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1:07

Hello there, arts aficionados! Welcome back to CI to Eye. Now,

1:12

one of the questions we hear most often from arts marketers is:

1:16

how do my campaign results compare to those of my peers?

1:19

We all want to know how everyone else is doing, and it's an excellent question,

1:23

especially since pre-pandemic benchmarks are all but obsolete right now.

1:26

Audience behavior has changed so much over the past few years,

1:30

and if we want to adjust to the demands of today's market,

1:32

we need updated markers for success.

1:35

And if you've been listening to the podcast, you know by now that we are relentless,

1:39

proud data nerds. A lack of measurement just doesn't sit right with us.

1:44

So the CI team put together a study based on our own bank of campaign data for

1:49

over 150 client organizations to uncover brand new digital

1:54

marketing benchmarks and emerging trends for our industry.

1:58

It's called Cultural Compass. And in today's episode,

2:01

we'll preview some of the most impactful findings before it's officially

2:05

released to the public. That's right, spoilers ahead.

2:08

I'll sit down with Senior Consultant Ali Blount to discuss the study's

2:12

parameters, the biggest surprises in her data analysis,

2:15

and a few key findings to help inform your FY25 media planning.

2:20

Shall we dive in? I'm here with Senior Consultant Ali Blount,

2:31

one of my favorite people to have on the podcast and lead researcher for CI's

2:35

brand new Cultural Compass study. Ali, say hello to your many, many fans.

2:40

All three of them. All three of them.

2:43

All three of them, my children and my husband. Hello.

2:46

I'm very excited to be here. So CI used to release an arts industry benchmark study,

2:53

and this looked at the state of digital marketing practices in the arts.

2:56

So how is Cultural Compass different?

2:59

So in some ways it's a 2.0 version,

3:01

and in some ways it's a completely new study.

3:03

It's adjacent to those other studies that we ran,

3:07

but also a completely new set of questions and things that we're looking at.

3:12

We actually looked at the data that we have at our fingertips.

3:15

So all of the campaigns that we run for our clients throughout the years,

3:19

we analyzed that data to come up with lots of different conclusions to kind of

3:22

see what's happening in the world today... in the digital marketing world.

3:28

And there's been definitely a lot of changes in the industry over the last few

3:31

years. I'm sure people on the podcast are sick of us saying, "Well,

3:34

the industry has changed so much over the last few years!

3:37

Unprecedented changes!" But it does feel like now would be a good time to look

3:41

at how we approach digital marketing, right?

3:43

Yes. And that's the reason that we really chose right now to be the time that we're

3:47

like, okay, we're doing this, we're studying this data.

3:50

We are emerging from the pandemic-whatever phase of the pandemic we're in,

3:53

who knows. But whatever phase we're in,

3:56

we're at a point where audiences really have settled.

4:00

The audience behavior changed throughout, and now we're at a point where it's like we're in that new routine.

4:05

We have things like AI and machine learning on the rise.

4:08

We have new platforms like TikTok and Spotify that a couple years ago were brand

4:13

new and now they also have kind of settled and they're not going anywhere,

4:16

and we have a better sense of that landscape. So it feels like we're at this really big watershed moment,

4:21

and that's why we were like, okay, this is the moment.

4:23

This is where we want to be answering all of these questions and making sure

4:28

that we're studying this data to really push us forward into what the next level

4:33

of digital marketing is going to look like.

4:36

Yeah, I think whenever a big study like this happens,

4:38

it's interesting to think about what questions the study is trying to answer.

4:43

So what were we looking at when we were originally creating this study?

4:47

So the idea for this kind of came because constantly our clients are asking

4:52

us, how do I compare to my peers? I am a museum and I want to know,

4:57

what are other museums in my area doing? Or I'm a theater,

5:00

what are other theaters doing? Or whatever. So we were really curious to actually be able to answer those questions.

5:06

So the big one was just generally, what can I learn from my peers in the industry that can help really guide my own

5:13

organization's growth? And then from there,

5:15

we really took it in a ton of different directions.

5:18

How does my media spend compare?

5:20

How can I diversify across other digital channels?

5:24

What can I learn from other organizations in my region, my budget size,

5:29

my genre? Yeah, I think knowing what your peers are doing is such a valuable way of

5:35

measuring your own performance.

5:38

And it can be so insular when you're at an organization because you're just in

5:41

the day-to-day, and you don't often think about what's everyone else doing and what can I do

5:45

differently? And especially with all the changes that have happened recently in the last few

5:50

years, things have gone up, things have gone down,

5:53

but you want to see if that's everyone, not just yourself, right?

