Advertising in Drum Corps

[iCanHazDcp]

Welcome to the discussion. I work at GroupM, the media conglomerate that oversees Mindshare, Mediacom, MEC, and Maxus. I started at Ogilvy & Mather when I left college/drum corps. I've work on American Express, Subway, Unilever, and dozens of others.

I agree with you about those venues. This is definitely something that needs to be recaptured. Speaking of Allentown--which for years was the only show I attended every year--many of these families you are seeing are alumni reunions. The Crossmen alumni have been having an Allentown picnic for years. There are other little pockets for corps you probably haven't even heard of (the Media Fawns?).

It's interesting that you bring up families because the seeds of wanting to be in drum corps often begin when a young person is exposed.

Another thing that seems to have been lost is "hometown" awareness. I have often traveled to Chicago for business and have asked the locals if they know who the Cavaliers are. I have yet to get a "yes" response. So, corps shouldn't just be doing appearances on the road. How about some "hometown" awareness? Your ideas are good for the road. But, relationship to the community should begin at home and begins with the corps organizations themselves.

I hope you do. I wonder if DCI has the resources to do the kind of rigorous research into developing objectives and strategies that we are both accustomed to.

Hey, nice to meet you! Always great to meet people in the industry who also marched corps.

Interesting points that I didn't know or didn't think about. If only we could be in a brainstorm session at DCI headquarters! I think we can both agree that DCI is long overdue for some outside opinion.

[MikeD]

Another thing that seems to have been lost is "hometown" awareness. I have often traveled to Chicago for business and have asked the locals if they know who the Cavaliers are. I have yet to get a "yes" response. So, corps shouldn't just be doing appearances on the road. How about some "hometown" awareness? Your ideas are good for the road. But, relationship to the community should begin at home and begins with the corps organizations themselves.

You are looking at the old model of drum corps being a local activity with national trips. Modern drum corps is a touring activity in 2012. Corps just do not hang around their 'base' for an extended period of time. Heck, BAC even had move-in in California because that is where they started their season this year.

[MikeD]

I wonder if DCI has the resources to do the kind of rigorous research into developing objectives and strategies that we are both accustomed to.

My guess is a resounding No to that.

[N.E. Brigand]

Quality does not have to suffer; my point is that more people will always go see, and always pay more money, to be entertained by a high quality, thought-provoking "movie" like Schindler's List than a thought-provoking, esoteric, high-quality "art-film" like The Bicycle Thief.

I feel obligated to quibble with your movie example. The only thing esoteric about The Bicycle Thief (i.e., Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is that it was in Italian and had a low budget (and yet wasn't like American "B movies", the only low-budget films then known to most people); Vittorio de Sica was a very accessible filmmaker. In its day, The Bicycle Thief was as popular in the U.S. as a foreign-language film could be (think Life Is Beautiful or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Shall We Dance? for modern comparisons) and broke from the shallow, fluffy Italian mainstream). Living amid the ravages of World War II certainly was an influence on its creation!

Also, it took a couple decades of exciting foreign films like De Sica's (and Kurosawa's, and Truffaut's, etc.) to finally get Hollywood to take some risks: without that history, there could be no Schindler's List, a big-budget art film made by a Hollywood studio. And even that movie's success was fairly unusual: look at the ten biggest hits for 1993, and only one other, Philadelphia, is arguably "thought provoking". (Though not anymore; and even then, the critical consensus was that it was at least five years too late.) I think four of that year's top ten are junk.

Now, can I bring this digression back to drum corps? Not easily. Er... I would reiterate a suggestion I've made before: that financial compensation to the corps ought to be keyed to audience response, without reference to the judges' decisions. (Just as box office and awards in movies are separate.) I think there always ought to be some experimentation in drum corps, so that the Bicycle Thieves of yesterday can lead to the Schindler's Lists of today. And I think that we the more dedicated fans should do what we can to help drum corps shows when DCI's advertising dollars run out, as they often will. Two weeks ago, I wrote to the morning DJ at the local (commercial) classical music station to let her know about the Akron show, and noted the classical music selections of some of the corps there, figuring even though she couldn't mention it on air without the station being paid for it, that maybe it would come up in her conversations with colleagues. (My effort probably made no impact whatsoever, but she did kindly write back. It doesn't hurt to try.)

[barigirl78]

You are looking at the old model of drum corps being a local activity with national trips. Modern drum corps is a touring activity in 2012. Corps just do not hang around their 'base' for an extended period of time. Heck, BAC even had move-in in California because that is where they started their season this year.

Why is the "new model" right and the "old model" wrong? Maybe the new model is part of the problem.

Even professional sports establish a base of fandom in their local communities. Would any team sport be as popular if its teams only had one or two home games a year?

[GUARDLING]

I feel obligated to quibble with your movie example. The only thing esoteric about The Bicycle Thief (i.e., Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is that it was in Italian and had a low budget (and yet wasn't like American "B movies", the only low-budget films then known to most people); Vittorio de Sica was a very accessible filmmaker. In its day, The Bicycle Thief was as popular in the U.S. as a foreign-language film could be (think Life Is Beautiful or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Shall We Dance? for modern comparisons) and broke from the shallow, fluffy Italian mainstream). Living amid the ravages of World War II certainly was an influence on its creation!

Also, it took a couple decades of exciting foreign films like De Sica's (and Kurosawa's, and Truffaut's, etc.) to finally get Hollywood to take some risks: without that history, there could be no Schindler's List, a big-budget art film made by a Hollywood studio. And even that movie's success was fairly unusual: look at the ten biggest hits for 1993, and only one other, Philadelphia, is arguably "thought provoking". (Though not anymore; and even then, the critical consensus was that it was at least five years too late.) I think four of that year's top ten are junk.

