 Let me get started and if we can just leave the doors open and people want to continue to pile in on their coffee break. Thank you so much for being here guys. It is like another perfect day in San Diego. I've never been here before, before this conference, and I may never leave. So, if anyone's with me, you can talk about that. So the word of introduction first and of course a big thank you to the TCG staff for having us and for having come on such a wonderful conference. I think I speak for everyone when I say it's been so much fun. But a brief word of introduction, my name is Hal Moss and I am a member of the Strategy and Branding team at a firm called the Pocket Cohen. For those of you that aren't familiar with us, we're a strategy, design, and full service advertising firm based in New York City and we exclusively serve the cultural and creative world. So that means performing arts, theaters, of course, visual arts, history, science, and living. So arts, science, museums, heritage, museums, and architecture firms. And it's really the core of what we do. We like to say health organizations connect better with their audiences. So our job is to really keep a finger on the pulse of what today's American culture looks like. And so before we start, I do want to start off as I said to the group yesterday with a bit of a promise. And that is that I can't promise this won't be a research presentation because that would feel like it is a research presentation. But I can promise that it would be not just a research presentation. We love data. We love doing research. But what we really love about research is when it turns into something else. I mean it does something better than itself or when it tells a story. So what you're going to see today is really the story of today's cultural consumer to our audience. And I think like any great story, there are moments that are really exciting. There are moments that are sort of terrifying. But it's really those cultural consumers, one of the most dynamic protagonists that you will find. So we're really excited to share this with you. And as a follow-up, you can tweet in addition to the TCG hashtag and hashtag culture tag. So a little bit of background first. What is culture tag? So culture tag is an ongoing tracking study and it's been filled in six times since 2001. And so when we say tracking study, you mean asking a similar group of questions to a similar group of people over time. And what we love about a tracking study is that it really does drum up some of that storytelling material. So while we love single-pointed data, and we have a lot of really interesting ones, and so while we're here at this study, we have new questions. Some of the really interesting trends can be seen across time for any of the theater technology folks in the room. We see some especially interesting trends. And so culture tag studies the attitudes and the motivators and the barriers to cultural participation of culturally active audiences. So how are we to find a culturally active audience this year? We'll expand on this a bit later. But basically it's someone who has attended a cultural event, one cultural event in the past year, and here we're finding a cultural event as theater, musical theater, dramatic theater, museums, opera, dance, and a variety of other arts activities. We do culture track for three main reasons. The first is that we're so inspired by the amazing range of arts research that exists out in the universe, right? I've given a few examples here. We have the NEA study of cultural participation, total baseline. I mean, I'm always referencing this, the TCG report for us on theater facts. We're always using our work. The Arts and Economic Prosperity by Americans for the Arts. And also, I just wanted to pull in an international study that we think is really fantastic. It's the UK arts index, it's sponsored by The Guardian, and it tracks cultural participation throughout England. It's really fantastic. So what we're trying to do is not necessarily to emulate these studies, but to try to build on them, fill in some of the holes that we think we can add some public leadership to the field in those areas. We're also trying to go deeper into some of these meta trends. And for those of you that are into trends reports, you're probably familiar with some of these phrases, right? The search for authenticity. Everyone's talking about how people are searching for authentic experiences in the face of maybe a more derivative world. Self-curation, right? This is one of the big buzzwords. People are self-curating their own lives. And collaborative consumption. You hear this a lot with programs like Uber that people are consuming collaboratively. And we love this stuff. We love reading trends reports, and we think it gives a really great barometric reading on what's going on with audiences today. What we also find is that when we're sitting across the table from a theater, from a museum, these things don't necessarily have the actionable strategies, right? We need to get into drivers, the emotional drivers that are causing these meta trends to really be present in our society. And we want to understand why. What's going on here? Why are audiences acting like this? And finally, we want to get inside the head of this protagonist. We really want to understand why people are participating in culture, what's driving them to participate in culture, and what maybe some of those barriers are. So, to set up this story, what does our protagonist look like? Well, today's cultural audiences are self-focused. And this doesn't necessarily mean that they're self-centered. Yes, it doesn't also necessarily mean that they're not self-centered. But in this case, what we're talking about is the need for institutions to really assert the value of a particular experience to someone's life. So people are looking for really meaningful experiences that they think can add value to their lives. Overcommitted, right? Everyone has so much going on. We actually launched this study a few months ago now, the New York Times Center in New York, and we had this fantastic array of panels. It's one of the events that, you know what I've realized? Every cultural experience, every decision to attend a cultural experience starts with you, right? Everyone has so many options. They're presented with so many cultural options that they actually have to filter first. The first thing they have to do is cross things off the list. So the question is, how do you become