May 30, 2024 • 25 mins
Audience behavior has changed significantly over the past few years, and pre-pandemic benchmarks are all but obsolete. If we want to adjust to the demands of today’s market, we need updated markers for success.
Enter: CI’s brand-new Cultural Compass study. We pulled from our own bank of campaign data that spans over 150 client organizations to uncover the latest digital marketing benchmarks and emerging trends for our industry. In this episode, lead researcher and Senior Consultant Ali Blount discusses the biggest surprises in her analysis of more than 7,000 digital campaigns, and previews key findings to inform your FY25 media planning.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
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Treat yourself to a ticket atcapacityinteractivebootcamp.com.
Hello there, arts aficionados!Welcome back to CI to Eye. Now,
(01:12):
one of the questions we hear mostoften from arts marketers is:
how do my campaign resultscompare to those of my peers?
We all want to know how everyone else isdoing, and it's an excellent question,
especially since pre-pandemic benchmarksare all but obsolete right now.
Audience behavior has changedso much over the past few years,
and if we want to adjust tothe demands of today's market,
(01:32):
we need updated markers for success.
And if you've beenlistening to the podcast,
you know by now that we are relentless,
proud data nerds. A lack of measurementjust doesn't sit right with us.
So the CI team put together a study basedon our own bank of campaign data for
over 150 client organizationsto uncover brand new digital
(01:54):
marketing benchmarks andemerging trends for our industry.
It's called Cultural Compass.And in today's episode,
we'll preview some of the most impactfulfindings before it's officially
released to the public.That's right, spoilers ahead.
I'll sit down with Senior ConsultantAli Blount to discuss the study's
parameters, the biggestsurprises in her data analysis,
(02:15):
and a few key findings to helpinform your FY25 media planning.
Shall we dive in?
I'm here with SeniorConsultant Ali Blount,
one of my favorite people to have onthe podcast and lead researcher for CI's
(02:35):
brand new Cultural Compass study. Ali,say hello to your many, many fans.
All three of them.
All three of them.
All three of them, my childrenand my husband. Hello.
I'm very excited to be here.
So CI used to release an artsindustry benchmark study,
and this looked at the state of digitalmarketing practices in the arts.
(02:56):
So how is Cultural Compass different?
So in some ways it's a 2.0 version,
and in some ways it'sa completely new study.
It's adjacent to thoseother studies that we ran,
but also a completely new set of questionsand things that we're looking at.
We actually looked at the datathat we have at our fingertips.
So all of the campaigns that we runfor our clients throughout the years,
(03:19):
we analyzed that data to come up withlots of different conclusions to kind of
see what's happening in the worldtoday... in the digital marketing world.
And there's been definitely a lot ofchanges in the industry over the last few
years. I'm sure people on thepodcast are sick of us saying, "Well,
the industry has changed somuch over the last few years!
Unprecedented changes!" But it does feellike now would be a good time to look
(03:41):
at how we approachdigital marketing, right?
Yes.
And that's the reason that we reallychose right now to be the time that we're
like, okay, we're doing this,we're studying this data.
We are emerging from the pandemic-whateverphase of the pandemic we're in,
who knows. But whatever phase we're in,
we're at a point whereaudiences really have settled.
The audience behavior changed throughout,
(04:02):
and now we're at a point where it'slike we're in that new routine.
We have things like AI andmachine learning on the rise.
We have new platforms like TikTok andSpotify that a couple years ago were brand
new and now they also have kind ofsettled and they're not going anywhere,
and we have a bettersense of that landscape.
So it feels like we're at thisreally big watershed moment,
and that's why we were like,okay, this is the moment.
(04:23):
This is where we want to be answeringall of these questions and making sure
that we're studying this data to reallypush us forward into what the next level
of digital marketingis going to look like.
Yeah, I think whenever abig study like this happens,
it's interesting to think about whatquestions the study is trying to answer.
So what were we looking at when wewere originally creating this study?
(04:47):
So the idea for this kind of camebecause constantly our clients are asking
us, how do I compare to my peers?I am a museum and I want to know,
what are other museums in myarea doing? Or I'm a theater,
what are other theatersdoing? Or whatever.
So we were really curious to actuallybe able to answer those questions.
So the big one was just generally,
(05:08):
what can I learn from my peers in theindustry that can help really guide my own
organization's growth?And then from there,
we really took it in a tonof different directions.
How does my media spend compare?
How can I diversify acrossother digital channels?
What can I learn from other organizationsin my region, my budget size,
(05:29):
my genre?
Yeah, I think knowing what your peersare doing is such a valuable way of
measuring your own performance.
And it can be so insular when you're atan organization because you're just in
the day-to-day,
and you don't often think about what'severyone else doing and what can I do
differently?
And especially with all the changes thathave happened recently in the last few
(05:50):
years, things have goneup, things have gone down,
but you want to see if that'severyone, not just yourself, right?
Yeah.
It's really because typically whenclients ask us these kinds of questions,
often our answer is like, okay, wellyou want to benchmark against yourself.
If you're a theater in the Northeast,
you don't necessarily expect that you'regoing to perform the same as other
theaters in the Northeastfor various reasons.
(06:10):
Even just programming can affectit, everything can affect it.
But that being said,
there are definitely some big questionswhere it would be really helpful and
interesting to know howyour peers are performing.
Thinking even about something likebudget where you're looking at, okay,
well what percentage of my budgetam I spending on Meta versus Google?
How much should I be spending?
Just having a sense of what your peersare doing I think is helpful to guide
(06:32):
you.
Maybe you are spending a lot less thanthem and you could and should be spending
more. Some people might be pushedto their max and that's fine.
