This month, music and film are at the forefront as each battles with the future uses for burgeoning tech. While AI-generated film visuals seem to be coming up short, progress toward realistic AI-generated music is starting to send shockwaves. On the consumer side, music streaming tools are being released to allow more listening experience customization. Across the industry, artists are celebrating ways that some these new tools can enhance their work, while speaking out against potential impacts on jobs, compensation, and creative freedom.
Generative AI (GenAI) has become increasingly integrated into marketing and communication careers, and even our daily lives, with the rise of various text-to-image, text-to-video, & text-to-text tools. As digital marketers find new and innovative ways to keep up with the trends, and specifically GenZ in a quick-changing popular culture scene, how are they reacting to the rise of GenAI?
Arts and cultural organizations are becoming increasingly aware of their climate impact, and many are taking action to reduce harm. Tracking, reporting, and offsetting emissions may seem like an overwhelming feat for small or mid-sized organizations, but emerging blockchain technology may help make the process more efficient and reliable.
As previously foreshadowed by Samantha in an article written in July of 2023, TikTok: Opportunity and Risk, TikTok has been under a microscope from governments across the globe for quite awhile. The analysis provided in her article is still relevant today given the recent vote to ban TikTok, and the United States House moving forward to force Chinese state-owned TikTok company ByteDance to sell their ownership of the U.S. version of TikTok, or lose access to the United States TikTok market. To fully understand the situation, this article will recap TikTok’s controversial Privacy Policy and the 2023 testimonies, and also discuss the current governmental situation surrounding the ban.
Digital strategy has become a buzzword after the explosion of AI in the last 18 months. Yet, it is not about AI. AI has been the tipping point for organizations and professionals to recognize that they must update or create a digital strategy for success. Digitally-forward arts organizations already have a digital component as part of their strategic plan. Read more to understand the need for technology to be a core component of strategic plans and operations.
The 2022 Theatre Communications Group conference offered virtual, hybrid, and in-person experiences. Hosted in Pittsburgh, the conference adeptly revealed the opportunities and challenges facing the field as theatre artists and institutions navigate their futures. The following summary offers two core takeaways from the conference, focusing on a theatre administration future of human-centered strategies allowing adaptive innovation within a constantly changing ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence in the arts is growing increasingly more complex. It is 2022, and robots are co-creating art, NFTs are celebrating and confusing art consumers around the world, and at least 85% of Americans have smartphones that give immediate access to endless amounts of streaming content. However, AI has flaws. This article covers the recommendation algorithms built to support content delivery for this majority, their cultural implications, and bias control.
2020 has been and will continue to be notable for all but especially artists and arts institutions. Globally we are facing the uncomfortable realities of a pandemic that has brought the arts industries to their knees, economically, particularly the performing arts. Demands for racial and social justice come with a reckoning for many arts institutions — for their own participation in the industrial model that creates inequity in hiring, programming, training, even foundation giving.
As a researcher, artist, academic and former managing director, I hope that 2020 is a year that will offering us, as an industry, a pause to rethink how to do our artistic work in more equitable, inclusive and relevant ways. To create clarity as we re-think institutional systems , it is important to turn to data about our own institutions as well as our audiences in order to become the relevant and vibrant institutions that all communities deserve. In this short article, I will connect information from the recent national survey by LaPlaca Cohen and Slover Linett, “Culture and Community in a Time of Crisis” and emerging best business practices heralded by McKinsey and Co. and other thought leaders in the business field.
In the light of protests surrounding racial inequality and systematic racism stretching across varying U.S. industries, this lack of representation has been noted among the staff of art institutions as well. The hiring of diverse staff in the arts industry historically does not represent the breakdown of the average American audience, particularly in high-ranking roles.
Many institutions are rethinking their approach to diversity in the light of renewed protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Theatre companies throughout the nation are a part of this wave, rethinking everything from season planning to staff structure. Yet one of the largest issues at hand is the lack of diversity in audiences. Theatre audiences are dwindling, and those audience members that remain tend to fall into a very narrow set of demographics: usually older, white, and affluent. Theatre companies will have to reach out to new groups If they want to continue working and thriving well into the future.
The Nonprofit Technology Conference (#NTC17) met in March in Washington, DC, the headquarters of all nonprofits. The conference was vast with inspiring keynotes and information-filled panels. The following is only a sampling of what was available and reveals my passions and interests: Data, Diversity and Communication.
Seven years ago Enrico Casarosa, an artist working for Pixar went on a pubcrawl. He writes that the spirit of community inspired him to create a community for visual artists that he called Sketchcrawl. The first Sketchcrawl happened in 2004 in over 20 locations in six countires. Since then, there have been 33 Sketchcrawls and the event has grown to almost a hundred locations in over 20 counties and now has a website sketchcrawl.com. The community now has over 3000 members and is still growing. At first, only Enrico was moderating, but Sketchcrawl has since grown to have numerous other worldwide administrators organizing participation and the community has strong leadership in both Asia and Europe as well as in North America.
