‘Live commercial’ puts pitch before performance
NEW YORK – As more television viewers skip commercials and print media readership declines, the battle to create novel advertisements has never been more intense. They’re printed on the side of coffee cups, projected onto the sidewalk beneath your feet and stenciled onto the white lines that separate parking spaces.
Add to that list of unlikely commercial spaces: the stage.
On Tuesday, the group charged with promoting tourism in London used live actors to pitch the city’s attractions to theatergoers in New York. In what Visit London billed as the “world’s first live commercial,” five actors took the stage before a performance of “Stomp” to act out a three-minute sketch in which they discussed reasons to visit Britain’s capital.
“If you look at a traditional travel and tourism promotion, they’re done through travel pages in newspapers or travel magazines, and that’s a very crowded marketplace,” said Ken Kelling, a spokesman for Visit London.
A marketing professor said the age-old problem of getting customers to pay attention to ads has gotten dramatically worse.
“You get more and more media fragmentation. And you get more and more people with digital recorders that make it easier just to bypass the advertising entirely. So there’s no question that people are looking for new ways to get the message across,” said Tim Calkins, who teaches at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Branding, once reserved for detergents and soft drinks, has become increasingly important for cities and countries. Calkins said competition for business investment and tourism dollars has increased dramatically because of the increase of global trade and the ease of traveling abroad.
“The competition for a city like London is really all the other global cities that one can choose from,” he said.
Visit London’s troupe has also delivered its pitch to theater audiences in Dublin, London and Hamburg, and a fifth performance is scheduled at a Pittsburgh theater Friday. No further showings are planned.
So should you expect actors to pitch Crest toothpaste to you the next time you see a Broadway show? It’s not likely, given the cost of staging a live commercial and the difficulty of persuading theaters to allow the advertisements.
“They’ve naturally been a little bit protective of what happens commercially in each theater and a little bit protective of the audience in some ways that they don’t want them bombarded with commercials and advertising,” Kelling said. “We’ve had to work very hard to convince producers and creative people that this is something worthwhile and I think it’s only happening really because it’s about London.”
However, Gary Gardner, a theater professor at UCLA, didn’t think there was anything wrong with introducing a new form of advertising to the theater.
“I can’t say that it necessarily offends me,” he said.