Ken Davenport - Opinions from a Broadway Producer

How long did it take Facebook to recoup?

Unless your name is Rip Van Winkle, then you know that Facebook is poised to be one of the biggest public online companies since Google. 

Think about it.  If we all followed the Peter Lynch philosophy of “Invest in what you know”, 250 million people out there would love to own a piece of Facebook stock.

And soon enough, as was confirmed this week by these initial filings, some of those folks (although a very select few, I’m sure) will have that chance when Facebook finally has its IPO.

This isn’t a stock and bonds blog, so what does this have to do with Broadway?

What interested me about the articles I read about the IPO was how long it took Facebook to become profitable. 

6 months?  1 year?  3 years?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

It took five years for Facebook to make a dime.  Five years.

I found that intriguing, because in the Broadway world, a five year payout would be celebrated, but still slow.  Our monster hits pay back in about 9 months to a year now (it used to be a sell out could recoup in about six months, thank you rising costs).   Of course, it’s an entirely different type of economic structure, so admittedly it’s a bit like comparing apples to pineapples.  (The problem with Broadway is that our costs can’t be controlled as much as the costs of a tech company, and our upside is a wee bit more limited so companies can afford the risk of investing more capital as you go.)

But still, I took it as a great reminder that sometimes, even when you’ve got something that 250 million people want to use, you’ve got to be patient and unbelievably persistent if you want to be profitable.

 

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Producing panel alert! How to produce from the ground up Off-Broadway.

My BFFs over at the Off Broadway Alliance asked me to let you know about the latest in their Off-Broadway panel series that just so happens to be . . . this Sunday!

Starting at noon and finishing by 1:30 (to make sure you have time to get to whatever matinee you're seeing that day) , this Sunday's panel is called "Producing from the Ground Up!" and features such the following awesome Hollywood Square-like celebrity participants:  Lori Fineman, Executive Director of Transport Group (which produced the New York premiere of Lysistrata Jones); Tom D'Angora, Producer of NEWSical; and Edmund Gaynes, Producer and Theatre Owner (St. Luke's Theatre and Actors Temple Theatre).

John Capo, President of John Capo Public Relations, will take his usual position as the moderator.

Oh, and if that weren't enough . . . free coffee and bagels.  I mean, come on.  Why do brunch when you can get free bagels and free advice on how to get your Off-Broadway show off the ground from three people that have actually done it.  

Here are the details:

Sunday, Feb. 12th.
12:00 - 1:30
Snapple Theater Center at 50th and Bway. 

To RSVP, click here. 

To learn more about the Alliance, including how to join and get involved, click here.  

 

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Rev up those engines, it’s speed dating time again!

It's time to date it up!

One of our most successful events last year was our Collaborator Speed Date. 

If you weren’t a reader back then, a CSD is when we gather partnerless composers, librettists, and lyricists in a room and introduce them to each other, in the hopes that they will make a match . . . and then, maybe a musical.

It’s a terrific opportunity to meet new people and hope that something clicks.  And who knows, maybe after a little bit of time together you’ll go all the way . . . to the Tony Awards! (Oh Sexual Innuendo, you minx.)

I’ve received a lot of requests recently to throw another speed dating extravaganza (translation = a room and some chips, salsa, soda and wine).  And, well who are we to get in the way of people looking for someone to spend a lot of late nights with, and fight with mercilessly, and make up with effortlessly, and hopefully become the next Ahrens and Flaherty.

So, in the spirit of Valentine's Day, we’re doing it again!

Our next Collaborator Speed Date will be held on Thursday, February 16th at 6:30 PM here at my studios.

Registration is a must.  Last year we “sold out” in advance, so click here to sign up now.

You can register as a Composer, a Lyricist, a Librettist . . . or hey, maybe you even swing both ways (Oh there you go again, Innuendo . . . just when they think they are safe, you “pop up!”  Damn it!)

See you at the Speed Date!  And spread the word!

 

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What if Ghost The Musical was written by a Ghost?

