2017 Bronze Entertainment, publishing and gaming

Altair Media

Client: Royal National Theatre

Think like a retailer

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

Each show was treated like a retailer's product launch. Altair Media put CRM at the heart of the activity with clear roles for all media to work together rather than in silos, challenging everything that had been run historically.

They created a shift in OOH to create impact with performance measured through social noise and search behaviour.

They ran ongoing frequency activity across display and social, targeting visitors to the Southbank and the theatre's bars with messaging about discounts to keep the theatre top of mind.

They uncluttered digital ads, creating solus ads for each performance integrating closely with print and OOH to improve recognition and cut-through.

Facebook was made lead channel for retargeting after analysing time-to-convert and path-to-convert data.
The team also served Facebook and Instagram ads to their database through IBM social audiences to coincide with email bursts, delivering dramatic improvements in performance.

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 (Director0 Altair Media - David Harvey (Director Altair Media) - George Slokoski (Data Analyst) 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 - Alex Bayley (Director of Audiences & Marketing) Royal National Theatre - Dan Batters (Designer Royal) National Theatre