January 16, 2007

Facilitating the Booking of Dance Companies with Online Video

Since I'll be attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters' 50th Annual Members Conference later this week, I thought I'd focus in this post on how the Internet can be used to enhance the booking process.

The APAP event is a face-to-face marketplace where a large number of presenters (performing arts venues, theater and festival organizers) and performing arts groups (dancers, theater companies and musicians) meet to network, perform and book groups for upcoming performances.

My primary question is how can the Internet be used by both presenters and performance groups to facilitate and improve the booking process? In addition, I'd like to explore whether the Internet can be a substitute for presenter conferences that take place around the country.

My Answers

- As things stand today, most dance companies do a poor job of using their websites to help presenters learn about their companies, performances and programs. Dance companies would greatly help their efforts to get more bookings if they added a "Booking" section to their website that provided clear and comprehensive background about their offerings to presenters. This section of a dance company's website should definitely include good quality video clips so that presenters can quickly see examples of your performances and related work.

- Organizers of presenter conferences/events - both those serving regional and national constituencies - should consider upgrading their online pre-event scheduling and screening tools to help presenters hone in on those acts that are likely to be the best fit for what they are looking for. For example, if presenters could search for specific types of performance groups prior to an event and watch video clips of these selected groups, they could make better use of the limited time that they spend at an event.

- The Internet will emerge as an important medium for bringing presenters and dance companies together once a much larger number of performance groups post multimedia content (primarily video) that shows examples of their offerings. In addition, new search engine strategies will need to be implemented so that presenters can search for performance groups across multiple websites and video sharing sites.

- In order to book groups that are likely to attract the largest audiences, presenters will embrace event-focused social networking sites where likely audience members share their preferences for various performance groups. In other words, presenters will begin to work more closely with actual ticket buyers to help decide which groups to book.

- As mobile Internet devices continue to proliferate and video quality for small screens makes dramatic improvements, presenters will have real-time access to a parallel virtual resource as they meet with dance companies and watch live showcases. To give a personal example, when I'm engaged in a conversation about a movie or book, I'm often using Google on my Internet-enabled cell phone to look up director names and authors. Essentially like millions of other people, I'm having a real-time conversation and simultaneously access a parallel virtual resource to access specific types of information. So the same scenario will soon apply at presenter events. Presenters will be watching a live showcase of a dance company while using their mobile devices to access online videos and other content about this same dance company. This type of multitasking may drive some people crazy, but it is definitely where we are heading.

Can the Internet Substitute for Presenter Conferences

And to answer my second question about whether the Internet will be a substitute for presenter conferences: my answer is no and yes. In one sense, there is no substitute for face-to-face encounters. Presenters are booking acts to perform live on stage. So the best way to evaluate a group is to see them perform live. A video is nice, but a dance company could do ten takes before getting a performance right. So presenters want to see the real thing with their own eyes.

At the same time, the importance of the Internet - especially the availability of performance video clips - cannot be overlooked. Presenters can:

- Find and evaluate specific types of dance companies more quickly than ever before

- Identify the interests of audiences through social networking sites (essentially this is a low cost approach to conducting both qualitative and quantitative research that one day may prove to be quite accurate)

- Conduct extensive pre-conference research to evaluate possible groups before attending a presenter conference, and

- Have access to a real-time, parallel virtual resource of high-quality videos via a new generation of mobile devices.

There are also two additional factors that will make the Internet an invaluable tool for dance companies seeking more bookings (which means all dance companies):

- Traditional presenters are not the only organizations that book dancers. With the growth of product placements - partly due to our TiVo-obsessed culture where more and more people ignore commercials - dance may become an ideal way to promote a broad range of consumer products. And,

- It is likely that new forms of revenue-generating distribution options will emerge for dance performances, dance-focused TV shows and dance instruction as broadband, IPTV, file sharing and mobile video continues to expand the market for high-quality video.

Upcoming Post: Background, Resources and Examples

The above is a summary of research I've been conducting about how the Internet may transform how presenters evaluate and book performance groups.

In an upcoming post (probably once I get back from APAP), I'll provide background about how I reached my conclusions, related websites and applications that are worth exploring, and specific examples of existing online resources that bring presenters and performance groups together.

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