2017 Bronze Best customer acquisition campaign

Best customer acquisition campaign

Client: Royal National Theatre

Sit in the Chair!

Campaign overview

The National Theatre has a mission to create theatre for everyone.

The task was to attract a younger, black, asian, minority ethnic audience, often under-represented in UK theatre audiences.

Strategy

The goal was to convince a non-attending demographic to trust The National Theatre, and come along to an art-form, which is often assumed to be dominated by white middle-class and middle-aged.

The concept was a play that would cover everyday life of African barber shops from London to five African cities, with the aim of having huge resonance with communities with connections to these cities.

To really reach their audience, Altair Media had to go hyperlocal. The team chose Brixton Hill, Peckham Road and Elephant and Castle for the social campaign and parts of Lambeth and Hackney for the OOH campaign, after identifying them as high-density areas for African and Caribbean communities.

The team used community engagement, with a community engagement specialist visiting barber shops in the areas and talking to young men about the theme of the play to raise interest in the topic.

Creativity

The creative had to focus around the right localities so that it could be easily relatable to the audience.

Once Altair Media had hand-picked the specific areas for the campaign using population data, they started with door-to-door chats from the community engagement specialist, fly posting and seeding the show through Snapchat geofilters that raised familiarity of the show.

The Snapchat geofilters placed the user in a barber's chair, a setting those Altair Media were targeting would have been familiar with due to the importance of the barber shop to men in African communities.

It was all about subtly introducing the play organically into the communities, so a campaign from the National Theatre did not feel alien to them, and inspired them to visit the theatre for the first time.

The whole campaign centred on people, relationships and cultural nuances.

Results

Following the campaign, The National Theatre had its highest ever black, asian, minority ethnic audience.

It also had a much younger audience, with 1 in 3 in attendance under 35, and a significant number of them attending theatre for the first time ever.

Team

Lyndsey (Best Director) Altair Media - David Harvey (Director Altair Media) - Dan Simms (Paid Social Manager) Altair Media - Franziska Bräumer (Account Manager) Altair Media - Becky Wootton (Deputy Director of Audiences & Marketing Royal National Theatre) - Ali Forbes (Head of Marketing Campaigns) Royal National Theatre - Kaia Parrett (Marketing Officer Royal National Theatre) - Daniel Batters (Designer Royal National) Theatre