The pure stopping power of great, unexpected creative can go a long way to help sway an audience in any campaign. This is particularly true when an audience's neutral or even negative preconceived notions of what you are offering might otherwise prompt them to ignore your message. In example after example, some of that creative can even go viral.
In opera, preconceived notions cast a constant shadow over purchase consideration for new audiences. A brilliant campaign like the “Doctor Opera” series from Lyric Opera of Chicago, developed in partnership with The Second City, helped audiences in Chicago realize that you didn’t have to take yourself too seriously to go to the opera - and that the situations in many operas were actually fun. If you like to laugh, you might just like going to the opera.
Entire art forms may carry preconceived notions, but so can specific titles. So, for a short case study on re-framing a message with content that had unique stopping power, I’m going to reach back a decade to a project at the Alliance Theatre. Try to remember January, 2009 with me. It was a time before video content dominated most viral online experiences (at the time 24 hours of video were uploaded every minute to YouTube, ten years later, depending on your source, that number has exploded to 300 - 400 hours of video uploaded per minute). It was a time when Evite still dominated the online invitation market - and when we were listening to music on our ipods rather than Pandora or Spotify. Even Apple’s “App Store” was barely six months old. It was at that moment, too, that the flagship regional theater for the Southeast (the Alliance Theatre) was preparing to produce something that had never been done before: all-new orchestrations and vocal arrangements for a classic musical, turning a show that had always been a rock musical into a gospel musical instead. The production was Jesus Christ Superstar GOSPEL.
Original production show artwork, Jesus Christ Superstar Gospel.
To make the project possible, the Alliance got the green light for to do something that had never been done before happened (and has never happened since). Andrew Lloyd Weber agreed to let another composer (Louis St. Louis) adapt his music in a new style. The production was going to be one of the largest in the company’s history, larger than even its pre-Broadway world premiere of The Color Purple, with a cast of close to 50 performers, including a chorus of 27 gospel singers hand-picked from church choirs across the Atlanta region.
As brilliant of an idea as the production was (and as excellent a production as it proved to be, thanks to the direction of the Alliance’s Artistic Director Susan Booth and performances from artists like Darius de Haas as Jesus, Darryl Jovan Williams as Judas, Eric Jordan Young as Herod, and Destan Owens as Pilate), there was were some inherent potential challenges with audience engagement in this musical and theatrical mash up. People who knew and loved JCS loved a rock musical. They had no reason to be enthusiastic about a production that would sound nothing like what they were used to. And people who loved gospel music assumed they knew JCS - and they knew it as a show with a musical vocabulary that wasn’t their cup of tea. Plus, the production had an almost exclusively African-American cast (with the choir recruited from some of the city's best church choirs), yet to more conservative African-American church-goers, there were aspects of JCS (particularly the implied relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene) that might be considered blasphemy.
To ensure that the production could be the hit that it deserved to be, something had to be done both to help traditionalists become enthusiastic about hearing the musical as a gospel celebration and to help gospel lovers connect with a piece that they assumed wasn’t musically in their wheelhouse.
At the time, the Alliance was working with one of the nation’s leading creative agencies, BBDO, so in trying to approach this problem, we had excellent thought partners. The more we explored the idea together, the more we kept coming back to one central idea that could unify a message between both audiences whose preconceived notions we were trying to dismantle: “Everything sounds better with gospel.”
That message helped the musical theater traditionalists get past the idea that someone had “tinkered with” the score to a musical they loved. It wasn’t that JCS needed an update. Rather, there was a universal truth we were communicating about a particular style of music. If your day-to-day life could be more uplifting and more joyful as a result of gospel music, then why couldn’t JCS also be better with it?
For existing gospel lovers, this central message became a way to reinforce something they already believed. By communicating a primary message that already resonated with them, they would pay attention to the secondary message of the campaign, which was that Jesus Christ Superstar also sounded better with gospel. So, if you believe the primary message, why wouldn’t you consider that secondary one?
Having alignment around a central unified idea was step one. The next step was to put that idea into action. It became clear quickly that to validate this proposition for a skeptic, we would need proof: we had to hear some actual music. But what music? How would we get that music out to people? And why would they want to listen to it? Very big ideas were thrown around, including:
Install listening stations at key locations with high pedestrian traffic.
Campaign local radio stations whose formats didn’t usually include gospel to play music from the show on air.
Get celebrities involved to sing gospel music or to create an endorsement campaign.
In the end, practical budgetary, licensing, and rehearsal concerns won the day. The campaign needed to start long before the production would even begin rehearsals. So, getting high quality music from the show early enough anywhere (on the radio, in a transit station, etc.) was a no go. Plus, a lot of those very big ideas towed the line between using the music for promotional purposes and using it for commercial purposes - another major complicating factor.
The decision (a relatively daring one in 2009) was made to pursue a path that would have the lowest overhead cost: make the campaign entirely digital. Toby Past was leading the digital team at BBDO Atlanta at the time. Once we decided to go digital, our brainstorming with him and his team narrowed its focus. Taking a page from Evite and Hallmark’s eCards (which were very much the rage at the time) and singing telegrams of yore, a concept was developed that could help people experience the central idea “Everything sounds better with gospel,” point people to this new musical in Atlanta, and make it easy for those excited by the message to share it with others. The concept was Gospelgrams.