But I think it's interesting to be ableto compare and tweak and see if there
are best practices that you're not kindof living up to and maybe figure out how
you can.
And seeing what you areoutperforming, as well.
Seeing what you're doing really welland might want to lean into even more.
(06:55):
Oh yeah. To be able to invest.
If you're really crushingit in the video category,
maybe you want to amp that upand spend even more on video.
Yeah. So you mentioned we pulled fromclients' campaign data for this study,
so we must have a bunch of data.
What kind of organizations are representedand what were some of the parameters?
What did we look at?
Yeah, so I was super excitedby the response to this.
(07:15):
I was very nervous when we started askingfor client permission because I was
like, how many are we going to get?
And we ended up getting 152 organizationsto agree for us to study their data,
which is incredible. It's a muchbetter response than I ever expected.
And those are organizationsacross the US and Canada,
and they are across every genre andorganization size and all of that.
So we have the organization size brokendown into three buckets. So small,
(07:40):
medium, large. Small being5 million budget or less,
or under 5 million. Mediumis 5 million to 14.9 million.
And then large organizationshave a budget of 15 million plus.
So we're really havingeverybody represented.
I think any organizationlistening to this,
you'll find your peersrepresented in this study,
(08:00):
especially because we had a massivepool of data, which was exciting.
We also looked at a full calendaryear, which was really important to me.
I wanted to make sure that we couldstudy things like seasonality,
things like holiday programming.So we looked at last year, so 2023,
January 1st to December 31st.
So this is a huge, huge study. Andas you were digging through the data,
(08:22):
what jumped out to you? Whatfindings surprised you the most?
A lot of things did,
which was really awesome that weended up finding a lot of things.
One that was really interesting was howorganization size played into things,
looking at large versussmall organizations.
And there are somethings that are expected.
(08:42):
Large organizations have largerbudgets, and in many cases,
of course they're going tohave better performance.
We saw a lot of higher ROIs and higherpurchase conversion rates and things like
that.
But what I thought was really interestingis that smaller organizations actually
can still hold their own and doso by spending a lot less than
medium and large size organizations.
(09:05):
The area that we really saw thiswas with video, interestingly.
So small organizations had the secondhighest video rates behind medium
size,
and large organizations actually hadthe lowest video view rates any way we
sliced it,
which was really surprising because youthink that a large organization has a
ton of money to pourinto video production,
(09:26):
so naturally their videos must bethe best and performing the best,
and it was the opposite of that, thatthey actually have the lowest rates.
So it was really interesting.
Yeah. Why is that, do you think?
Is it because smaller organizationscan generate a greater volume of
content for their size, or is it...
I always think about the scrappiness-ina good way-of smaller organizations.
(09:49):
About being able to just make thecontent without going through levels of
approval.
I think that's exactly it.
I think that one of the most interestingmetrics that we found was that for
video view rate in particular,
larger organizations actually hadthe lowest video view rates and small
organizations had much, muchhigher video view rates.
(10:09):
And I think you kind of hit the nail onthe head that a smaller organization is
going to be more nimble,
so maybe they don't have the abilityto produce this very expensive video,
but perhaps they can produce somethingthat's really relevant and fun and
engaging and interesting.
Perhaps that's using a trending audioor something that's very topical.
So I think that they actually in manyways can produce better content on less
(10:33):
budget,
which we saw because we saw stronger videoview rates for smaller organizations.
I think the last two bootcamps we've done,
we've had people talking about TikTok andthey emphasized how important it is to
follow these trends and just make thevideo and put it up there without worrying
too much about if it's perfect.
(10:54):
On the platform is better thanperfect and not on the platform.
100%.
So I've worked at larger organizationsand I've seen what it's like to get lots
of approvals and it can take a while,
and that's just notsomething that works as well.
When you're looking at contentcreation, at the end of the day,
you need to make reallycompelling content,
and you can't always do that if you'rewaiting two weeks to be able to get it
(11:16):
approved. And I don't mean todisparage large organizations,
they obviously still perform verywell, they all are doing great.
They're large for a reason.
But just small organizations, Iwouldn't want them to be like, oh,
we don't have a budget to produce things.
I want to give some hope there that youcan still make incredible content and
see incredible campaign results even ifyou don't have a lot of budget and a lot
(11:39):
of staff and things like that.
You just need to make incredible contentthat is tailored to your specific
audience.
And no matter what sizeorganization you are,
there's always wins thatyou can have regardless,
like branded campaigns for search.
You can run branded campaignsregardless of your organization size.
And like you said, it's suchan easy win because I mean,
(12:01):
my personal recommendation is thatanybody, any organization, size, type,
should be running a brandedsearch campaign year round,
and we saw the resultsreally supported that.
So that's a huge win that anybody can do.
Things like shifting some money to Google,
which I definitely want to talkabout, can be a really easy one too.
So obviously size of an organizationcan make a big difference,
(12:22):
but we also looked intodifferent genres as well.
We did, yeah, we looked atevery genre within the arts.
For ease of interpreting results,we broke it down into two buckets.
So we had exhibition,exhibit-based organizations, museums and things like that.
And then we had performing artskind of all lumped together,
and we did see some interesting results.
(12:44):
One thing that was fascinating to me isthat the exhibition-based organizations
saw stronger engagementrates for their Meta posts,
and one theory we have behindthat is that the exhibition based
organizations do a really good jobat representing what it's like to
actually visit the organization.In a lot of these posts,
(13:05):
you can really see when you go to visitthe museum, you know what it's like.
You're looking at whatever exhibitor whatever the entrance is.