A friend of mine wrote a book.

Wait, that’s not entirely accurate. 

 A friend of mine made it look like he wrote a book.  The truth is, he had it written by someone else.  A ghost.  (Insert spooky music here, or this from the upcoming musical version of Ghost.)

And in the publishing world, hiring a ghostwriter is a lot more common than you think.  It’s what a lot of people do if they (or someone else) think there is a market (translation: money to be made) in the written word of that individual or in a particular subject.

Bill Clinton’s bio, Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, and yep, sorry to burst your bubble young female detectives, but even the Nancy Drew books.

And that’s what amazed me as I’ve been reading on the subject lately.  I always knew that business books and biographies were written by poltergeists-for-hire who for a fee will write your book and turn over ownership to you.  And in those genres, it makes a heck of a lot of sense, because without a Casper, the books probably wouldn’t have ever been written in the first place. 

But fiction? 

Yep.  And a lot of it.  (Some folks say as much as 40% of today's books are ghosted.)

Ever wonder why your favorite mass paperback author can turn out a book a year 20 years in a row?  They might be incredibly prolific . . . or they might have a little supernatural aid.

So, of course, I wondered why it doesn’t ever happen in the theater? 

What if someone like Neil Simon hired the brightest young comic mind he could find to churn out a new play for him.  The play would be produced, there would be a built in audience and a lot of press, and maybe it would get a head start in the market. 

And I’m not saying the young comic Turk wouldn’t have Neil’s guiding hand along the way.  He’d be involved and it would have to meet his approval before it saw a day on the stage. 

Could a successful songwriting team do it?  With as long as it takes a show to develop, maybe this is a way to have more musicals by some of our favorite writers?

Why doesn't it happen?

Is it ego?  Is it that our genre of entertainment is more complicated than the novel and requires more collaboration? 

Maybe a little of both.

But the real reason that we don’t have ghostwriters in the Broadway biz is that . . . despite a lot of cracks we take for being commercial . . . our art is too pure for that.   Sure, we’re the commercial theater, but we’re not in the mass commercialization business as much as it may seem. 

Our passionate writers wouldn’t let someone else touch their ideas for all the gold in the world.

And that’s why ghosts don’t haunt Broadway, I'm proud to say, and never will.  

 

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10 surprising things overheard at Broadway focus groups.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, then you know that I'm a big proponent of research. We're one of the few industries on the planet that spends millions of dollars developing a project . . . but rarely test that project before going to market, or when we're in the market.

I don't do a show anymore without proper research to help guide me in my decision making process (and BTW, that's the key - to let it guide you - not let it drive you. You are the one holding the wheel, and the research just acts as a GPS that gives you the short cuts to where you want to go).

From what I hear from my peers, however, more and more focus groups and audience research reports are being done, which I think is fantastic. The more we listen, the more we learn.

One of the greatest reminders you get when doing a live focus group, where you sit behind a panel of one-way glass and listen to people talk about your show or Broadway habits in general, is how much people do not know. It's not that they are dumb, or ignorant or anything.

It's just that . . . we live in a bubble.

Since we constantly consume Broadway info, we sometimes assume everyone knows who is starring in The Mountaintop or how many weeks Darren Criss is in How To Succeed or that Darren Criss is even IN How to Succeed.

I thought I'd illustrate this point by listing ten surprising things heard by me and my peers over the last six months at a bunch of different live Broadway focus groups.

Fasten your seat belts . . .

 

1. "Priscilla closed. Yep, in October. I heard someone on the radio say it was the last day to see it."

2. "I heard a radio spot for Mandy Patumpkin and . . . some lady . . . I can't remember her name . . . but it's, you know, that lady has . . . been around."

3. "I want to see Spider-Man." "I want to see Spider-Man." "I want to see Spider-Man."

4. "I get all my tickets through Ticketron." (Ticketron disappeared in 1991 when it was acquired by Ticketmaster.)

5. "I went to see Priscilla because I thought Bette Midler was in it."