5:56

Yeah. It's really because typically when clients ask us these kinds of questions,

6:00

often our answer is like, okay, well you want to benchmark against yourself.

6:03

If you're a theater in the Northeast, you don't necessarily expect that you're going to perform the same as other

6:08

theaters in the Northeast for various reasons.

6:10

Even just programming can affect it, everything can affect it.

6:13

But that being said, there are definitely some big questions where it would be really helpful and

6:18

interesting to know how your peers are performing.

6:21

Thinking even about something like budget where you're looking at, okay,

6:24

well what percentage of my budget am I spending on Meta versus Google?

6:27

How much should I be spending? Just having a sense of what your peers are doing I think is helpful to guide

6:32

you. Maybe you are spending a lot less than them and you could and should be spending

6:37

more. Some people might be pushed to their max and that's fine.

6:39

But I think it's interesting to be able to compare and tweak and see if there

6:43

are best practices that you're not kind of living up to and maybe figure out how

6:47

you can. And seeing what you are outperforming, as well.

6:50

Seeing what you're doing really well and might want to lean into even more.

6:55

Oh yeah. To be able to invest. If you're really crushing it in the video category,

6:59

maybe you want to amp that up and spend even more on video.

7:01

Yeah. So you mentioned we pulled from clients' campaign data for this study,

7:05

so we must have a bunch of data. What kind of organizations are represented and what were some of the parameters?

7:11

What did we look at? Yeah, so I was super excited by the response to this.

7:15

I was very nervous when we started asking for client permission because I was

7:18

like, how many are we going to get? And we ended up getting 152 organizations to agree for us to study their data,

7:24

which is incredible. It's a much better response than I ever expected.

7:27

And those are organizations across the US and Canada,

7:30

and they are across every genre and organization size and all of that.

7:35

So we have the organization size broken down into three buckets. So small,

7:40

medium, large. Small being 5 million budget or less,

7:44

or under 5 million. Medium is 5 million to 14.9 million.

7:48

And then large organizations have a budget of 15 million plus.

7:52

So we're really having everybody represented.

7:54

I think any organization listening to this,

7:57

you'll find your peers represented in this study,

8:00

especially because we had a massive pool of data, which was exciting.

8:04

We also looked at a full calendar year, which was really important to me.

8:08

I wanted to make sure that we could study things like seasonality,

8:11

things like holiday programming. So we looked at last year, so 2023,

8:15

January 1st to December 31st.

8:19

So this is a huge, huge study. And as you were digging through the data,

8:22

what jumped out to you? What findings surprised you the most?

8:26

A lot of things did, which was really awesome that we ended up finding a lot of things.

8:31

One that was really interesting was how organization size played into things,

8:36

looking at large versus small organizations.

8:39

And there are some things that are expected. Large organizations have larger budgets, and in many cases,

8:46

of course they're going to have better performance. We saw a lot of higher ROIs and higher purchase conversion rates and things like

8:52

that. But what I thought was really interesting is that smaller organizations actually

8:57

can still hold their own and do so by spending a lot less than

9:02

medium and large size organizations.

9:05

The area that we really saw this was with video, interestingly.

9:09

So small organizations had the second highest video rates behind medium

9:13

size, and large organizations actually had the lowest video view rates any way we

9:19

sliced it, which was really surprising because you think that a large organization has a

9:23

ton of money to pour into video production,

9:26

so naturally their videos must be the best and performing the best,

9:29

and it was the opposite of that, that they actually have the lowest rates.

9:33

So it was really interesting. Yeah. Why is that, do you think?

9:37

Is it because smaller organizations can generate a greater volume of

9:42

content for their size, or is it... I always think about the scrappiness-in a good way-of smaller organizations.

9:49

About being able to just make the content without going through levels of

9:53

approval. I think that's exactly it.

9:56

I think that one of the most interesting metrics that we found was that for

10:00

video view rate in particular, larger organizations actually had the lowest video view rates and small

10:07

organizations had much, much higher video view rates.

10:09

And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head that a smaller organization is

10:13

going to be more nimble, so maybe they don't have the ability to produce this very expensive video,

10:19

but perhaps they can produce something that's really relevant and fun and

10:23

engaging and interesting. Perhaps that's using a trending audio or something that's very topical.

10:29

So I think that they actually in many ways can produce better content on less

10:33

budget, which we saw because we saw stronger video view rates for smaller organizations.

10:38

I think the last two bootcamps we've done,

10:42

we've had people talking about TikTok and they emphasized how important it is to

10:46

follow these trends and just make the video and put it up there without worrying

10:51

too much about if it's perfect. On the platform is better than perfect and not on the platform.

