Marketeer, So Confusing Sometimes To Be A Marketeer

The Mobius marketing team recently attended this year's Arts Marketing Association conference which was held in the creative cultural hub of Brighton. We recently shared some reflections on this year's conference from Lucy Jamieson, the AMA Head of Programme, which you can read here if you missed it.

Following on from Lucy's blog about the AMA conference, as part of her Brat girl summer, our Marketing Account Manager Beatrice has shared her fifteen take away tracks from a fantastic few days of all things arts marketing.

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The theme of this year’s conference was “Be Bold, Be Brave” (we could have easily had “Be Brat” added on for our powerful rule of threes...). Through a series of carefully cultivated keynote speakers, industry-led workshops and an exhibition of different organisations, it really did feel as if all angles were covered by the AMA. Whether you were a solo freelancer, a small events space or one of the largest museums in the country, there truly was something for everybody to learn and share.

Club Classics

The conference kicked off with a big dollop of motivation, infectious energy (plus some nostalgic video footage!) from Rikki Beadle-Blair. Straight away, we were challenged to rethink our practice; these aren’t our pieces of art we’re marketing, and they don’t even belong to artists we work with. At the core of every interaction, Beadle-Blair encouraged us to tether it back to the individual audience member. When we release a piece of art, a play or a track from Brat, it belongs to the spectator. Although this might seem obvious, for me this was an important reminder to keep our work focused on the audience to encourage individuals to engage with art.

Sympathy is a knife

Right now, working in arts marketing can be challenging. Amongst the cost-of-living crisis, we are arguably still navigating post-pandemic life and becoming familiar with audience booking patterns. Meta constantly changes how they prioritise posts; TikTok trends move at an unfathomable rate; people leave then rejoin X on the daily. Sometimes, being in a room of people who understand these frustrations is refreshing, uplifting and helpful.

I might say something stupid

For me, one of the first day’s most useful talks came from The Young Vic’s Florence Bell. Did you mean to post that? covered all the peaks and troughs of navigating your online presence as a company. Bell encouraged us to think about our tone of voice, channel our creativity and, once again, be bold to stand out in a saturated online landscape.

Talk talk

The AMA conference offers a chance for those working in different roles a chance to connect, network and “talk-talk-talk”... Attendees range from those working inhouse in galleries and theatres to graphic designers, ticketing specialists and marketing agencies like Mobius. This variety leads to many interesting conversations about the cultural landscape we find ourselves in. Plus, where better to learn about exciting projects you wouldn’t have heard about before?!

Von dutch

The most badass track on the album for the most badass speaker. Being encouraged to embrace and utilise our vulnerabilities, not just in our personal lives but also in our working roles was a vital takeaway from keynote speaker Jane Cordell. Cordell performatively and emotively shared her experiences of being dismissed from a role due to being deaf, and how she has channelled her disability into a superpower.

Everything is romantic

One of the most memorable parts of the conference, undoubtedly came at 10pm on Thursday 4th July. The exit poll came in and together in a beachfront bar, the conference attendees discovered…

Rewind

…that the country has decided to rewind to a Labour government. Throughout the whole first day there had been mutterings of ‘perhaps things might be different tomorrow?!’ Whatever your political persuasion, sharing the first morning of a new government (and those nerve-wracking vote re-counts!) with a roomful of people working in the same industry was a special experience.

So I

Moving onto our second day of talks, Rambert’s former Director of Audiences Jo Taylor thoroughly engaged us with her musings on how to interact with and build upon fan culture… Featuring some of the biggest laughs out loud of the entire conference, her stories amused and inspired us in equal measure.

Girl, so confusing

More fantastic pearls of wisdom came from the incredibly entertaining Sam Freeman in his talk I Can’t See The Wood for the Trees, all about to maximise your analysis of audience data and metrics. Freeman managed to make the driest (and scariest!) of subjects not only witty but extremely lucid, offering us practical advice aplenty about how to understand and keep building audiences.

Apple

Although I didn’t eat any apples, I did have samosas, carrot cake, pasta, Greek salad and had a lot of ginger beer and coffee. Top marks as always for lunches, AMA.

B2b

Breathing new life into social media presence is something we can all relate to finding difficult. However, thanks to Louise Cohen’s excellent 12 steps to getting out of a social media rut, we learned simple measures we can take to maximise our engagement, analyse results and how to experiment with new ideas. Both my colleague and I left feeling inspired and motivated to crack on with a host of ideas…

(n/b Juliet was very disappointed not to win One Further’s shark-cat.)

Mean girls

It would be an entirely mean girl move of me to not mention (and thank) Jonny Goode from Blast Theory and their talk What Audiences Want (and how to give it to them). Indeed, Jonny used the example of incorporating Brat into a recent campaign which, as you can tell, went straight to this millennial gal’s heart inspiring this piece.

I think about it all the time

On the train home, much like Lucy Jamieson I reflected on learnings from the AMA conference. Being bold and brave is something that is often challenging to bring into work. Through this year’s conference I felt inspired and invigorated to incorporate creativity, humour and personality to my work. Perhaps this blog, an ode to Charli XCX as much as the AMA, is the first step in this.

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Thanks for a great few days AMA. See you in (approx.) 365 days.

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