that thing that stays on the list? So the top of the list is completely essential. That did, right? And we mean this in every possible way. They're hyper-connected through technology. They're hyper-connected to their friends. And they're hyper-connected across any geographic boundaries, right? So they always encounter a bigger impulse of any cultural event or activity that's happening anywhere in the world. Over-stimulated, there is so much incoming information, right? It's hard to even imagine how people can process everything. Pramiscuous. So this is a word that we've been using a lot recently. We are not referring to their personal lives. We're referring to their cultural lives. People have become culturally ridiculous. And when we did this study back in 2011, we actually did an audience segmentation where we tried to segment audiences based on their culture patterns. And what we found is that people often fell into groups of discipline-based identities. So you had to go to theatergoers. You had to do CM savings. We had to always dance for them. Three years later what we found is that this is completely off the case. People are skimmers. People are samplers, right? And while this has perhaps kind of a scary implication to the world of loyalty, it also has some really exciting implications about open-mindedness. Because people are really willing to try a variety of things, even if it's something they've never experienced before. And they're incredibly eager to consume all types of culture. They are cynical, however. There's so much information in everyone's fingertips. They are having so many different experiences that there's a high bar and people really want experiences that they feel speak to them. But they're curious. And we think this is the most important takeaway from this study, that you have audiences that are really, really curious to try new things and to participate in culture. And so what we can take from this is that today's audiences are very complicated and very challenging. And so we asked them three main questions. What? What are you doing? What are you participating in? How? How are you participating in these things? And why? And this we think is really at the heart of Culture Track. Well, why do you participate in culture? What does it mean to you? And so for a little bit of background and methodology for the research ones in the room, we collected data from 4,026 respondents across the United States representing all 50 states. When we had the initial pool of respondents, they statistically mirrored the U.S. population and then they were actually filtered for cultural participation. So here, as I mentioned, we're defining cultural participation as participating in one event of the year so that we're really diving into the behaviors of culturally active audiences. And it's also important to note that we have a 1.6% margin of error which we're super pumped about because if you think about a lot of political polls, that's usually about 3 or 4%. And so what this means is that as you're watching the study, the numbers may vary by about 1.6%, but that's all. So it's a pretty tight margin. Throughout, we'll be breaking down audiences by age. This is something new this year, but we have found most important and interesting differences about audiences or actually regardless of what they're doing, regardless of where they live, but it's what age they are. This really ties audiences together. So throughout, you see an M, that's for millennials, ages 18 to 29. Gen X is ages 30 to 49. Boomers, 50 to 69. And prewar, 70 plus. So what did we learn? Okay, to dive into the data. Well, what we learned is actually pretty exciting. What we learned is that it's actually a very robust cultural market right now. So actually with a few exceptions, participation has increased among the majority of art forms. I promise this is the ugliest, most cramped chart you're going to see this entire presentation, so stick with us. So if you can't read it, we have going down Living Museums, Science Museums, History Museums, Art Museums, Musical Theater, Dramatic Theater, classical music, modern dance, classical dance, and opera. Now, I think what's really important to look at is, of course, this very exciting musical theater number. And we filtered a question yesterday from a gentleman who said, well that's interesting because when I read the NEA study, I didn't see that, right? We saw that with Musical Theater, Dramatic Theater, wrong decline. So this is where it's important to keep in mind the distinguishing factors between culture track and NEA study. So the NEA study is looking at census data, right? So both culturally active and non-culturally active participants were looking at just culturally active. And in most culturally active audiences, the takeaway of a musical theater is positive. This is great news. Dramatic Theater, however, is not so positive and we are seeing a statistically significant decline in dramatic theater attendance alongside modern dance, classical dance, and opera. So what's going on here? And I think this is a good moment to point out that I hope our Q&A again will be in time to discuss some of these issues and it would be fantastic to hear people's opinions about what might be the differentiating factor here. But the way that we're thinking about it or hypothesizing about it is that Dramatic Theater, dance and opera fall into perhaps the more rigorous art forms, the ones that may need to pursue a bit more knowledge and understanding. If audiences are aging, we might be seeing replacement audiences who are educated in these forms of cultural events. We might see those replacement audiences twinkling. So again, we'll be very curious to hear people's thoughts on this. But overall, that was a very good chart to look at as someone in the arts business, right? We saw more increases and decreases and that's really great news. But that does come with a big asterisk and that asterisk is frequency of anticipation. So, while we saw people attending a wider variety of cultural activities what we're also seeing is that people are attending far fewer cultural events per month. So if you look at this chart, we asked people, okay, how many cultural events are you attending in a given month? Is it none? Is it one to two? Or is it more than three? And what we found is that the real story here is in the past seven years. As if you look at this chart, in 2007 we had 31% of people attending more than three cultural activities in a month. That number