Market Failures of a Music Festival

This past weekend in Columbia, Missouri the Second Annual Bluebird Music Festival took place at over 12 music venues and 7 art galleries in the downtown area. Over 60 bands from the Midwest traveled here for the festival which is sponsored by several different Columbia businesses and radio stations.

The event's organizers weren't able to quote actual numbers, but it was generally agreed upon that attendance was down from last year. Though the event head's blamed the lower turnout on the cold weather this past weekend and venues that differed from those offered last year, I believe the real reason for low numbers of attendees was a simple information asymmetry: the public knew little, if anything, about the festival.

I think the festival has an incredible amount of potential in Columbia. The weekend brought acts that varied from acoustic folk music, good old fashioned rock'n'roll, techno and indie rock. Columbia is a community that loves its arts and music. The audience is out there, they just failed to inform them in a successful manner.

Instead of analyzing who their target audience was and how it was best to reach them, the Bluebird Festival went the easy way out by spending their limited budget on radio and television spots (can be viewed on the festival's site: http://whatisbluebird.com/What_is_Bluebird/Home/Home.html). However, I think it is pretty obvious that college-aged kids and recent grads in their 20's DON'T listen to the radio. We listen to iPods, iPhones, satellite radio and iTunes. We DON'T watch TV in the traditional sense. We DVR our favorite shows, watch them on Hulu, do a quick google search to find episodes streaming for free or simply watch things on YouTube. The message wasn't received by the desired potential attendees.

I understand that their budget was limited, but I feel if the festival organizers had simply examined their surroundings a little more closely, they would've stumbled upon the obvious: the festival takes place in a town most well known for the University of Missouri, which is most well noted (beyond sports) for their Journalism School. Within that school, there is a Strategic Communication Journalism major which combines PR and advertising. Within that program, there are over 300 students who would throw themselves at the opportunity to have an internship with the festival to place on their resume. They would do this work for free. They would do it with great enthusiasm to show off their knowledge and ideas. How this didn't occur to the organizers - all local Columbia musicians and artists - is beyond me.

Instead of eating their budget with TV and radio spots that were seldom seen nor heard by the target audience, Bluebird could have explored a variety of options. A blog could have been added to their website with interviews with the forthcoming bands posted in the months leading up to the festival and updated information on the venues and art galleries. Posters, flyers and stickers could have been printed and posted on campus and in the downtown area (okay, so they did a little bit of poster/flyer distribution this year, but not until the days leading up to the festival) to raise awareness. Facebook advertisements could have been purchased at very minimal cost and been extremely targeted to Columbia networks only. The list could go on and on with potential for reaching and drawing a wider audience.

I think the Bluebird Festival really blew it this year, to be completely honest. However, there is always next year and, I think, true potential for the event. The Bluebird Festival has proven for the second year their ability to attract incredible bands, exude that warm Midwestern vibe and create a supportive and passionate community for music and the arts in Columbia. All they are missing is an informed strategy on reaching their target audience and increasing attendance.

Dove...Real Beauty or Real Profits?

In 2004, Dove launched their "Real Beauty" campaign. Print media and a television commercial featured "real" women in their underwear, ostensibly to promote the values of natural/normal beauty versus stick thin supermodels. Media reaction to this campaign was overwhelming and immediate and garnered them attention that has been valued at tens of millions of dollars.

Mostly, the public was won over with the message of self-confidence and "real beauty". However, common criticism came in the form of male chauvinists (my favorite comment came from a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times who said of the billboards featuring large women in their underwear, "the only time I want to see a thigh that big is lightly breaded and in a bucket," which is pretty hysterical no matter your personal views), professionals in the health field lamenting acceptance of obesity and the cynical crowd attacking Dove for advocating natural beauty while selling cosmetic products.

So can you reconcile the message with the messenger? It is inarguable that the stereotypical woman you see in advertisements in beautiful, young and thin and that this probably has some significant affect on young girls. However, as many bloggers, journalists, competitors and advertising professionals have pointed out: Dove is a cosmetics company. The initial introduction of the "Campaign for Real Beauty" was timed to coincide with the release of Dove's newest product: a skin firming cream for cellulite. Honestly. This is a brazen manipulation of product and consumer reaction. Make the average American woman (5'4" and a size 12) have these feelings of "I can be curvy AND beautiful. Thank you Dove for that message and self-esteem boost," then... casually offer them the option of feeling even better about themselves by trying a new cream to rid them of cellulite. Excellent use of marketing, but is it ethical?