That's really part of thepost, just inherently.
Whereas performing arts posts tend tofocus a little bit more on the art itself,
which is... there's nothing wrongwith that, that's really important.
People need to know whatthey're going to go see,
(13:26):
but the thing that's really missing iswhat that experience is going to be like,
which is often what gets people outof the door and out of their house,
is what the whole experienceis, not just the art itself.
So I think that that's something thatperforming arts organizations can learn
from the exhibit-based,
is really [to] focus on the full picturefrom A to Z as opposed to just the
middle section where you'reactually seeing the show.
(13:49):
Yeah, capturing that excitement ofgoing into a theater I think is...
Every time I go in and I get my seat andflick through the playbill and pretend
to read it-.
I read it! Always. It doesn't surpriseme that you're not a playbill reader.
No, my wife is. Shecollects all the playbills.
Well, she's better than you.
Yeah, yeah. Well, in every way.Yeah, definitely. And yeah,
I mean capturing the sort ofmagic as you walk into a theater,
(14:12):
I always get so excited in mybelly when I walk into a theater.
In your belly?
Yeah, I feel like a kind of,
almost like butterflies a little bitwhenever I walk into a big theater or even
a little theater, to be honest.It is just exciting to sit down.
And capturing that inside an adI think is a really strong move.
Oh yeah. When you said littletheater, it just made me think,
(14:34):
I took my kids to see The Little Mermaidat a very tiny theater this weekend,
and it was my daughter's first show.She's two, and she did amazing.
She sat quietly the entire time,
but I'm going to fully admit that I criedwhen we walked in and they were both
looking around at the theaterand it was just so sweet,
and they were so excited,
and I fully cried at The LittleMermaid because I was just like,
(14:56):
this is just such anexperience and a moment.
It was just so exciting for themto witness this live amazing thing.
Yeah, I mean, little theaters,
there's something magical and scrappyand fun about a little tiny theater.
I do improv every two weeks in alittle 30-seat theater, and it's tiny,
but that packed out ismagical when people are
(15:19):
jammed in. So a tiny theater,
that's an experience that you can'tnecessarily replicate in a lot of bigger
venues.
Do you get jam-packedcrowds for your improv...?
Oh, we actually do! We're doing all right.Yeah, we do. We've been selling out.
Not in the past...
I'm happy for you.
I've done the EdinburghFringe a few times.
I've definitely had light audiencesof just one or two people before.
(15:41):
It's more intimate.
Yes. Yeah. What a diplomaticway of putting that.
What about the other way?
Is there anything that you thinkexhibit-based organizations can learn from
performance-based organizations?
Yes.
The performing arts organizationssaw much stronger video rates.
So video view rates were a lothigher for performing arts,
and our reason for that is theyjust tend to be more dynamic,
(16:05):
which is not fair to exhibit-basedorganizations. Of course,
visual art is inherently kind of static.
There are very few visual artsexhibits that are moving and dynamic.
That happens, but not always.
Whereas performing arts is very dynamicand that makes a more dynamic video,
just like inherently. So thosevideos tend to perform a lot better.
(16:27):
So I think that's somethingthat exhibition-based organizations could work on is
making sure that their video contentin particular is really dynamic.
It's a great reminder of just creatingcompelling content in general.
And you also researched ideal videolength for these paid campaigns, right?
Yeah, so we've talked a lot about video,
and I think that one of the big questionsthat I certainly always get from my
(16:48):
clients, I'm sure every single consultantat CI gets from their clients, is:
what is the best video length?
And I hate to give an answer to thatbecause ultimately the answer is the best
video length is making a video that isstrong and compelling and wonderful with
the time that you need. But if wewant to put an answer behind it,
which people do...
Such a consultant answer right there.
(17:10):
I know. But if we're going toput an actual number behind it,
we really did see spikes atone to two minutes. One to two,
and between those were when we sawa lot of spikes in all the metrics:
engagement rate, video viewrate, page view rate, et cetera.
So I hate to say it, but there was asweet spot there of one to two minutes,
although we still also did see strongresults with videos across the spectrum.
(17:32):
So all that to say is,if you're making a video,
use the amount of timethat you need to use.
If you need to make a five minute videoand that's the best way to tell your
story, then do it. We saw plenty of fiveminute videos that had amazing results,
but if you don't need a five minute video,
then maybe try to edit itdown to 60 seconds or so.
(17:53):
I think a lot of listeners are deep intothe FY25 strategic planning stage of
the year, and as they put mediaplans together for the next season,
what do you think are some of the biggestopportunities according to this data?
There are a lot. I think theone that I'm most excited about,
just because it was honestly kind of wildas I kept doing the data analysis and
kept seeing the results come in,is Q3. So July through September,
(18:17):
we see a ton of opportunity there.
It was very interesting becauseorganizations spend the least.
We looked at media spend for each quarter,
and the lowest media spend wasin Q3. But on the flip side,
all of the other metrics were betterin Q3. So CPA, cost per acquisition,
was at its lowest in Q3. CPM,
(18:39):
effectively how much we're spendingon these ads, was at its lowest in Q3.
Page view rates were highest in Q3,purchase rates were highest in Q3.
So it's this interesting thing wherenobody's spending there as much,
but the people who are spending areseeing the best results of the year.
I think many organizationsare dark in the summer months.
It runs from September to May.
(19:00):
And so we think naturally asmarketers we're like, well,
we're not selling anything. Let'sturn off the tap and save some money.
But that's not always the bestuse of our time and money.
No, it really isn't. Kind of out of sight,
out of mind where if you're not running,
then by the time you start up again andyou have tickets on sale or programming
starting, you might notbe top of mind for people.