Gospelgrams had a relatively short life - they were tied to one specific project with a six-week run in one city. But, from tracking their reach and sales impact, even in their short life, they moved quite a few needles. Here was the basic concept:
The Alliance shares a link to the Gospelgrams microsite, which lived as a standalone site separate from the Alliance Theater’s website. The microsite would have very limited Alliance Theater branding. (The Alliance was simply a sponsor of the microsite.) The link is shared with people in the theater’s existing database and through social media channels (think Facebook and early Twitter - there weren’t that many others in 2009).
Once you visit the microsite, you have the ability to send a musical e-card. Two dozen or so e-cards were available, ranging from the expected (happy birthday, happy new year, happy anniversary, etc.) to the absurd (there are donuts in the break room, we should start seeing other people, etc.). To send the e-card, you provide your email address (to get a confirmation it was sent) and the email address of the recipient (since the e-card was sent as an email). In the fine print, you agree that any email address you enter will be added to the Alliance’s email mailing list. The microsite itself looked a little cheesy (think old school jibjab videos) to help make clear it wasn’t taking itself too seriously.
The recipient gets their gospelgram in their inbox. When they click on the link to view the card, the sender gets a notification. Once they’ve viewed the e-card, they have the opportunity to send more to friends of their own.
Screenshot from the Gospelgram microsite, care of Toby Past.
By today’s standards it was something of viral click bait. But the reason it worked was the content itself.
Knowing the barriers that came with the timing of rehearsals, none of the music in the gospel-grams was actually music from Jesus Christ Superstar Gospel. Instead, the melodies were popular melodies from traditional gospel or spiritual music that you might hear at a revival or a mega-church. Think of tunes like “Oh Happy Day,” “Precious Lord Take My Hand,” “When the Saints Come Marching In,” or “Balm in Gilead.” The melodies (all in the public domain!) were given new lyrics to celebrate these real and completely off-beat occasions.
An easy partnership between great colleagues in artistic, production, and marketing made it possible to arrange recordings of all two dozen pieces of music in a single 4-hour studio session. Since many of the principal artists were New York-based, we opted to work with available members of the 27-person gospel choir that would be in the show. They already knew the melodies and were well-experienced in improvising harmonies from their home churches, so bringing them together in studio for the recording session led to a boisterous evening of performances full of life, joy, and the exuberant fun we were hoping to communicate in the campaign.
In the end, thousands of people experienced Gospelgrams over a three month period. (I wish I still had the exact number ten years later!) The campaign wasn’t explosive in the way that 2007’s Evolution of Dance video had been (at the time, one of the most watched and shared videos on YouTube). However, since we had all of the senders and recipients’ email addresses, we were able to trace the shares of the campaign generation-by-generation (i.e., how many initial recipients of a Gospelgram shared it with someone else, and how many people it was then shared with shared it further). At its peak, Gospelgrams achieved eight generations of sharing from a single initial message. One can only imagine in a world where sharing is as easy as a Facebook post and no longer requires opening emails and keying in friends’ email addresses how much more sharing we’d see today!
We were also able to track engagement back to the Alliance. At the bottom of every Gospelgram was a message that said “Brought to you by the Alliance Theatre’s Jesus Christ Superstar Gospel” with the production’s run dates and a link back to the production on our website. The percentage of new audiences at the Alliance who came to JCS who had also received a Gospelgram was statistically significant. Thankfully much of BBDO’s time was given pro bono to the project, so it was easy for the effort to have strong, positive ROI. Were one to track the continued engagement of those new audiences at JCS on future productions at the Alliance ten years later, the impact would certainly be even more substantial.
The Last Supper from Jesus Christ Superstar Gospel. Photo: Greg Mooney
What made the campaign work? Among other things, it was moderately disruptive. It brought gospel music directly into your home or your office in a way you wouldn’t expect it. And the disruption was fun and enjoyable. It was something that you actually wanted to share because of its novelty. But, it also effectively delivered the message we needed it to: “Everything sounds better with gospel.” It successfully combatted the idea that gospel wasn’t for you, because if you listened, you laughed, and you sent it on to another friend, obviously gospel music was for you. And if it could be for you in your cubicle, there was no reason why it also couldn’t be for you in our theater.
What are the ways in which you could re-frame your message at your organization to combat the pre-conceived notions your community has about modern dance, Baroque music, opera, or jazz? Maybe you don’t need a jazz-gram, but you may need something that disrupts people’s pre-conceived notions enough that they actually can become open to your message. There are a million ways to accomplish that; it’s just a matter of figuring out what’s right for your organization.
A lot has changed in our world since 2009, but share-ability and the desire to include our friends and loved ones in funny things that go viral has only grown. As I think about the #tenyearchallenge that obsessed Instagram and Facebook in January 2019, I wonder what Gospelgrams would look like today - or if there is an industry out there waiting to take this idea to a new generation, with more seamless sharing integration, better graphics than 64-bits, and a broader scope than just one project in just one city. (You no longer need to hit forward and type in a whole of email addresses to forward something interesting to people you know, after all. It’s as easy as just clicking “share” after all. In another ten years we probably won’t even need to do that!) I’d love to share a Rodgers and Hammerstein-gram, a rockabilly-gram, a blues-gram, or an opera-gram if they existed. Wouldn’t you?