S3 E10: The Campaign That Brought Theater-Goers Back to Broadway – With Andrew Lazzaro

FIVE: Innovation for Marketers

Jake talks with Andrew Lazzaro, Campaign Architect for The Broadway League about “This is Broadway,” the ground-breaking campaign that brought theater lovers back to Broadway shows after being closed for eighteen months.

Broadway shut down due to COVID on March 12, 2020… a shutdown that lasted over a year.  With Broadway contributing over $14 billion to New York City’s economy in the year prior, this shutdown was a big problem – one that left over 90,000 people out of work. Broadway needed to make a comeback, but that wasn’t an easy proposition. In this episode, Andrew and Jake discuss how digital marketing and innovation helped make that happen.

Andrew Lazzaro is a strategic marketer with extensive experience leveraging data to identify hidden consumer behaviors, design new business models, accelerate profitable growth, and strengthen operational performance. He led Broadway’s industry-wide campaign that helped the city of New York and Broadway get back on their feet.

There are a million areas we could focus on this episode, but Jake zeroes in on FIVE:

 Jake’s FIVE List:

• The shutdown: The impact of COVID on Broadway and New York City’s economy
• The response: How the city and the theater industry staged a comeback
• The campaign: The details of the full “This is Broadway” campaign
• Reaching an elusive new economic ticket buyer: The innovative strategy to connect with a key audience
• The results: How matching a well-defined audience with a well-designed ad experience helped turn the tide

“When you start to look at how those users were engaging with it and how much they were sharing it and how they were clicking through and really consuming that content I think that was surprising to everybody.”

Host Jake Moskowitz and guest Andrew Lazzaro take a deep dive into the “This is Broadway” campaign. Along the way, Andrew shares the compelling results of the unique AR component of the campaign, how his experience in the Casino / Resort industry contributed to the Broadway campaign’s success, and the mid-campaign audience discovery that drove a significant strategy shift that drove fans back into theaters.

Some other stuff Andrew says during the conversation:

“You know the traditional 30 second television spot on the local news isn’t going to do it but meeting them where they’re at in a way that they’re familiar with that brings a smile to their face. And, it’s not about complex augmented reality or deep expensive builds and experiences, it’s the brilliant insight that the team executed creatively – it was simple. It’s brief and it’s right on point for what you needed to get people engaged with going to see a show over the holidays.”

“The first metric that we were really surprised by was the level of engagement. We saw, on average, 3.2 minutes of engagement counting for 750 hours of total usage of the AR experience over the three weeks we were in the market. I mean that’s just extraordinary when you think about our traditional digital assets that we’re regarding somewhere around 22 to 27 seconds of engagement.”

“So, if you reach out to me and say ‘Hey Andrew, you want to go see a show? Check this one out, I’d love to go see it!’ I’m much more likely to say yes than to be doing discovery all by myself and so this idea of advocacy through our 22% share rate, that was extraordinary.”

“This idea that you know this was a little less than 10 percent of our budget but drove over 30% of the engagement pointed to the fact that this type of medium for the customer that was really interested in what Broadway had to offer worked.”

Additional episode resources:

• The Broadway League
• Jake & Andrew reference the innovative “This is Broadway” campaign experience
• Emodo’s blog post follow up: The Campaign The Brought Young Broadway Fans Back to the Theaters
• ICOM Presentation on “This is Broadway”
• Andrew’s LinkedIn Profile
• This campaign included collaboration with Emodo partners 8th Wall & Aircards

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