Two Tales of Targeting for Different Audiences

T he things they do.

A study in two parts:

Exhibit A: If you’re a Hollywood producer with a big, expensive movie like Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own,” you do all of the usual things to attract audiences, like hit the TV talk shows and grant magazine interviews.

You also do the unusual, like this weekend get QVC (Quality, Value, Convenience), cable television’s home shopping network, to hold a 24-hour sale of the licensed couture from the movie about World War II professional women baseball players--jerseys, caps, jackets. You also get Marshall to Philadelphia, too, back on camera in three one-hour call-in segments.

Exhibit B: If you’re players in a different but related league, like Los Angeles theater producers Jean Stein and Veronica Chambers, you also do all the usual things to attract attention, like hire a publicist, buy advertising, wait for Jay Leno or even Mr. Pete to return your calls, form theater parties for your stand-up musical, “Forever Plaid” at the Canon in Beverly Hills.

You also do the unusual, like getting your four singers to serenade Ivana Trump on her book tour or show up at a shopping mall to judge singing contests.

Exhibit A: You have Madonna, Geena Davis and Tom Hanks.

Exhibit B: You have four dead guys.

Exhibit A: You have the mammoth resources of Columbia Pictures (Sony).

Exhibit B: You have 23 pals as your backers for this one-act theater piece about a male quartet killed in a 1964 car crash and who are divinely put on hold for one last lounge gig.

The things you do.

It’s called targeting.

Big Hollywood production or small live musical, you grab your piece of the demographic pie by calculating which of the multitudes you want lined up at the box office and then you concentrate your efforts on them.

Elliot Abbott, executive director of Marshall’s Parkway Productions, which with Columbia produced “League,” thinks his pioneering “enter-mercial” with QVC just might cut a big piece of the pie. QVC claims 42 million viewers--well, not all at one time--with 70% of its buyers women. What better way, then, to appeal to an audience that traditionally isn’t expected to spend its summer evenings with a “Batman” or a “Terminator” or a “Lethal Weapon”?

A few weeks ago QVC and Abbott tested the idea. In a 25-minute effort 1,200 of the unseen movie’s jerseys sold, along with a few hundred items, and that without Marshall. Clearly, Parkway had found an audience.

Stein and Chambers think they, too, have found an audience worth developing. Theirs was a tougher selling challenge. “Plaid” had been through the territory before, twice in San Diego and once as part of the Pasadena Playhouse season. The producers had no big-name stars to promote. No subscribers. No telephone lists. For starters, there were plenty of good reviews and a lot of favorable word of mouth.

But what do you do after that? They decided to concentrate on younger and non-traditional theater audiences with a heavy dose of exposure of their four performers and a message that read: Here’s a musical different from anything Mom and Dad might have gone to. But it’s OK to bring them.

Something must have worked. In its first 10 weeks at the 392-seat Canon, the play’s box office returned almost half of the investors’ outlay. The play recently celebrated its 100th performance and is into its 17th week. Tickets are selling into late August. “Plaid” may yet turn forever green.

The things you do.

“It will be like a little bit of Larry King and a little bit of ‘The Tonight Show’ with all of the appeal of ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ ” said Abbott of Marshall’s QVC dates Saturday morning and then twice on Sunday. The movie is being sneak-previewed Saturday night in certain theaters (officially it doesn’t open until Wednesday) so he’s expecting Marshall’s first interactive TV appearances will help sell more than just merchandise. “We’re creating an awareness,” he said.

Stein also is shooting for awareness for her play. “Every show has its own kind of personality and requires its own marketing strategy. This show has become an event. We promoted at first right from the theater, decorating the front in plaid to make the building vibrant. We want the evening to be fun. That’s part of our appeal, especially for young people. We have to find ways to develop audiences for the future.”

To find new audiences, the two producers strung together a series of continuing promotions. In effect, they wanted to keep “the four guys” in front of their target audiences.

They got their singers on certain radio shows on stations with younger demographics. They talked RCA and Tower Records into doing in-store promotions for the various show albums. They developed contacts with social organizations and local businesses with memberships and employees in the under-40s zone. They worked out special arrangements with college and high school students for group and discount tickets. They developed promotions with restaurants whose clientele don’t exactly qualify for senior discounts.

Theirs was a campaign of personal appearances and promotions. And they made some discoveries along the way about targeting audiences, like Japanese tour groups.

“Plaid” had been a hit in an earlier brief Asian tour, so group sales manager Heather Fitzgerald started inviting travel agents to the show in the hope that the show’s popularity had traveled back across the Pacific. It worked, especially with younger Japanese groups familiar with American music pre-Beatles, the nostalgia of Perry Como.

“As a producer I could choose just to raise money, count the receipts and sit back,” Chambers said.

“We knew we had a helluva product so we had to do everything to get the word out. You have to let them know you’re here. We didn’t want people asking us after a month if the show was still running. Give me a break.”

When “The Real Live Brady Bunch” opened in Westwood with its obvious built-in appeal to a generation of boomers brought up on the television sitcom, the two “Plaid” producers did some cross-pollination, free tickets to their show as a “Brady” gift giveaway, a “Brady” plug at the Canon.

The Bradys are, in a fashion, doing something about developing new theater audiences. “Our play is a pop culture thing,” says co-producer Faith Soloway, 28.

“The people come to us. We don’t have to promote heavily. It’s TV night at the theater. An event.”

Stein and Chambers, meanwhile, are getting calls from producers of “Forever Plaid” in other cities (versions run in New York, Boston, Houston, Denver, and soon in Kansas City), wanting to know more about their targeting campaigns, wanting to know more about the things they have to do.