(19:23):
So I think this is a huge opportunityto make sure that at the very least that
you have a branded campaign running.If not, if you're selling tickets,
if your on-sale is then, makesure you have an on-sale campaign.
If you are starting actual performances,have a single ticket campaign.
And there's lots of options there thatyou can be doing with those types of
campaigns, but just have something going.
What are some other ways you canchange up your marketing mix?
(19:46):
You mentioned prioritizing Google as well,
which we've alreadychatted about a little bit.
Yeah,
so one of the interesting things that wefound is that people tended throughout
2023 to invest more in Meta.The split was roughly...
Looking at Meta and Google specifically,the split was roughly like 60-40 ish,
give or take, and that makessense. Meta has incredible results,
(20:06):
and the one thing we found though isthat we are seeing really strong results
recently from Google.
Google has really done a lot ofinvestment in their dynamic ads and their
machine learning to make sure that theircampaigns are going to perform really
well, and we're seeing that play out.
We saw crazy high results fora lot of Google campaigns.
So we're not necessarily saying,
(20:27):
take all of your Metamoney and put it in Google.
That's not what I want people to do.
Meta is still really important andit still does really, really well,
but if there are ways to make sure thatyou can shift a little to Google or just
make sure you have a presence on Google,
that is definitely somethingwe're recommending. Like I said,
people aren't spending there as much.
I'm sure many organizationshave no Google budget,
so just explore that and tap into Googleand really try to spend a little bit
(20:50):
there if you can.
I think that becomes a little easier whenwe think about things like Performance
Max and Demand Gen campaigns,which are performing really,
really well at the moment.
They are. That was one of the mostinteresting takeaways I think,
was how well Performance Max is doing.
What is Performance Max just so we can,because it is a weird concept, right?
So Performance Max is basicallyletting you tap into all of the Google
(21:13):
inventory. So you run your one ad,you give Google all of your assets,
so like your copy, your imagery, whichcould be video ads and static images,
and you put it all in there,
and then they're going to serve outthe best possible ad combination.
So they're going to piece those together.
Best possible ad combination for eachperson on the best possible placement for
each person, which is kind ofwhere that interesting twist is.
(21:34):
So you can tap into Gmail and YouTube andall the different places from this one
campaign.
It's a little bit of a black hole becauseyou're trusting the Google algorithm
and you're not telling it,
"I want to serve X amount of impressionson YouTube" or anything like that.
I will fully admit that I was askeptic when it was first announced.
I have a tendency to nottrust the machines and AI...
(21:58):
You've learned well fromsci-fi films, I feel.
I sure have.
But especially coming out of this studyand seeing just how high the results are
for Performance Max, I am truly converted.
I've been telling all my clients that weneed to run-and we have-that we need to
run on Performance Max. Sounsurprisingly, for Google,
paid search was the top.
It was performing the highest for anymetric, you name it. Paid search wins,
(22:22):
which makes sense. Of coursewe would expect that. But next,
in pretty much every case-I don't thinkthere was ever a metric that this wasn't
true-next was Performance Max,
and then there was some various mix withthe next three of Display, Demand Gen,
and YouTube. But the toptwo by far, solidified,
were paid Search and Performance Max,
(22:42):
and I thought that was really interestingbecause there are very few people who
actually are runningPerformance Max campaigns,
so it's a huge opportunity for people toshift their budget to be running there.
Also,
keeping in mind that you needto be running paid search when you run Performance
Max, just as an FYI.
Yeah,
so all of this informationis super helpful and I think a really good preview of
(23:03):
the Cultural Compass findings.
When is this coming out andwhere can people find it?
So it's going to be releasedin June on CI's website,
so you can go there to findit when it's published.
If you're not already on CI's list,
I highly recommend signing up for ouremails so that you can be one of the first
to know when it actually gets published.
And it's a huge study.
(23:26):
How's the best way to approach thisstudy, and what can we take from it?
I think that the main thing that-when Istarted this study and the research for
it, I really wanted to makesure that it was actionable.
That was my number one goalhere was whatever the results are, whatever we have,
I want to make sure that people can readthis and that they can take action from
it and apply the findings.
There's nothing worse than having a bunchof data and then just thinking, cool!
(23:49):
And not doing anything with it.
Especially because we are in this workall the time and we have a tendency to be
really in the weeds,
and I wanted to make sure that we'rezooming out and making sure that anybody
reading this is going to understand theresults and also know what to take away
from them. So for every piece of data,
for every metric and benchmarkand question that we answer,
we have an explanation of whatit's actually saying and showing,
(24:13):
and then we also have ourCI recommendations for every single piece of data.
So it's like, what if you aremeeting this benchmark or not?
What could you be doing? Here'sthe big takeaway from this.
All those kinds of things are in thereto make sure that you can really take
action and apply this to your nextseason and beyond as you plan.
Yeah,
I'm really excited for clients to diginto this and see all the work that you've
(24:37):
done in this study. I thinkit's such a useful resource,
especially as we're planningthe next year for marketing.
So thank you so much for joining us andtalking through the Cultural Compass.
Thanks for having me, as always.
(24:59):
Thank you for listening to CI to Eye.
This episode was edited and produced byKaren McConarty and co-written by Karen
McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss.
Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CIto Eye's designers and video editors,
and all work together tocreate CI's digital content.
Our music is by whoisuzo. Ifyou enjoyed today's episode,
(25:20):
please take a moment torate us or leave a review.