Now, can I bring this digression back to drum corps? Not easily. Er... I would reiterate a suggestion I've made before: that financial compensation to the corps ought to be keyed to audience response, without reference to the judges' decisions. (Just as box office and awards in movies are separate.) I think there always ought to be some experimentation in drum corps, so that the Bicycle Thieves of yesterday can lead to the Schindler's Lists of today. And I think that we the more dedicated fans should do what we can to help drum corps shows when DCI's advertising dollars run out, as they often will. Two weeks ago, I wrote to the morning DJ at the local (commercial) classical music station to let her know about the Akron show, and noted the classical music selections of some of the corps there, figuring even though she couldn't mention it on air without the station being paid for it, that maybe it would come up in her conversations with colleagues. (My effort probably made no impact whatsoever, but she did kindly write back. It doesn't hurt to try.)

you really think corps should be paid keyed on aidience responce? Well let me get all my homies out to scream like crazy..thats so subjective and many times has little or nothing to do with being good or even entertaining. That can change night to night and what about the corps many dont go to see....letting anyone know about the activity wheather they roll their eyes and move on isnt a bad idea..cant hurt anyway

[N.E. Brigand]

You really think corps should be paid keyed on audience response? Well, let me get all my homeys out to scream like crazy. That's so subjective and many times has little or nothing to do with being good or even entertaining. That can change night to night, and what about the corps many don't go to see?

Obviously there would need to be a good system in place to prevent fraud (each patron is issued a ballot which is collected in the stadium, for instance), but I absolutely think the corps' take of the box office should be based on the people who are paying that box office, not on the judges' decisions. If the judges want to put up their own money for a separate judges' prize, they should by all means do so! Otherwise, the corps should be happy just to receive their expert adjudication.

[GUARDLING]

Obviously there would need to be a good system in place to prevent fraud (each patron is issued a ballot which is collected in the stadium, for instance), but I absolutely think the corps' take of the box office should be based on the people who are paying that box office, not on the judges' decisions. If the judges want to put up their own money for a separate judges' prize, they should by all means do so! Otherwise, the corps should be happy just to receive their expert adjudication.

people barley make money on these shows..it was NEVER through history the gate , its always concessions but It would be a disaster I think to leave anything up to the audience. Its not like a movie, drum corp patrons are very Bias and dont walk into a show with a blank slate in their own minds. We go in with pre conceptions, expectations on some and not others, and extremely judgemental if some direction is take that some dont like.....

[barigirl78]

This discussion inspired me to go back to examine some Nielsen data on the last time DCI was telecast on ESPN2.

The telecast at 10PM ET on 9/5/07 had an average viewership of about 520,000 Viewers.

Compared to other things that aired in Primetime on ESPN2 that week, it ranked around the middle of the pack. A college football game between Auburn and South Florida had 2.1 million viewers. The World Series of Poker had about 400,000.

(Note: When you see Nielsen data like this, the figures represent the number of viewers during the AVERAGE MINUTE of the telecast. They do not represent how many people watched the whole thing because viewers and tune in and tune out after a few minutes.)

Other stats:

Average age of the viewer was 40.6. That may surprise some of you, but reinforces value of "old school" people like me.

Number of viewers Aged 18-49 was around 264,000. Number of viewers aged 15 to 24 was only about 56,000.

Now for the troubling statistic. The average "% of the program viewed" was 11%. That means that most of the viewers tuned in for a short amount of time and tuned out. It was a 2-hour telecast, so, ironically the average # of minutes viewed was 13. But, its ESPN2 and I'm sure a lot of people stumbled onto it while flipping around and didn't stick very long.

I found the DCI announcement for when they canceled doing ESPN2. http://www.dci.org/news/view.cfm?news_id=907ff620-2aae-4201-a595-fc05eed6d41e

It didn't site ratings as the reason to stop. "Acheson continued, “Although the broadcast is a very significant component in our ability to share our performances with the world, our non-profit organization simply can’t cover the expense of producing and airing the program, even with the very generous support of a substantial number of advertisers and corporate partners. We’ve been quite pleased with the viewership of this world-class event and are grateful to the number of sponsors who have helped us offset a portion of the production and airtime costs. In the end, we simply must make a responsible business decision on behalf of the corps.”

Read more: http://www.dci.org/news/view.cfm?news_id=907ff620-2aae-4201-a595-fc05eed6d41e#ixzz1yvRM0Hlt

It's odd that now in 2012, they essentially produce several telecasts of the season online, some of them multi-camera. I can't imagine that's any cheaper to do than what they did for ESPN2.

As I said previously, its a pay model that is geared to current hardcore fans paying to see the activity while the rest of the world has limited ways to sample the activity for free or even low cost.

[MikeD]

Why is the "new model" right and the "old model" wrong? Maybe the new model is part of the problem.

Even professional sports establish a base of fandom in their local communities. Would any team sport be as popular if its teams only had one or two home games a year?

Sports players are paid professionals who can afford to buy/rent in the area of their team. In DCI the members come from all over and pay for the ability to march. It is totally different.

Back in the day, at least my day, only a very few kids were able to march far beyond their local home area. I certainly could not have joined the Kilties in 1970; it was a stretch to drive to Garfield from my own NJ towns.

You have to look at how the world is today and come up with ways to market to that world.