is cut in half in seven years. That's incredibly significant. We have a few theories about this. You'll see them in this slide that follows some positive and then some a bit more negative, mainly the long tail of the economic recession. But first, to continue on this we actually found that the oldest and the youngest ends of the spectrum are the ones that are participating the most frequently. So we call this the cultural participation sandwich. And as you see, moving down here we have millennials at the top, then Gen X rumors and pre-war. And your millennials and pre-war are actually participating by far the most per month. This might be a little surprising. You might think that the Gen X rumors, since they have families and productive partners, might be the ones that are participating more but this is actually not the case. Why is this? Well, what we've found is that millennials are actually really voracious samplers. So where there are lots of discussions about how do we engage these millennials, how do we pin them down, it's not that they're not active. In fact, they're even more active than pre-war, who you think of as your traditional cultural audience. That represents an enormous opportunity. But again, it's this concept of cultural promiscuity. How do we make them come back? And then of course, you do have a very solid, frequent audience base in your pre-war, often because there is a greater amount than some leisure time and greater loyalty to institutions. So when we fielded the study this year, let me say that in three years since our last iteration of the study, we definitely hoped that we would see some promise like news about the economy. I'm sorry to say that was not the case, unfortunately. What we found is that the long tail of the economy really does still linger. In fact, when we asked, you see an increase in those who said that they are participating in culture less frequently because they are reducing their expenses across the board. That's a really significant increase from 77% in 2011 to 82% in 2014. So it's very important to remember that for your audiences, the Great Recession is still very top of mind for them, and it is very much affecting their priorities. Sorry. But, and this is still very promising, but when we were looking at this decline among the cultural attendance, obviously the economy seemed to be a very strong hypothesis for why this might be happening, but there's also something else. And that is that we found audiences are defining culture much more broadly. So whereas we had always asked about a set list of cultural activities, theaters, museums, dance, opera. We, for the first time this year, also asked about other cultural events. We said, what are you defining as culture? We don't even want to place that definition on you. And so what we found was really, really interesting and I think explains some of these frequency patterns. For example, going to a national park was actually the number one activity to be defined as a cultural experience. So you have 8 out of 10 people defining as a cultural activity, right? And going to the park, and you know what, for me, that is culture. And 87% participating at least once per year. Well, this is really amazing, particularly when you think about the larger discussion about activating the arts and public spaces, right? So for anyone in the room that's maybe going to Grand Park in LA, this is the High Line in New York and I think it's so significant that the new executive director of the High Line used to be the artistic director of the Williamson Theatre Festival. That's no coincidence. This is a really huge moment for activating these kind of spaces. A broadcast of a live performance in a movie theater. So for example, Med HD Live. You have two thirds of people defining this as a cultural activity and around a third participating at least once per year. First of all, I think it's amazing that you actually have a third of people participating as a specific event in a given year. But this is also, of course, grounds for a greater conversation about events like these. Med HD Live was exorbitantly successful. Unfortunately, it did not translate to in-person attendance. So I think this is really the interesting grounds for a conversation. Of course, it's incredibly exciting that people are experiencing activities like this. So it's a double-edged sword. Street art. You have two thirds defining viewing street art as a cultural activity and over half participating at least once per year. I believe that because this particular bank seat piece was a block away from our office, I swear to you, I couldn't get to work that morning for an hour, it was so crowded. So this is incredibly popular. Food and drink experiences. So you have 64% of people defining this as a cultural activity, about three quarters participating at least once per year. For those of you who are from New York or have visited New York, this is a picture of Smorgasburg and Williamsburg. It's a really fantastic food festival. I think one of these numbers are actually incredibly driven by millennials. So an incredibly large percentage of millennials say food and drink experiences that's culture for me. I think this has significant implications as well for theater. I know that folks from Benchie Valer here, which they're in here, the Tea Party scene in Benchie Valer, that's a perfect example of incorporating food and drink experiences into theater. Having some really great synergy there. A live or recorded lecture, like a TED talk, this is culture for your cultural audiences. It doesn't matter that it can be at home on your couch, online, this is a cultural experience. An independent film and a theater over half defining as a cultural activity and over half participating at least once in the past year. As an interesting side note, we also asked about more mainstream films and those are actually still ranking lower. So when it comes to film, seeing some of these high low boundaries, my guess is we'll continue to see that change. Non-commercial television. So we have 51% defining as a cultural activity, 84% participating at least once per year when we released this study in New York. One of our panelists that was reflecting on the research was the executive producer of Downton Abbey. She was so pumped about these numbers. This was fantastic. We really love talking about this statistic because I don't know if anyone read a few months ago David Carr had a piece in the New York Times. It was basically saying