A Sketchcrawl is a day predetermined thoughout the world, where artists young and old, professional and amateur pledge to sketch for anywhere from 20 minutes to 8 hours. The results of the event day are posted online for the whole worldwide community to see. There are some true gems in these online galleries. Participants speak of both the reward and difficulty of committing to draw for an entire day. They recount the lucidity that comes from a full day of observation and moving from subject to subject. They also comment on the difficulty of focusing their attention for so long. Side by side, these artists are creating a community through a shared experience and their love of art. Alongside their peers the collection of images lead us through a sense of movement throughout the day and objects and people that once were ignored as mundane become visible and interesting.
This community, built through a mutual love of the arts, is a strong sign of the growth of the arts online and should give the arts community at large hope for the future in the face of declines elsewhere. The next Sketchcrawl is on January 21, 2012. It is easy to sign up and there are also multiple social network sites for the community at large and for individual city groups.
There’s a project going on in Australia that is the largest online digital storytelling project in the country. The project invites people to tell stories about what has made the arts special to them and how they’ve been touched by the arts. They tell their stories through audio, video and writing. The cool thing about it is, anyone in Australia can do it. As of today, it has several thousand entries. The project was launched in July of 2010 and the results are aggregated into a into a giant, growing testimonial page with search-able contents by genre.This website is called “What Makes Me”. There are three different sections: What Makes Me, What Makes You, What Makes Us. Each person claims a cube, a cleverly designed multimedia enabled object online and they decorate it with their images, video, and audio files. Each one is very different. The first twelve entries talk about why each individual loves a certain art form or forms - whether it be dance, circus arts, graffiti or something else. All of them are touching and told from the heart. There’s a retired nurse that found out her next door neighbor was a circus performer and has since fallen in love with the circus. There’s a professional rugby driver who drives around looking at the graffiti all over the city. There’s a professional cook who while catering a party, discovered dance for the first time and has since developed a personal relationship with the choreographer.
The common thread that runs between most of these testimonials is the personal connection built with a specific artist or the arts in their neighborhood. It’s about relationships, rather than facilities, and community as the key to these relationships.
The idea around this project was to counteract the perception that the arts in Australia are “associated with images of snobbery and inaccessibility”. The project is run by a company called Wanted Digital and initiated by the Australia Council for the Arts. The participants of What Makes Me are cooperating to build something together- it’s a game. A game that is getting the attention of philanthropic organizations in the US. Wolf Brown recently used this interactive project as an example of participation in the arts in their recent study commissioned by the Jame Irvine Foundation “Getting In On the Act - How arts groups are getting opportunities for active participation”.
What Makes Me is worth taking a second look at. The project engenders enthusiasm that isn’t created from simply being a spectator. Anyone in Australia can be a part of it and there is a hefty presence on the site from diverse populations with Aboriginal people, the disabled, and immigrant communities being well represented. Participants post links to their cube, to their facebook, to their twitter, to other social media sites. The individual act of creation combined with the community have a ground swell effect and foster even deeper love for individual artists and the arts contributions to the community.
Perhaps one of the most difficult and sensitive topics in the arts community is that of building audience diversity. As national celebrations like Black History month approach, artists, arts managers and arts organizations often brainstorm for ways to reach out to and include minority communities in their organizations, especially if there is special programming during these celebrations. As the Pew Research Study indicates, minority groups do have a strong presence on Twitter, with 13% African American and 18% Hispanic. There are also a host of groups within the LinkedIn and Meetup platforms that are exclusively for minority professionals. Many arts marketers are concerned that targeting groups of people based upon their ethnic background can come across as unethical or forced.
An example of one such social media marketing tactic popped up in my Inbox earlier this week courtesy of Thomas Cott's clipping-service "You've Cott Mail." In this Clickz article, Giovanni Rodriguez suggests that using hashtags is an effective way to reach the Latino population on Twitter. While the article appears on a website with general marketing advice that is not necessarily specific to the arts, its inclusion in an arts-related clipping service suggests that this practice should be considered by arts managers.
The screen shot below shows one of these hashtag-driven discussions in action.
Hashtags in Action
The bottom of the screenshot shows a promotion for the Broadway musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown using the hashtag "#latism." An important thing to note is that the user promoting this event is NOT the Belasco Theater or the musical's production company, it is another person promoting Latino Events in general. While this musical is certainly relevant to the Latino community, the message is especially relevant coming from a community insider.
As an African American female who frequently uses Twitter to discover cultural events in which I may be interested, I can see how "community insiders" could either be offended or altogether ignore this type of "hashtag marketing" from someone outside of their community. A random #Black or #BlackHistory tag from an organization I'm not familiar with would probably be ignored.
Reaching out to a key influencer or community-recognized group is a more genuine and relevant approach for social media campaigns. One possible workflow might be:
This type of strategy boosts an organization's credibility within the communities to which they want to develop connections. It is also a more genuine way to build relationships. As my colleague Amelia Northrup pointed out in a previous article on this topic:
At long last, the diversity question has come around to the classic “old vs. new” debate. When faced with declining arts attendance, is it better to “pick the low-hanging fruit” and focus on maintaining and growing our existing audience demographics (”the more return on investment for less energy” approach) or make a long-term investment in trying to attract new groups of people to our performances?
Cultivating new audiences may be a daunting and often challenging task, but it is one of the most worthwhile investments that any organization can make. A relevant and genuine outreach campaign is the first step in this important process.