10:57

100%. So I've worked at larger organizations and I've seen what it's like to get lots

11:02

of approvals and it can take a while, and that's just not something that works as well.

11:06

When you're looking at content creation, at the end of the day,

11:09

you need to make really compelling content,

11:12

and you can't always do that if you're waiting two weeks to be able to get it

11:16

approved. And I don't mean to disparage large organizations,

11:20

they obviously still perform very well, they all are doing great.

11:23

They're large for a reason. But just small organizations, I wouldn't want them to be like, oh,

11:30

we don't have a budget to produce things. I want to give some hope there that you can still make incredible content and

11:35

see incredible campaign results even if you don't have a lot of budget and a lot

11:39

of staff and things like that. You just need to make incredible content that is tailored to your specific

11:44

audience. And no matter what size organization you are,

11:48

there's always wins that you can have regardless,

11:50

like branded campaigns for search.

11:54

You can run branded campaigns regardless of your organization size.

11:57

And like you said, it's such an easy win because I mean,

12:01

my personal recommendation is that anybody, any organization, size, type,

12:04

should be running a branded search campaign year round,

12:07

and we saw the results really supported that.

12:09

So that's a huge win that anybody can do. Things like shifting some money to Google,

12:14

which I definitely want to talk about, can be a really easy one too.

12:19

So obviously size of an organization can make a big difference,

12:22

but we also looked into different genres as well.

12:25

We did, yeah, we looked at every genre within the arts.

12:29

For ease of interpreting results, we broke it down into two buckets.

12:33

So we had exhibition, exhibit-based organizations, museums and things like that.

12:37

And then we had performing arts kind of all lumped together,

12:40

and we did see some interesting results.

12:44

One thing that was fascinating to me is that the exhibition-based organizations

12:48

saw stronger engagement rates for their Meta posts,

12:52

and one theory we have behind that is that the exhibition based

12:56

organizations do a really good job at representing what it's like to

13:01

actually visit the organization. In a lot of these posts,

13:05

you can really see when you go to visit the museum, you know what it's like.

13:09

You're looking at whatever exhibit or whatever the entrance is.

13:13

That's really part of the post, just inherently.

13:16

Whereas performing arts posts tend to focus a little bit more on the art itself,

13:21

which is... there's nothing wrong with that, that's really important.

13:24

People need to know what they're going to go see,

13:26

but the thing that's really missing is what that experience is going to be like,

13:30

which is often what gets people out of the door and out of their house,

13:34

is what the whole experience is, not just the art itself.

13:37

So I think that that's something that performing arts organizations can learn

13:40

from the exhibit-based, is really [to] focus on the full picture from A to Z as opposed to just the

13:46

middle section where you're actually seeing the show.

13:49

Yeah, capturing that excitement of going into a theater I think is...

13:53

Every time I go in and I get my seat and flick through the playbill and pretend

13:56

to read it-. I read it! Always. It doesn't surprise me that you're not a playbill reader.

14:00

No, my wife is. She collects all the playbills.

14:04

Well, she's better than you. Yeah, yeah. Well, in every way. Yeah, definitely. And yeah,

14:08

I mean capturing the sort of magic as you walk into a theater,

14:12

I always get so excited in my belly when I walk into a theater.

14:16

In your belly? Yeah, I feel like a kind of,

14:19

almost like butterflies a little bit whenever I walk into a big theater or even

14:23

a little theater, to be honest. It is just exciting to sit down.

14:27

And capturing that inside an ad I think is a really strong move.

14:31

Oh yeah. When you said little theater, it just made me think,

14:34

I took my kids to see The Little Mermaid at a very tiny theater this weekend,

14:39

and it was my daughter's first show. She's two, and she did amazing.

14:41

She sat quietly the entire time, but I'm going to fully admit that I cried when we walked in and they were both

14:48

looking around at the theater and it was just so sweet,

14:50

and they were so excited, and I fully cried at The Little Mermaid because I was just like,

14:56

this is just such an experience and a moment.

14:58

It was just so exciting for them to witness this live amazing thing.

15:03

Yeah, I mean, little theaters, there's something magical and scrappy and fun about a little tiny theater.

15:09

I do improv every two weeks in a little 30-seat theater, and it's tiny,

15:14

but that packed out is magical when people are

15:19

jammed in. So a tiny theater,

15:22

that's an experience that you can't necessarily replicate in a lot of bigger

15:26

venues. Do you get jam-packed crowds for your improv...?

15:29

Oh, we actually do! We're doing all right. Yeah, we do. We've been selling out.

15:33

Not in the past... I'm happy for you. I've done the Edinburgh Fringe a few times.