A nice comment goes a long way in helpingother people discover CI to Eye and
hear from experts in the arts and beyond.If you didn't enjoy today's episode,
pass it on to all of your enemies.Don't forget to follow us on Facebook,
Instagram, LinkedIn, andYouTube for regular content to help you market smarter.
(25:40):
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please click the subscribe buttonwherever you get your podcasts.
Until next time, stay nerdy.
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Hello there, arts aficionados!Welcome back to CI to Eye. Now,
(01:12):
one of the questions we hear mostoften from arts marketers is:
how do my campaign resultscompare to those of my peers?
We all want to know how everyone else isdoing, and it's an excellent question,
especially since pre-pandemic benchmarksare all but obsolete right now.
Audience behavior has changedso much over the past few years,
and if we want to adjust tothe demands of today's market,
(01:32):
we need updated markers for success.
And if you've beenlistening to the podcast,
you know by now that we are relentless,
proud data nerds. A lack of measurementjust doesn't sit right with us.
So the CI team put together a study basedon our own bank of campaign data for
over 150 client organizationsto uncover brand new digital
(01:54):
marketing benchmarks andemerging trends for our industry.
It's called Cultural Compass.And in today's episode,
we'll preview some of the most impactfulfindings before it's officially
released to the public.That's right, spoilers ahead.
I'll sit down with Senior ConsultantAli Blount to discuss the study's
parameters, the biggestsurprises in her data analysis,
(02:15):
and a few key findings to helpinform your FY25 media planning.
Shall we dive in?
I'm here with SeniorConsultant Ali Blount,
one of my favorite people to have onthe podcast and lead researcher for CI's
(02:35):
brand new Cultural Compass study. Ali,say hello to your many, many fans.
All three of them.
All three of them.
All three of them, my childrenand my husband. Hello.
I'm very excited to be here.
So CI used to release an artsindustry benchmark study,
and this looked at the state of digitalmarketing practices in the arts.
(02:56):
So how is Cultural Compass different?
So in some ways it's a 2.0 version,
and in some ways it'sa completely new study.
It's adjacent to thoseother studies that we ran,
but also a completely new set of questionsand things that we're looking at.
We actually looked at the datathat we have at our fingertips.
So all of the campaigns that we runfor our clients throughout the years,
(03:19):
we analyzed that data to come up withlots of different conclusions to kind of
see what's happening in the worldtoday... in the digital marketing world.
And there's been definitely a lot ofchanges in the industry over the last few
years. I'm sure people on thepodcast are sick of us saying, "Well,
the industry has changed somuch over the last few years!
Unprecedented changes!" But it does feellike now would be a good time to look
(03:41):
at how we approachdigital marketing, right?
Yes.
And that's the reason that we reallychose right now to be the time that we're
like, okay, we're doing this,we're studying this data.
We are emerging from the pandemic-whateverphase of the pandemic we're in,
who knows. But whatever phase we're in,
we're at a point whereaudiences really have settled.
The audience behavior changed throughout,
(04:02):
and now we're at a point where it'slike we're in that new routine.
We have things like AI andmachine learning on the rise.
We have new platforms like TikTok andSpotify that a couple years ago were brand
new and now they also have kind ofsettled and they're not going anywhere,
and we have a bettersense of that landscape.
So it feels like we're at thisreally big watershed moment,
and that's why we were like,okay, this is the moment.
(04:23):
This is where we want to be answeringall of these questions and making sure
that we're studying this data to reallypush us forward into what the next level
of digital marketingis going to look like.
Yeah, I think whenever abig study like this happens,
it's interesting to think about whatquestions the study is trying to answer.
So what were we looking at when wewere originally creating this study?
(04:47):
So the idea for this kind of camebecause constantly our clients are asking
us, how do I compare to my peers?I am a museum and I want to know,
what are other museums in myarea doing? Or I'm a theater,
what are other theatersdoing? Or whatever.
So we were really curious to actuallybe able to answer those questions.
So the big one was just generally,
(05:08):
what can I learn from my peers in theindustry that can help really guide my own
organization's growth?And then from there,
we really took it in a tonof different directions.
How does my media spend compare?
How can I diversify acrossother digital channels?
What can I learn from other organizationsin my region, my budget size,
(05:29):
my genre?
Yeah, I think knowing what your peersare doing is such a valuable way of
measuring your own performance.
And it can be so insular when you're atan organization because you're just in
the day-to-day,
and you don't often think about what'severyone else doing and what can I do
differently?
And especially with all the changes thathave happened recently in the last few
(05:50):
years, things have goneup, things have gone down,
but you want to see if that'severyone, not just yourself, right?
Yeah.
It's really because typically whenclients ask us these kinds of questions,
often our answer is like, okay, wellyou want to benchmark against yourself.
If you're a theater in the Northeast,
you don't necessarily expect that you'regoing to perform the same as other
theaters in the Northeastfor various reasons.
(06:10):
Even just programming can affectit, everything can affect it.
But that being said,
there are definitely some big questionswhere it would be really helpful and
interesting to know howyour peers are performing.
Thinking even about something likebudget where you're looking at, okay,
well what percentage of my budgetam I spending on Meta versus Google?
How much should I be spending?
Just having a sense of what your peersare doing I think is helpful to guide
(06:32):
you.
Maybe you are spending a lot less thanthem and you could and should be spending
more. Some people might be pushedto their max and that's fine.
But I think it's interesting to be ableto compare and tweak and see if there
are best practices that you're not kindof living up to and maybe figure out how
you can.
And seeing what you areoutperforming, as well.
Seeing what you're doing really welland might want to lean into even more.
(06:55):
Oh yeah. To be able to invest.
If you're really crushingit in the video category,
maybe you want to amp that upand spend even more on video.