You have to be a true cynic to appreciate what is happening here. Dove is a brand owned by Unilever who, coincidentally, also owns the brand Axe body spray and deodorant for men. Axe ads, as any breathing American could probably attest to, use beautiful sexy women and sexually provocative innuendoes to market their products. Contradiction? Here's another: Dove is classified as a cosmetics company. The very industry their ads prey upon and attack. True, Dove is perceived more as a "soap and lotion" company then a cosmetics one, but it is part of the industry none the less. At its core, Unilever is a giant corporation, looking out for itself before young girls I would think. And if they find a way to do both (say, raise awareness and good feelings towards their products while simultaneously raising their profit margin), then hey, more power to them.

On a different note, I've noticed an interesting opinion being echoed in comments on blogs and articles about Dove's campaign. There is a backlash against showing larger - some truly overweight - women as "normal" and "beautiful" during an ongoing obesity epidemic in our nation. The comments seem to primarily come from physicians, not just "fatists". I believe they make an unanticipated but highly valid point. Should Dove be promoting these values? One doctor raged against the new accepted stereotype of a female in our culture being overweight or obese, claiming it would be better if the stereotype in media leaned more toward thin women - at least that way young girls wouldn't get the impression that being fat is okay. Where this view fits in with the larger argument, I'm not sure since it seems to be a minority group raising this issue.

When it comes down to it, Dove has done something remarkable. Thanks to a large survey conducted in 2001 on worldwide perceptions of beauty and the geniuses at Oglivy & Mather, they were able to create an ad campaign that got ridiculous amounts of attention, generated discussion internationally on the issue of women and beauty, and created an enormous amount of warm feelings toward their brand. I guess in this example, we can think of Dove as consequentalists: the reasons why they produced the campaign don't matter so much, what matters is that the consequences have been phenomenal for their business.

Ethics in Education

Last Sunday's NYtimes Magazine was the annual 'School Issue'. One of the major articles described an alternative public school in Washington D.C. where inner-city kids in grades 6 -12 not only attend school but live in dormitories Sunday through Thursday night. Students at the SEED School must balance their academic week lives - full of strict rules and a ban on Facebook, TV and MySpace - with their weekend lives back in their urban poor neighborhoods. Students at SEED post remarkable graduation rates and far higher test scores than their D.C. public school counterparts. These students are chosen via yearly lottery, provided their parents have gone through the required paperwork and evaluations.

Critics claim the high costs associated with the school ($35, 000 per student) and the means by which they select students is unfair. The argument is that SEED manages to "skim the cream of the inner-city youth," by selecting only from the pool of students whose parents are functional and educated enough to be able to properly fill out the paperwork. Additionally, some believe that large sum of money per student would be better spent helping to improve ALL D.C. schools across the board, and ideally, to improve the neighborhoods and homes themselves so that students wouldn't have to escape to a boarding school environment in the first place.

So...ethical? If you were to look at Jonathan Haidt's theory of moral "flower pots," it would be easy to see where people would line up politically on this issue. Liberals, viewing ethics strictly from a fairness and caring perspective would, I believe, heavily endorse the school and its vision (President Obama has called it a "true success story"). To them, SEED is protecting these kids from the dangers of their neighborhoods and trying to educate them to a level whereby they could be equal other students who have the privilege of good schools, stable homes and communal support. Conservatives, however, see 5 different areas of ethics that they believe in equally according to Haidt. Not only do they take fairness and care into consideration, they also focus on respect for tradition, purity and loyalty to your group. In that case, the school's completely nontraditional mission would be a turnoff. Perhaps some would argue that sending children away from their family in order to teach them is also against tradition as well as breaking up the pureness of the family.

I think the school has an interesting concept. SEED now has a school in Baltimore and has plans to open in other cities. So far, the statistics have backed up the founders expectations and more and more parents are entering their children in the lottery every year. Maybe Ayn Rand would take the argument that the school is stealing the best and brightest and turn it on its head, saying that these kids are the "superpeople" and they have earned this right and will succeed. Whether it is the greatest good for the greatest number is debatable... the money could be going towards more kids. At the same time, these students that graduate and go on to do well in college could return to their neighborhoods and use their knowledge and experiences to help future kids. Regardless of where your ethics fall, I think the SEED School is worth keeping an eye on to see if the program catches on nationally.