that a friend of his came up to him and said, oh my god, there's this amazing new show and you have to watch it. And his reaction was, another one? Like you can, there is so much amazing good television right now. And from Breaking Bad to House of Cards this is what people are talking about and they're defining it as culture. So to get to those more emotional drivers that we were talking about. So we know that audiences have a much broader cultural landscape now. But what's driving them? What is it that will actually get them in the door of a cultural experience? What we find out is that cultural audiences are seeking both entertainment and enlightenment and they have to go together. You can't cheat. They are expecting both of these things when they walk in the door. And what we also found is that the number of people who said that they attend a cultural event to be in the know has significantly decreased in the past three years. So it's not about being in the know it's about being with whom you know the people that are actually important to you seeing culture as a social event. So as you can see the top factors are entertainment and enjoyment and time with friends and family. And this ranks higher than talking about other cultures. This is about a personal experience it's about having fun so being with your friends. So throughout we're going to show these little yellow stickies we think that these are just some sort of fun facts about different generations that really distinguish through the millennials, Gen X, boomers, or pre-war. So to start what we found that we were actually pretty surprised about is that there's an inverse relationship between attending a cultural experience and needing to escape stress. So actually you have millennials three corners of millennials saying I go for a cultural event because I'm really stressed out and that's how I chill out. We thought this was really surprising because you might expect that Gen X with your children might be the most stressed out but no you have millennials saying this is what I'm bringing to the table when I attend a cultural event. I'm super stressed and I love culture because it lets me collapse. So what drives participation to a particular event? So before we were asking about the meta level, why do you incorporate culture into your life? Well why do I make the decision to actually purchase a ticket and walk in the door? What we found is that it's content it's value and it's being social. So interest in the subject, cost and it's important to note here that we're using cost in terms of price because we think it's very important to always remember the value proposition. If you think about people who are spending a ton of money per month on cable it's not about price it's about the value that they perceive that something has to their lives. And then of course you have these three social motivators. So invited by family friends, my friends recommended it to me and my spouse is interested so I'm coming along as well. What are the barriers? They're basically the other side of the coin. So cost, content and inconvenience. Now we like to say that cost and parking are the white noise upon the research. So whenever you do audience research, cost and parking are always going to show up. There's usually something more than that. So if you're just looking at those top two it is always important to dig deeper because it's very easy to say it's too expensive or oh I don't know I just couldn't find parking. It's always important to go deeper. So the top three again, cost, it's a hassle to get their convenience and unappealing topic. Something needs to appeal to your audience member. One funny thing that we found is that almost half of millennials won't even attend a cultural event if they cannot find someone to go with. Oh, pardon me. Dramatically different from your other generations, right? This is about you know, the need to connect with others and a lack of interest in wanting to do something alone. Now on the other hand, for pre-war it's all about feeling like the content is for you. So we have over three quarters of pre-war saying they won't even go if they feel that the programming is not for them. There's actually something interesting going on here because you might say okay that makes sense, right? Why would you go if all the content wasn't for you? I mean it's interesting that you have almost half of millennials saying they will go if they still feel that the content isn't for them. What is this about? Well in part I think it's what we just saw, right? They're social if my friend is going. I don't really know what it is but I'm going to. And also this skimming sampler nature, right? Well I don't know that it's for me but I'll try it, right? And I'll see. And what we also see going on here is perhaps pre-war content is not being catered towards that right now, right? You have three quarters of pre-war saying it's not for me. I'm not going to go. So how are audiences finding out about cultural activities? Well what we found is that print and broadcast do still matter. They are not dead. As you can see there is an expected decline in newspapers, Sunday newspapers and daily newspapers, declining from 40% in 2011 to 29% and 37% for daily newspapers to 28%. TV is also declining in a little bit more of a subtle way. However, what we found that was perhaps the most surprising was if you remember the size of these bars, right? This is what we found for online. This is sort of a moment, right? And especially these social media numbers. We might have expected to see those completely skyrocketed, right? Well, there could be a few different things going on here and they mainly have to do with social media. I think it's very possible that people, and remember this is the national sample. When we break this out by age, which we will we're going to see a different story. But when we're looking at all of the generations I think it's possible that people don't yet flag social media for cultural recommendations, right? It's a lot of things for a lot of people but maybe the New York Times intersection is still top of mind when it comes to, okay, what should I do this weekend? I think that the other thing that is very possible is that organizations aren't yet coming through the noise, right? There's definitely a noise factor online and particularly in social media and it's very possible organizations just have yet to really clearly communicate to those audiences. But of course, when we break this down by