities for cooperative advertising
Include your event on their web sites with a link to your site
Regularly field inquiries from the public along the lines of "what is there fun to do in Graveyard County on the second weekend in June?"
Lend credibility and marketing hooks to the event through recognition programs, such as "One of the 20 outstanding tourism events in the state or region for the month of June."

I. OTHER MEANS
1. Other Events
a. Provide your direct mail pieces to artists appearing on the event and vendors who travel from festival to festival.
b. Directly distribute them at other events as permitted by the respective presenters.
c. Also where permitted, give the emcees written – 50 words or less – announcements in large type. Don’t just give them a direct mail piece. Ask for permission of the stage manager or the presenter first.
d. trade ad space in festival programs
e. trade web site links
f. consider cooperative marketing with other events
g. In certain circumstances sponsorships of parts of other events both advertises your event to important audiences, has a cause oriented effect, and enhances your event’s market profile
2. Advertising Novelties
a. I feel that advertising novelties have such limited legs – except as staff reward items – for bluegrass festivals that I won’t even bother to explain why.
3. Logo Merchandise
a. You can’t beat advertising for which the consumer pays
b. You can use merchandise to reward staff, volunteers, media, and sponsors
c. Two caveats
i. All merchandise must meet the high quality and image standards of the event
ii. It must be ordered in reasonable quantities considering short shelf life, market, and return on investment
4. Posters
a. Posters have some utility for music stores, other events, and places where people gather to pick. Sometimes they can be displayed in the community to approach the local audience.
b. That said, posters are an "if you can afford it" item, unless the local general public is a primary audience
c. Again, if you do them, they have to reflect well on the festivals image and sell both visually and verbally. Don’t overburden with details. Don’t include prices.
5. Billboards
a. Billboards go after a very untargeted audience
b. They only make sense for bluegrass if donated or owned by the festival
6. Banners
a. If you’re a nonprofit presenter with strong community ties, area governments or businesses may permit you to display banners gratis.
b. Again, however, banners go after a totally untargeted audience
7. Word of Mouth
a. Word of mouth is your best friend or enemy in bluegrass promotions. A lot of advertisers look at all marketing as a way to generate positive word of mouth.
b. The best way to ensure positive word of mouth is to present an outstanding event with attention to detail and exceptional customer service. Clean restrooms, comfortable campgrounds with good picking, honesty, well rendered marketing, and friendly staff will do a lot more for your word of mouth than the lineup.
c. Techniques exist to help word of mouth
i. Follow the example of the Lewis Family. Try to make every fan feel they have a personal relationship with you and with the event
ii. Look for decision influencers. These include prominent performers, bluegrass gypsies who go to festivals all over, leaders of local bluegrass and pickers associations, folks in the media, people who always seem to have a big crowd gathered around their campsite, instrument store proprietors, vendors who go from festival to festival, and collectives that seem always to camp together. Build positive relationships with all these folks. For example, if you promise someone a specific location for their RV, you’d better provide it or an even better one. For another, make sure that people in the media most important to you get free tickets.

V. DO’s AND DON’T’s
A. Do
1. Develop marketing plans to allocate your resources and direct your advertising.
2. Emphasize direct mail
3. Use professionals for design, art, ad copy, and mailing services
4. Develop and maintain a web site and work with new bluegrass media
5. Use media outside bluegrass to reach all audiences outside the hard core bluegrass fans
6. Take advantage of all free promotional avenues such as calendar listings, broadcast media partnering and coverage, CVB’s, and articles
7. Have a festival program
8. Develop a realistic festival budget deriving your ticket prices from all festival costs and allocating a significant amount to marketing and advertising.
9. Use ad trades and media sponsorships to leverage your advertising budget
10. Provide radio stations liberally with tickets for on air giveaways
11. Trade tickets to TV, radio, and cable for advertising
12. Use brochures or post cards as direct mail pieces
13. Use display ads to sell the festival
14. Use art work from your festival, especially of happy audiences
15. Sell to the people who will buy tickets
16. Listen to the people who buy tickets
B. Don’t
1. Advertise without a marketing strategy
2. Use your flyer as a display ad
3. List prices in display ads
4. Use display ads to provide detailed information that belongs in the direct mailer and on the web
5. Let art work or design features overwhelm your message
6. Use artist promo shots as your art work in display ads
7. Sell to yourself, other promoters, or performers.
8. Place ads based strictly on price
9. Ignore in-kind deals
10. Limit yourself simply through marketing and advertising shortcomings to just the hard core bluegrass fans
11. Use the flyer format for your direct mail piece
12. Do direct mail at first class rates
13. Forget that you get what you pay for in marketing and advertising
14. Be afraid to spend money wisely on marketing
15. Ignore the world beyond bluegrass
16. Let comments from your consumers overrule your instincts, common sense, or positive results
17. Spread your budget too thin or try to do too many things at once
18. Ignore publication deadlines then ask for special treatment