15:36

I've definitely had light audiences of just one or two people before.

15:41

It's more intimate. Yes. Yeah. What a diplomatic way of putting that.

15:47

What about the other way? Is there anything that you think exhibit-based organizations can learn from

15:51

performance-based organizations? Yes.

15:54

The performing arts organizations saw much stronger video rates.

15:58

So video view rates were a lot higher for performing arts,

16:01

and our reason for that is they just tend to be more dynamic,

16:05

which is not fair to exhibit-based organizations. Of course,

16:08

visual art is inherently kind of static.

16:12

There are very few visual arts exhibits that are moving and dynamic.

16:16

That happens, but not always. Whereas performing arts is very dynamic and that makes a more dynamic video,

16:22

just like inherently. So those videos tend to perform a lot better.

16:27

So I think that's something that exhibition-based organizations could work on is

16:30

making sure that their video content in particular is really dynamic.

16:34

It's a great reminder of just creating compelling content in general.

16:38

And you also researched ideal video length for these paid campaigns, right?

16:42

Yeah, so we've talked a lot about video,

16:45

and I think that one of the big questions that I certainly always get from my

16:48

clients, I'm sure every single consultant at CI gets from their clients, is:

16:51

what is the best video length? And I hate to give an answer to that because ultimately the answer is the best

16:58

video length is making a video that is strong and compelling and wonderful with

17:02

the time that you need. But if we want to put an answer behind it,

17:05

which people do... Such a consultant answer right there. I know. But if we're going to put an actual number behind it,

17:11

we really did see spikes at one to two minutes. One to two,

17:16

and between those were when we saw a lot of spikes in all the metrics:

17:20

engagement rate, video view rate, page view rate, et cetera.

17:23

So I hate to say it, but there was a sweet spot there of one to two minutes,

17:28

although we still also did see strong results with videos across the spectrum.

17:32

So all that to say is, if you're making a video,

17:36

use the amount of time that you need to use. If you need to make a five minute video and that's the best way to tell your

17:41

story, then do it. We saw plenty of five minute videos that had amazing results,

17:46

but if you don't need a five minute video,

17:48

then maybe try to edit it down to 60 seconds or so.

17:53

I think a lot of listeners are deep into the FY25 strategic planning stage of

17:58

the year, and as they put media plans together for the next season,

18:01

what do you think are some of the biggest opportunities according to this data?

18:05

There are a lot. I think the one that I'm most excited about,

18:08

just because it was honestly kind of wild as I kept doing the data analysis and

18:12

kept seeing the results come in, is Q3. So July through September,

18:17

we see a ton of opportunity there.

18:20

It was very interesting because organizations spend the least.

18:24

We looked at media spend for each quarter,

18:27

and the lowest media spend was in Q3. But on the flip side,

18:30

all of the other metrics were better in Q3. So CPA, cost per acquisition,

18:35

was at its lowest in Q3. CPM,

18:39

effectively how much we're spending on these ads, was at its lowest in Q3.

18:43

Page view rates were highest in Q3, purchase rates were highest in Q3.

18:48

So it's this interesting thing where nobody's spending there as much,

18:51

but the people who are spending are seeing the best results of the year.

18:55

I think many organizations are dark in the summer months.

18:58

It runs from September to May. And so we think naturally as marketers we're like, well,

19:04

we're not selling anything. Let's turn off the tap and save some money.

19:07

But that's not always the best use of our time and money.

19:11

No, it really isn't. Kind of out of sight,

19:13

out of mind where if you're not running,

19:15

then by the time you start up again and you have tickets on sale or programming

19:20

starting, you might not be top of mind for people.

19:23

So I think this is a huge opportunity to make sure that at the very least that

19:26

you have a branded campaign running. If not, if you're selling tickets,

19:30

if your on-sale is then, make sure you have an on-sale campaign.

19:33

If you are starting actual performances, have a single ticket campaign.

19:37

And there's lots of options there that you can be doing with those types of

19:40

campaigns, but just have something going.

19:42

What are some other ways you can change up your marketing mix?

19:46

You mentioned prioritizing Google as well, which we've already chatted about a little bit.

19:50

Yeah, so one of the interesting things that we found is that people tended throughout

19:54

2023 to invest more in Meta. The split was roughly...

19:57

Looking at Meta and Google specifically, the split was roughly like 60-40 ish,

20:02

give or take, and that makes sense. Meta has incredible results,

20:06

and the one thing we found though is that we are seeing really strong results

20:10

recently from Google. Google has really done a lot of investment in their dynamic ads and their

20:17

machine learning to make sure that their campaigns are going to perform really

20:21

well, and we're seeing that play out. We saw crazy high results for a lot of Google campaigns.