generation, the story completely changes. So for millennials as expected, it is all about social media. And as you'll see here, whereas before social media in the larger scene of things really ranked quite low it's number one for millennials and it's number one by a lot. So this is incredibly important to know that your millennials are on social media and therefore how can we cut through the noise, right? How can we really clearly communicate to them because this is where they live? And on a more meta level how are people participating in social media? What we found is that beyond Facebook and YouTube, it's really the other generations that are dominating these platforms. So actually if you look at Facebook, you have 60% of pre-wars on Facebook. This is quite a large number and we actually have a friend of ours who's a digital consultant for arts organizations and he believes that that number, that 60% number is going to affect your millennials number significantly by the time you do this in 2014. That number is going to decrease because millennials don't want to be on Facebook with a brand founder, right? And you can see this particularly in this Snapchat number is super interesting, right? You have 29% of millennials on Snapchat. The next number is 8% Gen X and you have zero pre-war. And we fielded this research in February. My guess is if we were to do it against today, that Snapchat number would already be significantly larger for millennials. So it's super interesting insight into how these platforms can just pop up among a particular segment of people. See pre-war numbers dropping. Advanced planning. So whether your audience is actually thinking about purchasing their ticket to the next show, this was sort of surprising. What we found is that advanced planning continues to be on the rise for the visual arts. So you have more people saying I plan well in advance to go to a museum. But for the performing arts the number is hugely increased. So you have from 62% in 2011 to 72% in 2014 saying I plan well in advance. And this may seem a little bit counter-intuitive since we're talking about these skimming audiences, right? They're maybe a little bit flighty and a little bit over committed. But with that reason, for the over commitment, that's why we're seeing this well in advance planning. Because think about the last time you tried to plan something with a group of friends, right? All of the emails, all of the changed Google calendar invites, it's hard to schedule stuff right now. And for that reason you really need to make sure that you're getting on people's radar screens very early when they're not thinking about this weekend, they're thinking about it next fall. And what we also found is that online ticket sales completely prevailed now. So where we saw 56% in 2011 saying that they prefer to purchase their tickets online, that is now increased to 65%. This is huge. As you can see in person at the box office barely even matches that. And this is super interesting too when you think about the fact that online ticket sales often have associated fees, right? It's often a bit more expensive to purchase tickets online. So this is very interesting. And what we found as well is that that goes for audiences of all ages. So your pre-war, as you can see online ticket sales has the number one method of purchase. This is really interesting and it means that you need to make sure that online ticket sales platforms are very streamlined, right? They're easy to use. And that goes for audiences of all ages. So technology and the on-site experience, this is always a fun one to present because I know that it's very top of mind for everyone. So to set the baseline for this, we need to figure out what people have, right? What kinds of mobile devices are in their possession and what are they using? So what we found was pretty fun. So in 2011, as you can see, we have a third of people with smartphones. We have 18% with tablets or e-readers and 42% with an iPod. Are you ready for three years later? This is pretty amazing. We have the number of smartphones more than doubling. The number of tablets more than tripling. That's particularly amazing. And also a significant increase in iPods and MP3 players. This is by far the biggest jump that we've seen in any of our numbers. But what we found is that while people have these devices, they're actually still not really using them on-site to enhance their virtual experience. And so this is the baseline number for people that have mobile devices in 2014. So you have that 2 thirds of a smartphone, roughly 2 thirds of a tablet. There's a percentage of people who said that they used it online to enhance their cultural experience. On-site to enhance their cultural experience. So this is very surprising. This is not what we expected to see. I think there could be two things going on here. The first is that perhaps people don't really want to use mobile devices on-site. Maybe perhaps cultural experiences are what people are talking about which is a cold spot. People want to attend a performance and they want to put their phone away. But there's another option as well. I think this might be the more likely option. And that is that people are open to the idea of using a device on-site. They're hungry for those kind of experiences. But they haven't found something yet that really speaks to them. So they're on-site, they download the app, they look at it and they say, this isn't really adding to my experience. It isn't really for me. So this is really a very transitional moment in terms of using technology on-site. And it's really going to be audience driven. So depending on how audiences determine they want to use mobile devices on-site, that's going to directly affect the development of these technologies moving forward and how you communicate with your audiences digitally. So what is it that they want to do? This is a real picture. Actually, it's from a great group in New York called Museum Hack. They did these sort of guerrilla tours of the Met Museum, encouraging people to take selfies. What we found, this is the selfie moment. This is an Instagram world right now but people want to do is they want to take photos and they want to share those photos. So we asked those who had said, yes, I use my mobile device on-site to enhance cultural experience. We asked them, okay, well what are you doing? What are you doing with your mobile device on-site? And as you can see, taking photos came in at two thirds and sharing photos nearly 