Yeah. So you mentioned we pulled fromclients' campaign data for this study,
so we must have a bunch of data.
What kind of organizations are representedand what were some of the parameters?
What did we look at?
Yeah, so I was super excitedby the response to this.
(07:15):
I was very nervous when we started askingfor client permission because I was
like, how many are we going to get?
And we ended up getting 152 organizationsto agree for us to study their data,
which is incredible. It's a muchbetter response than I ever expected.
And those are organizationsacross the US and Canada,
and they are across every genre andorganization size and all of that.
So we have the organization size brokendown into three buckets. So small,
(07:40):
medium, large. Small being5 million budget or less,
or under 5 million. Mediumis 5 million to 14.9 million.
And then large organizationshave a budget of 15 million plus.
So we're really havingeverybody represented.
I think any organizationlistening to this,
you'll find your peersrepresented in this study,
(08:00):
especially because we had a massivepool of data, which was exciting.
We also looked at a full calendaryear, which was really important to me.
I wanted to make sure that we couldstudy things like seasonality,
things like holiday programming.So we looked at last year, so 2023,
January 1st to December 31st.
So this is a huge, huge study. Andas you were digging through the data,
(08:22):
what jumped out to you? Whatfindings surprised you the most?
A lot of things did,
which was really awesome that weended up finding a lot of things.
One that was really interesting was howorganization size played into things,
looking at large versussmall organizations.
And there are somethings that are expected.
(08:42):
Large organizations have largerbudgets, and in many cases,
of course they're going tohave better performance.
We saw a lot of higher ROIs and higherpurchase conversion rates and things like
that.
But what I thought was really interestingis that smaller organizations actually
can still hold their own and doso by spending a lot less than
medium and large size organizations.
(09:05):
The area that we really saw thiswas with video, interestingly.
So small organizations had the secondhighest video rates behind medium
size,
and large organizations actually hadthe lowest video view rates any way we
sliced it,
which was really surprising because youthink that a large organization has a
ton of money to pourinto video production,
(09:26):
so naturally their videos must bethe best and performing the best,
and it was the opposite of that, thatthey actually have the lowest rates.
So it was really interesting.
Yeah. Why is that, do you think?
Is it because smaller organizationscan generate a greater volume of
content for their size, or is it...
I always think about the scrappiness-ina good way-of smaller organizations.
(09:49):
About being able to just make thecontent without going through levels of
approval.
I think that's exactly it.
I think that one of the most interestingmetrics that we found was that for
video view rate in particular,
larger organizations actually hadthe lowest video view rates and small
organizations had much, muchhigher video view rates.
(10:09):
And I think you kind of hit the nail onthe head that a smaller organization is
going to be more nimble,
so maybe they don't have the abilityto produce this very expensive video,
but perhaps they can produce somethingthat's really relevant and fun and
engaging and interesting.
Perhaps that's using a trending audioor something that's very topical.
So I think that they actually in manyways can produce better content on less
(10:33):
budget,
which we saw because we saw stronger videoview rates for smaller organizations.
I think the last two bootcamps we've done,
we've had people talking about TikTok andthey emphasized how important it is to
follow these trends and just make thevideo and put it up there without worrying
too much about if it's perfect.
(10:54):
On the platform is better thanperfect and not on the platform.
100%.
So I've worked at larger organizationsand I've seen what it's like to get lots
of approvals and it can take a while,
and that's just notsomething that works as well.
When you're looking at contentcreation, at the end of the day,
you need to make reallycompelling content,
and you can't always do that if you'rewaiting two weeks to be able to get it
(11:16):
approved. And I don't mean todisparage large organizations,
they obviously still perform verywell, they all are doing great.
They're large for a reason.
But just small organizations, Iwouldn't want them to be like, oh,
we don't have a budget to produce things.
I want to give some hope there that youcan still make incredible content and
see incredible campaign results even ifyou don't have a lot of budget and a lot
(11:39):
of staff and things like that.
You just need to make incredible contentthat is tailored to your specific
audience.
And no matter what sizeorganization you are,
there's always wins thatyou can have regardless,
like branded campaigns for search.
You can run branded campaignsregardless of your organization size.
And like you said, it's suchan easy win because I mean,
(12:01):
my personal recommendation is thatanybody, any organization, size, type,
should be running a brandedsearch campaign year round,
and we saw the resultsreally supported that.
So that's a huge win that anybody can do.
Things like shifting some money to Google,
which I definitely want to talkabout, can be a really easy one too.
So obviously size of an organizationcan make a big difference,
(12:22):
but we also looked intodifferent genres as well.
We did, yeah, we looked atevery genre within the arts.
For ease of interpreting results,we broke it down into two buckets.
So we had exhibition,exhibit-based organizations, museums and things like that.
And then we had performing artskind of all lumped together,
and we did see some interesting results.
(12:44):
One thing that was fascinating to me isthat the exhibition-based organizations
saw stronger engagementrates for their Meta posts,
and one theory we have behindthat is that the exhibition based
organizations do a really good jobat representing what it's like to
actually visit the organization.In a lot of these posts,
(13:05):
you can really see when you go to visitthe museum, you know what it's like.
You're looking at whatever exhibitor whatever the entrance is.
That's really part of thepost, just inherently.
Whereas performing arts posts tend tofocus a little bit more on the art itself,
which is... there's nothing wrongwith that, that's really important.
People need to know whatthey're going to go see,
(13:26):
but the thing that's really missing iswhat that experience is going to be like,
which is often what gets people outof the door and out of their house,
is what the whole experienceis, not just the art itself.
