Bad Advertising

[sebastienne]

Dear EdFestMag,

Thank you for the unsolicited publicity advice which I received this morning.

However, between your punctuation and your made-up statistics, it did not really do much to encourage me about the quality of your publication.

"Too many people believe that handing out flyer's on the royal mile will suffice, while this does generate some interest, literally, hundreds of performers are handing out flyer's. Tourists and visitors become overwhelmed with information and tend not to go to over 80% of the shows they receive flyer's from."

I try very hard not to respond negatively to "bad grammar", because I recognise that it can be a form of ableism and/or cultural imperialism. However I've not come across similar arguments about making up statistics. WTF?!

Comments

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

Bad grammar/ablism...
There is a difference between personal and professional communication in this context, right up until the communication is corporate and aimed at an audience outside the producing organisation grammar is not an issue (except perhaps as an irritation).

When presenting to someone who needs to a) understand with absolute clarity what you are communicating and/or b) be impressed with your presentation, however, then if you have a disability that prevents you from using professional level written communication then someone ought to be supporting you to overcome it.

[crouchinglynx.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they came up with that number by taking the number of flyers printed and subtracting the number of tickets sold, for all the shows in their sample - a hit rate of 1 in 5 sounds quite good, really. Although what they're doing to discount the effects of posters/listings/word of mouth is beyond me.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

That's a point - if 20% of the people we flyered last year had actually come to the show, we'd have been counting our audients in the thousands, not the hundreds!

[r-e-mercia.livejournal.com]

In fairness, there's a lot of terrible flyering on the Mile!

Two Shades really had to learn how to do it properly (eg target demographically, multiple-flyer, stop and chat to people if they look remotely interested, bounce up and down excitedly as you explain how awesome the show is, escort them to the theatre under your umbrella with the promise of a nice cup of tea...), and I think groups who do it in our way probably get a much much better hit rate than others flyering on the Mile...

[vampire-kitten.livejournal.com]

1) edfringe official stats suggest the biggest predictor of size of audience is number of flyers given out. Approx. 1% of flyers taken equate to sales from the boys estimates last year.
2) 2,400 shows up this year. assuming that 90+% of shows flyer on the mile and that flyer saturation of people going through is say, 75+%, that means each person going through gets flyers for 1620 shows over the course of the fringe. To see 20% of these, they would need to going to 11+ shows a day every day. Assuming half of these are free and the rest cost £5 a pop (ha, cheapest ed ever) they'd have spent 800 pounds on tickets. Does EdFest believe it has found a way to make audiences more dedicated than this?! The mind boggles...