50%. This is what people are doing on-site. This is what they want to do. This ranks above browsing a cultural organization's website, using a search engine, going on social media, that's particularly surprising. So what are the really important takeaways from this? Well, I think it actually has the most important implications for the theater, because as we were talking about earlier, people are engaging in a wider variety of activities, right? They're culturally permissive as their samplers. And so say someone has a day to themselves to do a bunch of different cultural activities on a Saturday, right? And the afternoon, they decide that they're going to go to the vet and they're going to check out the most recent exhibit. And what they'll find when they go to the vet museum is that the photography restrictions are much more lenient now than they used to be. So they can go check out a sculpture, take a selfie, share it with their friends like they're accustomed to doing. And then later on, in the evening, they go to the theater. And what happens when they pull out their cell phone to the theater? When they're waiting for curtain, they want to take a picture of the scenes. No, no. You're treated like you have a concealed weapon. And so, are we saying that theaters or other performing arts organizations should be encouraging people to live to even record performances? Absolutely not. That's totally not what we're saying. However, this does seem like a particularly opportune moment to think about ways of activating pre-show, intermission, co-show, maybe thinking about not only how to host these sorts of activities through selfie walls and social media conversations, but how do we participate in them? Because that is a standard that is being said by other cultural organizations that really is still on the rise in theater. Very important to think about. Talk to technology in the off-site experience. So what's going on off-site people's tones? Well, if we were surprised by how low some of those numbers were for on-site engagement, it was completely the opposite for off-site engagement. So we asked about people who were experiencing an organization's performances online. So we're not talking about just general music videos here or videos that were recorded on people's tones. We're talking about organization section content down into the world. And what we found is that the numbers are incredibly high. So as you can see here, actually this is a bit of a different looking chart. I know of the other ones. So the left-hand bar is indicating that they have used a platform to experience performance online. The middle bar is okay, I'm aware of YouTube, but I've never actually used it to witness a performance online. And the last bar is I've never heard of YouTube. And as you can see, we start at a third of people using Vimeo to experience performance online and it only goes up from there. And the real story here is YouTube. That's an extraordinary number of you have four out of five people saying yeah, I've watched a performance online on YouTube. So obviously this can seem to be maybe a bit of a challenge, a challenge to on-site participation. But I do think that it also represents like we were talking about photography a very special moment of opportunity too, because these numbers represent an appetite for this. There is a significant appetite for video content. So maybe this is a time that they creatively, right, how can we maybe use our online videos channels to promote exclusive behind-the-scenes content that you can't find anywhere else or how do we use them to engage perhaps our international audiences that would be loyal to us if they could just access our content. So this is very interesting. Very interesting by thanks to think about. And so why are people doing this? Why is there such a huge number for YouTube? Well, what we found is that watching a performance online directly circumvents those barriers that are causing people not to come in the door. So what we found is that at certain events cost I can watch a performance online on YouTube for free and convenience, I can do it sitting on my couch with my pajama. As you can see, the top three motivators there cannot attend due to location so I can watch from my computer at cost and scheduling. Also, convenience. Okay, so this is the section where we ask people to sort of take a deep breath to prepare for this one because this is definitely where we see the cultural promiscuity playing out. So let's just dive into it. Loyalty obviously continues to be on the decline for both the visual arts and the performing arts. So here we are in 2011. We have 26% of people who hold visual arts membership and 23% who hold performing arts subscriptions. So where do you think we're going to fall? 2014 and three years later. So this is where we are. So you have a decline from 26% to 15% visual arts memberships 23% to 10% performing arts subscriptions. This is very drastic and I think from the nodding heads really not incredibly surprising. But what we will say is that when we're talking to our theater clients now we used to find that the conversation was how can I boost my subscription model? How can I do things differently so that my numbers are better? And we found that the new question is so what's next? What is the new model after subscriptions? But so long as this is the new model the current model is important to understand what is behind subscribing and the loyalty behavior. So for visual arts it's a finny. I like an organization, it's important to me and therefore I want to support it. And then of course we have less expensive tickets which I think we can always expect to see this is the value concept. For the performing arts it's a little different, right? For the performance it's what's on stage. So people are inclined to purchase a subscription if it means less expensive tickets and the type of performance, right? I've looked at the schedule for the season and this really speaks to me I'd like to go. But honestly I think we can get the best insight into why these numbers are trending the way that they are from breaking down these motivators by different categories. So one thing that we found which is super interesting is that fewer subscribers want you to choose for them. What does that mean? Well we found that there is a significant decrease in people saying you know why I purchased a subscription because it helps me simplify my planning. This is a funny thing, right? You have 30% saying that