6. "The only show I want to see is Hugh Jackman." "It closed." "Really? Then forget it. I don't want to see anything!"

7. "I'd see any show by Andrew Lloyd Webber."

8. "I don't like to buy tickets in the winter. Because if there's a huge storm I can't drive into the city and I lose my money. Bloomberg always says, 'Despite the snow, Broadway is open!' Well, it's not open for me, and I don't want to be out that money so I stay home and watch TV."

9.  "I used to go to the theater all the time.  Then I had kids."

10. "Wicked plays television commercials all the time." (According to my sources, Wicked has never had a television commercial.)

 

 

Ok, now, the above comments were each said by only one person in a small group of Broadway theatergoers, so I wouldn't take any one of them as an indication of a trend amongst theatergoers (although that snow thing does make me think we need to do a better job of articulating our snow policy to ticket-buyers).

But I post them here to remind us all that just because we know something, doesn't mean our audience does.

What's the most surprising thing you've ever heard someone say about Broadway?

 

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Do people really finance shows from Kickstarter? Results revealed!

It has been almost two years since I blogged about the kickstart of Kickstarter (read the original post here).    
There's no question that this previously little and now big dot-com has had a serious impact on how money gets raised for all sorts of different types of projects.  (And hey, it was one of the inspirations for The People of Godspell.)

But just how much money has been raised?

Kickstarter released a whole bunch of stats on their blog this week, announcing to the world not only that they've received over 100 million bucks in pledges over their short life span, but also breaking the pledges down by categories.

So how did theater do?  Here are the results:

There have been 931 successfully funded Kickstarter projects which were backed by a total of 50,144 people.  (And I bet a lot of those 50,144 could be converted into commercial theater investors if we could talk to them).  

These 50+ thousand folks have put up $4,051,962.62.  And counting.

Pretty good, right?  (You can see the results of the other categories here - including film, which took in 8x the amount that we did.)  What these stats say is that, raising money is hard, Kickstarter has made it easier.

And you know what's really cool?  Without Kickstarter, many of these projects would never have happened, and that money wouldn't have gone back into our economy.  Yep,  Kickstarter has had an economic impact.  And it is sizeable.

So should you Kickstart your show?  Well, sure, if it feels right for you, then do it. 

But the challenge is that because so many Kickstarters are out there now, you have to be even more creative in attracting donors . . . especially ones that you don't know (they have a lot of serial funders on Kickstarter, including one guy, who pledged money to more than 700 projects).  

But you can do it. 

Thanks for the help in helping so many artists and producers, Kickstarter.  Hopefully your success will kick Congress in the butt to allow a just-as-easy for-profit crowd-funding soon enough.

 

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The problem with hard "trade" tickets.

There's an advertising practice that has been going on for a number of years that . . . well, has to change.

It was a great one to start off with, and it helped both parties, but now, as is usually the case with anything that is working well . . . a third party has come along and screwed it up for everyone.

Let me explain.

Often, media companies, from television stations to certain newspapers, etc. will accept "trade" for advertising . . . sometimes in addition to cash, sometimes in lieu of cash.  That's right, if your product is valuable enough, people will give you "free" advertising in exchange for your stuff (in our case, tickets).  If you've got the inventory, and the media company has the inventory, it can be a great deal for both sides.

What happens next is that the media companies either use the tickets for themselves (gifts to employees, clients) or they place the tickets in barter networks like this one, where they can trade them again for other products/services.

All good, right?  You get advertising, they get tickets . . . everyone's happy.

Well, not so fast, my friends.  

There are two ways to deliver these "tickets" to the media companies:

1) Hard tickets (which are actual tickets for specific performances with seat locations and everything)

2) Ticket vouchers (which are usually valid for weeks of performances, but need to be reserved in advance with your company directly, and therefore validated, before they can be used.

Without a doubt, #2 is the best scenario for both parties.  It provides the most flexibility for the "tradee", because it allows the user to see the show on multiple performance dates and times.  And it allows for the "trader" to have flexibility as well, in case the President of the United States decides to show up to a performance, and you need to control the inventory.  