So I think that that's something thatperforming arts organizations can learn
from the exhibit-based,
is really [to] focus on the full picturefrom A to Z as opposed to just the
middle section where you'reactually seeing the show.
(13:49):
Yeah, capturing that excitement ofgoing into a theater I think is...
Every time I go in and I get my seat andflick through the playbill and pretend
to read it-.
I read it! Always. It doesn't surpriseme that you're not a playbill reader.
No, my wife is. Shecollects all the playbills.
Well, she's better than you.
Yeah, yeah. Well, in every way.Yeah, definitely. And yeah,
I mean capturing the sort ofmagic as you walk into a theater,
(14:12):
I always get so excited in mybelly when I walk into a theater.
In your belly?
Yeah, I feel like a kind of,
almost like butterflies a little bitwhenever I walk into a big theater or even
a little theater, to be honest.It is just exciting to sit down.
And capturing that inside an adI think is a really strong move.
Oh yeah. When you said littletheater, it just made me think,
(14:34):
I took my kids to see The Little Mermaidat a very tiny theater this weekend,
and it was my daughter's first show.She's two, and she did amazing.
She sat quietly the entire time,
but I'm going to fully admit that I criedwhen we walked in and they were both
looking around at the theaterand it was just so sweet,
and they were so excited,
and I fully cried at The LittleMermaid because I was just like,
(14:56):
this is just such anexperience and a moment.
It was just so exciting for themto witness this live amazing thing.
Yeah, I mean, little theaters,
there's something magical and scrappyand fun about a little tiny theater.
I do improv every two weeks in alittle 30-seat theater, and it's tiny,
but that packed out ismagical when people are
(15:19):
jammed in. So a tiny theater,
that's an experience that you can'tnecessarily replicate in a lot of bigger
venues.
Do you get jam-packedcrowds for your improv...?
Oh, we actually do! We're doing all right.Yeah, we do. We've been selling out.
Not in the past...
I'm happy for you.
I've done the EdinburghFringe a few times.
I've definitely had light audiencesof just one or two people before.
(15:41):
It's more intimate.
Yes. Yeah. What a diplomaticway of putting that.
What about the other way?
Is there anything that you thinkexhibit-based organizations can learn from
performance-based organizations?
Yes.
The performing arts organizationssaw much stronger video rates.
So video view rates were a lothigher for performing arts,
and our reason for that is theyjust tend to be more dynamic,
(16:05):
which is not fair to exhibit-basedorganizations. Of course,
visual art is inherently kind of static.
There are very few visual artsexhibits that are moving and dynamic.
That happens, but not always.
Whereas performing arts is very dynamicand that makes a more dynamic video,
just like inherently. So thosevideos tend to perform a lot better.
(16:27):
So I think that's somethingthat exhibition-based organizations could work on is
making sure that their video contentin particular is really dynamic.
It's a great reminder of just creatingcompelling content in general.
And you also researched ideal videolength for these paid campaigns, right?
Yeah, so we've talked a lot about video,
and I think that one of the big questionsthat I certainly always get from my
(16:48):
clients, I'm sure every single consultantat CI gets from their clients, is:
what is the best video length?
And I hate to give an answer to thatbecause ultimately the answer is the best
video length is making a video that isstrong and compelling and wonderful with
the time that you need. But if wewant to put an answer behind it,
which people do...
Such a consultant answer right there.
(17:10):
I know. But if we're going toput an actual number behind it,
we really did see spikes atone to two minutes. One to two,
and between those were when we sawa lot of spikes in all the metrics:
engagement rate, video viewrate, page view rate, et cetera.
So I hate to say it, but there was asweet spot there of one to two minutes,
although we still also did see strongresults with videos across the spectrum.
(17:32):
So all that to say is,if you're making a video,
use the amount of timethat you need to use.
If you need to make a five minute videoand that's the best way to tell your
story, then do it. We saw plenty of fiveminute videos that had amazing results,
but if you don't need a five minute video,
then maybe try to edit itdown to 60 seconds or so.
(17:53):
I think a lot of listeners are deep intothe FY25 strategic planning stage of
the year, and as they put mediaplans together for the next season,
what do you think are some of the biggestopportunities according to this data?
There are a lot. I think theone that I'm most excited about,
just because it was honestly kind of wildas I kept doing the data analysis and
kept seeing the results come in,is Q3. So July through September,
(18:17):
we see a ton of opportunity there.
It was very interesting becauseorganizations spend the least.
We looked at media spend for each quarter,
and the lowest media spend wasin Q3. But on the flip side,
all of the other metrics were betterin Q3. So CPA, cost per acquisition,
was at its lowest in Q3. CPM,
(18:39):
effectively how much we're spendingon these ads, was at its lowest in Q3.
Page view rates were highest in Q3,purchase rates were highest in Q3.
So it's this interesting thing wherenobody's spending there as much,
but the people who are spending areseeing the best results of the year.
I think many organizationsare dark in the summer months.
It runs from September to May.
(19:00):
And so we think naturally asmarketers we're like, well,
we're not selling anything. Let'sturn off the tap and save some money.
But that's not always the bestuse of our time and money.
No, it really isn't. Kind of out of sight,
out of mind where if you're not running,
then by the time you start up again andyou have tickets on sale or programming
starting, you might notbe top of mind for people.
(19:23):
So I think this is a huge opportunityto make sure that at the very least that
you have a branded campaign running.If not, if you're selling tickets,
if your on-sale is then, makesure you have an on-sale campaign.
If you are starting actual performances,have a single ticket campaign.
And there's lots of options there thatyou can be doing with those types of
campaigns, but just have something going.