in 2011 only 11% in 2014. I think this is where that self curation idea comes in maybe 10 years ago people were saying wow I could have a theater schedule my social calendar for me that's fantastic but now you have people saying no I want to do that myself I have incredible amounts of information in my fingertips I have incredible array of options and I'm a self curator I'm curating my own life and so this is very interesting because unlike a visual arts membership that is so like a core of a subscription and so I think thinking about flexible subscriptions allowing people to choose their own seasons that's always a very good idea then the other way to break this down that also definitely shed some light is to look by generation and so what you're going to see that for every generation you have these two what we would think of as hygiene factors those things that are always going to appear which are of course content and value these are the top two most important factors that they kind of switch in order but they always appear for every generation but it's the other factors that really distinguish them so for pre-war you have programming listed in the brochure meaning that a subscription is really driven by receiving that the Bible, a calendar for the season and saying this looks good and I'm going to purchase a subscription convenience it's just easier to purchase a subscription because I don't have to keep purchasing tickets I'm not going to go and a desire to support local organizations that's the affinity concept that we see moving to billmars we've got our same top two but then it's it gets me hacked so I have lots of family commitments I have lots of work commitments but if I have a subscription I will go because there are tickets waiting for me desire to support local organizations that have that affinity concept again and again programming listed in the brochure Gen X our favorite top two motivators affinity again, desires to support an organization that's important to me it gets me out remember Gen X is the most likely generation at half children in the household so this is a good excuse to have a babysitter but this one is really what caught our attention better seats because if you notice this is the first motivator we're seeing that's actually benefit-based perhaps if the others were more about personal relevance about emotional drivers this is, no no, I like to purchase a subscription because I know when I do I will get better seats so this is a unique shift and then millennials you have your same top two convenience this is funny because once again we see our millennials and our pre-war kind of big buddies and dog-tailing there millennials they are your other most active segment and it's just more convenient to purchase a subscription we have so much going on but then these last two are the really really different ones so we have again benefit-based motivators discounts on area attractions and discounts on organizations other programs or venues this really shed some light because what you have here is millennials thinking about purchasing a subscription into a particular organization based on the art of the entire experience so when they purchase a subscription they are looking for discounts on the dinner beforehand maybe they can go to a local park they can feel really engaged with the organization having discounts to other venues if they have other programming sites so this is unique and it's important to remember for millennials that because they do have this broadening definition of culture that this is about the art the entire art of engagement giving this is a little bit better looking fortunately so we can move on to something a little more positive what we have found is that despite the findings about the long tail of the Great Recession charitable giving is actually remaining vibrant so as you see it's a third of people in 2011 planning to make a charitable contribution and in 2014 it's 35% so with the margin of error we can certainly say that this is remaining steady if not going on so that's promising and why are people planning to make charitable contributions well it comes down to social impact and affinity so I feel like this organization is benefiting my community and I feel like this organization is something that's really important to me and therefore I want to support it believe it or not this actually ended up being one of our most interesting sections and you'll see why in a second what we found is that perceptions of a cultural sponsorship are actually very positive but they're nuanced and what we mean by that is that more audiences now believe that sponsorship is motivated by marketing so as you can see there's a significant spike and sponsorship is just a marketing tactic so I see that there's a cultural sponsorship and I know what's going on I know that it's marketing for that corporation and I see through that and so if we see a huge spike in that answer you might think that we're also going to see a huge spike in I have a distrust of that organization because I see what they're doing but that's actually not what we found that cultural sponsorships are also more of a minor than ever so you see these increases in both I think highly of a sponsor when I see that it's during a cultural sponsorship and I feel good about doing business with them so what's going on here well this is a concept that we like to think of as born branded I think we live in a world now that is very dominated by very visible marketing we also live in a world where the phrase personal branding is quite revered actually so people are completely aware and sensitive to marketing but they're also full of it it's not necessarily a flag it's something that they can actually admire perhaps they admire more because they see that a corporation is sponsoring the arts over everything else and then this is a perfect example I mean for anyone who is from New York or visited New York recently it's plastered throughout many subway stations and what it is it's a campaign for personal brands these are three YouTube celebrities who have over 5 million fans and this is what people admire so it's an incredibly interesting shift in thinking about branding, marketing and the reaction to it so what does this all mean we've been needy and data map to our protagonist what it means is that today's audiences are really vibrant you can call them a lot of things and we have them if we will but you cannot call them passive they are not passive audiences they are