GLOSSARY

Ancillary Revenue: Income the event derives from any source other than ticket sales, such as from vendor fees, hook-ups, memorabilia sales, sponsorship, donations, and ads in the festival program.

Camera-Ready: Camera ready is a widely used, yet not quite specific term, which in printing using traditional methods meant a "mechanical" ready to be placed into the publication as is and photographed to generate film for the printing process. With the onset of computer aided design and publication, it tends now to serve as a synonym for ads prepared according to the specifications of the publication.

Closing Date: The last day by which you must make your ad placement or insertion in order to get into a particular issue of a magazine or newspaper.

CMYK: a specification for how colors are presented in certain graphic file formats. Service Bureaus and computer savvy printers tend to prefer CMYK for creating color separations from computer files.

Color separations: In most four color printing processes, each color is printed on a separate pass through the press. Thus each color must be provided on a separate film negatives.

Domain: The @ part of a URL or email address.

.eps: Encapsulated Postscript Script. The most easily transportable computer file format for ad copy since it doesn’t require supporting fonts and works across platforms.

Font: refers to the particular size and style of a typeface, which is the design family of the letters.

Four P’s: the building blocks of classical academic marketing theory – product, price, placement, promotion. Too many people think knowing those four words makes them understand marketing.

Guerilla marketing: using targeted, lower cost, and presumably innovative methods to focused, niche markets, such as the audience for bluegrass music.

Halftone: a black and white photograph rendered as dots for printing.

Insertion or Ad Placement: Contracting with a publication for ad space.

ISP: Internet Service Provider, the company from which you buy your email account and server space.

Leading: the space between characters in text.

Line Screen: a specification for the intensity of the dots in a halftone

Marketing: each and every contact you have with the any segment of public or media serving them.

Points of Influence: All the aspects of the event where contact is made with the public, direct and indirect.

Pull Rate: a measure of pull power, the ability of various marketing communications to draw folks to your event

REED: Right Read Emulsion Down. The most common format for film negatives for ads.

Spamming: The discredited practice of sending unsolicited advertising email (UCE = unsolicited commercial email) to addresses indiscriminately. This is done both by sending to discussion groups and by purchasing mass email addresses from vendors of same. Send group or mass email to folks who have requested to be on your list or at least freely given you their address is not spam.

URL: Universal Resource Locator, the address for a worldwide web site.

Velox: is a special film quality paper for positives including both camera-ready black & white and proofs to accompany film negatives.

Webzine: an Internet only magzine.

RESOURCES

Guerilla Marketing: gmarketing.com Up to date and content rich, this is your best source for free, on line information about advertising and marketing with limited resources

Marketing For Dummies by Alexander Hiam (Foster City, CA: IDG Books, 1997. $19.99). I know, you’re going to peruse an MBA level marketing text from the library. Get real.

NetMartketing www.netb2b.com, an AdAge subsidiary webzine, provides a strong source for web marketing information.

Project 2000 http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/ archives an impressive collection of academic studies about web marketing and advertising

Public Participation in the Arts: is a series of periodical surveys of Americans participation in and attitudes toward all forms of the arts. The survey has been conducted by the NEA and the Bureau of the Census each five years beginning in 1982. Reports resulting from these studies can be found at http://arts.endow.gov/research/notes.html.