What are some other ways you canchange up your marketing mix?
(19:46):
You mentioned prioritizing Google as well,
which we've alreadychatted about a little bit.
Yeah,
so one of the interesting things that wefound is that people tended throughout
2023 to invest more in Meta.The split was roughly...
Looking at Meta and Google specifically,the split was roughly like 60-40 ish,
give or take, and that makessense. Meta has incredible results,
(20:06):
and the one thing we found though isthat we are seeing really strong results
recently from Google.
Google has really done a lot ofinvestment in their dynamic ads and their
machine learning to make sure that theircampaigns are going to perform really
well, and we're seeing that play out.
We saw crazy high results fora lot of Google campaigns.
So we're not necessarily saying,
(20:27):
take all of your Metamoney and put it in Google.
That's not what I want people to do.
Meta is still really important andit still does really, really well,
but if there are ways to make sure thatyou can shift a little to Google or just
make sure you have a presence on Google,
that is definitely somethingwe're recommending. Like I said,
people aren't spending there as much.
I'm sure many organizationshave no Google budget,
so just explore that and tap into Googleand really try to spend a little bit
(20:50):
there if you can.
I think that becomes a little easier whenwe think about things like Performance
Max and Demand Gen campaigns,which are performing really,
really well at the moment.
They are. That was one of the mostinteresting takeaways I think,
was how well Performance Max is doing.
What is Performance Max just so we can,because it is a weird concept, right?
So Performance Max is basicallyletting you tap into all of the Google
(21:13):
inventory. So you run your one ad,you give Google all of your assets,
so like your copy, your imagery, whichcould be video ads and static images,
and you put it all in there,
and then they're going to serve outthe best possible ad combination.
So they're going to piece those together.
Best possible ad combination for eachperson on the best possible placement for
each person, which is kind ofwhere that interesting twist is.
(21:34):
So you can tap into Gmail and YouTube andall the different places from this one
campaign.
It's a little bit of a black hole becauseyou're trusting the Google algorithm
and you're not telling it,
"I want to serve X amount of impressionson YouTube" or anything like that.
I will fully admit that I was askeptic when it was first announced.
I have a tendency to nottrust the machines and AI...
(21:58):
You've learned well fromsci-fi films, I feel.
I sure have.
But especially coming out of this studyand seeing just how high the results are
for Performance Max, I am truly converted.
I've been telling all my clients that weneed to run-and we have-that we need to
run on Performance Max. Sounsurprisingly, for Google,
paid search was the top.
It was performing the highest for anymetric, you name it. Paid search wins,
(22:22):
which makes sense. Of coursewe would expect that. But next,
in pretty much every case-I don't thinkthere was ever a metric that this wasn't
true-next was Performance Max,
and then there was some various mix withthe next three of Display, Demand Gen,
and YouTube. But the toptwo by far, solidified,
were paid Search and Performance Max,
(22:42):
and I thought that was really interestingbecause there are very few people who
actually are runningPerformance Max campaigns,
so it's a huge opportunity for people toshift their budget to be running there.
Also,
keeping in mind that you needto be running paid search when you run Performance
Max, just as an FYI.
Yeah,
so all of this informationis super helpful and I think a really good preview of
(23:03):
the Cultural Compass findings.
When is this coming out andwhere can people find it?
So it's going to be releasedin June on CI's website,
so you can go there to findit when it's published.
If you're not already on CI's list,
I highly recommend signing up for ouremails so that you can be one of the first
to know when it actually gets published.
And it's a huge study.
(23:26):
How's the best way to approach thisstudy, and what can we take from it?
I think that the main thing that-when Istarted this study and the research for
it, I really wanted to makesure that it was actionable.
That was my number one goalhere was whatever the results are, whatever we have,
I want to make sure that people can readthis and that they can take action from
it and apply the findings.
There's nothing worse than having a bunchof data and then just thinking, cool!
(23:49):
And not doing anything with it.
Especially because we are in this workall the time and we have a tendency to be
really in the weeds,
and I wanted to make sure that we'rezooming out and making sure that anybody
reading this is going to understand theresults and also know what to take away
from them. So for every piece of data,
for every metric and benchmarkand question that we answer,
we have an explanation of whatit's actually saying and showing,
(24:13):
and then we also have ourCI recommendations for every single piece of data.
So it's like, what if you aremeeting this benchmark or not?
What could you be doing? Here'sthe big takeaway from this.
All those kinds of things are in thereto make sure that you can really take
action and apply this to your nextseason and beyond as you plan.
Yeah,
I'm really excited for clients to diginto this and see all the work that you've
(24:37):
done in this study. I thinkit's such a useful resource,
especially as we're planningthe next year for marketing.
So thank you so much for joining us andtalking through the Cultural Compass.
Thanks for having me, as always.
(24:59):
Thank you for listening to CI to Eye.
This episode was edited and produced byKaren McConarty and co-written by Karen
McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss.
Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CIto Eye's designers and video editors,
and all work together tocreate CI's digital content.
Our music is by whoisuzo. Ifyou enjoyed today's episode,
(25:20):
please take a moment torate us or leave a review.
A nice comment goes a long way in helpingother people discover CI to Eye and
hear from experts in the arts and beyond.If you didn't enjoy today's episode,
pass it on to all of your enemies.Don't forget to follow us on Facebook,
Instagram, LinkedIn, andYouTube for regular content to help you market smarter.
(25:40):
You can also sign up for our newsletterat capacityinteractive.com so you never
miss an update. And ifyou haven't already,
please click the subscribe buttonwherever you get your podcasts.
Until next time, stay nerdy.
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