incredibly open minded as we found they have a very broad definition of culture now and they're willing to experience a lot of new things but that also means that they're more restless and they're less loyal than ever as we saw this is that concept of the cultural promiscuity so to create the cultural experience in the future what do we do, how do we address these audiences well the key is really thinking what we like to call thinking from the outside in, always always thinking about how audiences are feeling what's driving them and meeting them where they live on their turn so how do they feel that there are a lot of adjectives where we left off they're curious they have an insatiable curiosity willingness to try incredible amount of cultural experiences plugged in again in terms of technology in terms of always having their antenna up to a variety of cultural experiences this is a plugged in audience social for these audiences as foremost a social experience a time to spend time with friends and family heat seeking these audiences are always looking for the new hot thing what's amazing about that is that it means that they're receptive to experiences they've never encountered before so if it is the thing right, they're there this is evidenced by seven hour lines for chronos stuff like that, if it's the thing you can capture their attention regardless if they've never experienced it before born branded this is what we were just talking about in terms of sponsorship they see marketing, they understand it and they're cool with it up for anything so this is an audience that really is at its core open-minded who like to try new things and then a little challenge, they are discerning they have incredibly experienced they've done a lot of different things and therefore again, they are looking for this moment, this experience that is really relevant to their lives so what is a cultural organization to do with all this right, we've learned all of this about our audiences how do we respond accordingly well, we believe that the most important thing you can do is to listen directly to what your audiences have to say and so for the first time this year culture traffic really has always been a quantitative study but for the first time this year we've added a qualitative component so actually giving audiences an open-ended space to answer a question the question is, what is a cultural experience to you how do you define culture what does it mean to you to have a cultural experience and to share with us a little bit of what runs through your mind so we've heard a variety of different answers but this is just a sampling of a few of them something that entertains enriches, challenges the mind and gives enjoyment having ah-ha moments so we take this to mean perhaps those moments of authenticity and what's often maybe more downloaded and derivative world than it's ever been something that offers enrichment by sight sound, touch or taste it's where multi-sensory comes in again or millennials ranking food and drink experiences as culture an experience that enlightens and enlarges your world something that takes you above your everyday life it raises your awareness and it uplifts you something that enhances your mind body and soul in a unique and profound way so we'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts you can tweet us at lupakaco and hashtag culture track but I think what we can really take away from these quotes is that we do have an audience that scans that samples that is hyper-connected, that is overstimulated but wow they have some pretty beautiful things to say about a cultural experience they know what it means to them and they know that culture plays a very significant role in their lives and would give them the opportunity to express what it means to them they did so and they did so really in an eloquent and very inspiring way so those are your audiences they are a lot of things they are ever-changing, they are very dynamic but they also love what you do and they love what you do for them and I think that's a very inspiring thing so you can download this presentation at lupakaco.com you can also download hundreds of pages of supporting data if that loads your vote you can dig deeper into a lot of these questions and a lot of our findings and thank you for this mic down to make it a little more casual we also had a discussion we'd love to hear any of your thoughts about any of the findings, things that surprise you any things that you didn't expect to see can you notice anything about musical events except for opera and musical theater you didn't include symphony or music festivals like my daughter is totally about music festivals interesting, okay so we had classical music we also asked about popular music and the new definition of culture question what we found about actually let me notice that classical music finding was very interesting in the sense that we're calling correctly there was about a 15% this is huge we think there could be a few different things one option is that people are defining it certainly is an outlier about its activities and that it is something that you can more easily on the radio there are also a wider variety of options now in terms of classical music concerts that are fusion with more pop music or with movies film, etc there was also a really interesting article recently that the lupakaco inside a Boston Globe about a group called group music and it was a group that actually gathers mainly millennials and it just plays classical music together and has these classical music house parties and it's actually incredibly successful and it's spread across the country and there's a great quote in there that says we're reclaiming the fact that classical music is apparently social and that really struck us it's interesting that people are finding new and inventive ways to engage with classical music and that could also certainly be a part but to answer your question what we did find is that like blockbuster movies popular music is still ranking lower in terms of how many people work again, I imagine a lot of people fielded this survey we started with a sample of statistically mirroring the U.S. population as in terms of gender as in terms of participation as defined by attending these regional meetings so we're officially doing one in Boston we're in talks to come in LA as well where we're diving deeper with the same survey into a particular region and that's what we think we're going to be able to answer about