20:25

So we're not necessarily saying, take all of your Meta money and put it in Google.

20:29

That's not what I want people to do. Meta is still really important and it still does really, really well,

20:34

but if there are ways to make sure that you can shift a little to Google or just

20:37

make sure you have a presence on Google, that is definitely something we're recommending. Like I said,

20:41

people aren't spending there as much. I'm sure many organizations have no Google budget,

20:46

so just explore that and tap into Google and really try to spend a little bit

20:50

there if you can. I think that becomes a little easier when we think about things like Performance

20:54

Max and Demand Gen campaigns, which are performing really,

20:58

really well at the moment. They are. That was one of the most interesting takeaways I think,

21:03

was how well Performance Max is doing.

21:06

What is Performance Max just so we can, because it is a weird concept, right?

21:09

So Performance Max is basically letting you tap into all of the Google

21:13

inventory. So you run your one ad, you give Google all of your assets,

21:17

so like your copy, your imagery, which could be video ads and static images,

21:21

and you put it all in there, and then they're going to serve out the best possible ad combination.

21:25

So they're going to piece those together. Best possible ad combination for each person on the best possible placement for

21:31

each person, which is kind of where that interesting twist is.

21:34

So you can tap into Gmail and YouTube and all the different places from this one

21:38

campaign. It's a little bit of a black hole because you're trusting the Google algorithm

21:43

and you're not telling it, "I want to serve X amount of impressions on YouTube" or anything like that.

21:49

I will fully admit that I was a skeptic when it was first announced.

21:53

I have a tendency to not trust the machines and AI...

21:58

You've learned well from sci-fi films, I feel. I sure have.

22:01

But especially coming out of this study and seeing just how high the results are

22:06

for Performance Max, I am truly converted.

22:10

I've been telling all my clients that we need to run-and we have-that we need to

22:12

run on Performance Max. So unsurprisingly, for Google,

22:15

paid search was the top.

22:18

It was performing the highest for any metric, you name it. Paid search wins,

22:22

which makes sense. Of course we would expect that. But next,

22:26

in pretty much every case-I don't think there was ever a metric that this wasn't

22:29

true-next was Performance Max,

22:31

and then there was some various mix with the next three of Display, Demand Gen,

22:36

and YouTube. But the top two by far, solidified,

22:40

were paid Search and Performance Max,

22:42

and I thought that was really interesting because there are very few people who

22:45

actually are running Performance Max campaigns,

22:47

so it's a huge opportunity for people to shift their budget to be running there.

22:52

Also, keeping in mind that you need to be running paid search when you run Performance

22:55

Max, just as an FYI. Yeah,

22:59

so all of this information is super helpful and I think a really good preview of

23:03

the Cultural Compass findings.

23:06

When is this coming out and where can people find it?

23:09

So it's going to be released in June on CI's website,

23:12

so you can go there to find it when it's published.

23:15

If you're not already on CI's list, I highly recommend signing up for our emails so that you can be one of the first

23:20

to know when it actually gets published. And it's a huge study.

23:26

How's the best way to approach this study, and what can we take from it?

23:30

I think that the main thing that-when I started this study and the research for

23:33

it, I really wanted to make sure that it was actionable.

23:36

That was my number one goal here was whatever the results are, whatever we have,

23:40

I want to make sure that people can read this and that they can take action from

23:44

it and apply the findings. There's nothing worse than having a bunch of data and then just thinking, cool!

23:49

And not doing anything with it. Especially because we are in this work all the time and we have a tendency to be

23:56

really in the weeds, and I wanted to make sure that we're zooming out and making sure that anybody

24:00

reading this is going to understand the results and also know what to take away

24:04

from them. So for every piece of data,

24:06

for every metric and benchmark and question that we answer,

24:09

we have an explanation of what it's actually saying and showing,

24:13

and then we also have our CI recommendations for every single piece of data.

24:17

So it's like, what if you are meeting this benchmark or not?

24:20

What could you be doing? Here's the big takeaway from this.

24:23

All those kinds of things are in there to make sure that you can really take

24:26

action and apply this to your next season and beyond as you plan.

24:31

Yeah, I'm really excited for clients to dig into this and see all the work that you've

24:37

done in this study. I think it's such a useful resource,

24:40

especially as we're planning the next year for marketing.

24:43

So thank you so much for joining us and talking through the Cultural Compass.

24:47

Thanks for having me, as always. Thank you for listening to CI to Eye.

25:01

This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen

25:05

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Until next time, stay nerdy.