Additionally, when someone is given hard tickets for a specific performance . . . and can't use them . . . you end up with a block of empty seats in your house.  It's an eyesore, and an inventory-sore, because those are seats that went dead, that someone knew were going to go dead and you had no chance to resell those seats.

But for some reason . . . some companies refuse to take vouchers instead of hard tickets.  Well, I think I stumbled upon the reason why.

On at least four occasions in the last twelve months, I have found "trade" tickets in the hands of secondary market sellers (i.e. brokers) that have been selling them to consumers.  A customer ends up with a ticket that says "COMP" and yet has paid sometimes more than face value for that seat.  One associate of mine found himself in this situation at a very high profile final performance that was sold out . . . but his seat money went to a secondary seller and not the show.  The worst part?  That show had in no way near recouped.

Somehow the trade ticket had fallen into the wrong hands. 

If someone insists on "hard tickets" for a trade you're involved in, ask them why, and ask them where they are trying to distribute them.  Then explain the benefits of a voucher system to both parties.

I have often offered companies 125% of the trade value if they take vouchers instead of hard tickets (and if they refuse, that's when I know something is really up).

Vouchers won't solve the problem entirely, but they will make it a lot more manageable, and offer road blocks to those people out there trying to profit where they shouldn't be.

The trade system is a great one, but the time has to come to regulate it so that it does what it was originally intended to do before it puts more money in the wrong hands.

 It's time for Producers, Marketing Directors and Advertising Agencies to tell their partners . . . hard tickets are no longer an option.  Vouchers only.  If we take this stand as an industry, they'll have no choice.

They should get used to it anyway. Because in a few years, we'll all be using e-tickets, and they'll have no choice.

 

(Got a comment?  I love 'em, so comment below!  Email subscribers, click here, then scroll down, to say what's on your mind!) 

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3 Things I learned from the Holiday Week.

Talk to any General Manager in town and they'll tell you that the busiest week on Broadway is from 12/26 - 1/1.  That's the one seven day period shows look forward to all year.  In fact, have you ever wondered why some Broadway shows who appear to be on the brink of closing, limp along until the first of the year before shutting their doors?  

It's all for the holiday week.  

With the flood of tourists that come into town, just about every show from Broadway to Off Broadway to Comedy Clubs to Street Buskers, sees a surge in sales unlike any other time during the year.

Kind of makes you want to jump on the lobby for that Christmas in July thing, doesn't it.

I spent a lot of time in Times Square last week, talking to people from all over (and I mean all over - from Iowa to the Philippines, from South Africa to 57th and 6th), to try and pick up some information that I could use in guiding my decision making process, and to of course share with you.

Here are three things I learned during these mucho importante seven days:

1.  The TKTS Booth should be renamed The Theater Information Booth

Part of this is because of its location, part of it is because of it is "outside", and part of it is because it's . . . red . . . but theatergoers, especially the ones from outside the country, are drawn to the booth like it's some mystical oracle that knows all the secrets of Broadway.  It's good news, of course, because if you're walking through Times Square, it's hard to miss it (and most tourists walk through Times Square).  It's bad news, of course, because the tickets that are offered are at a discount.  Shows can now offer varying percentages off (40%, 30% . . . and even 20%), which helps, but since so many people I talked to flock there just to find out what's playing, I wondered if there was a way to get this info to them before they see those red steps to help shows maximize their income.

2.  A 7 PM curtain time shortens their day.

We all know that many shows have moved a curtain time or two to earlier in the eve (7 PMs, usually) to appeal to the local crowd that might want to get home before the 11 PM news.  But, for a tourist, an earlier curtain time just reduces the amount of time they have to . . . do stuff.  Think about it . . . you're in Paris or London or Vegas, or wherever.  You create an itinerary in the morning of things you want to see . . . museums, monuments, or the dancing Elvis show.  You try to pack it all in to a short period of time to make the most of your vacation.  And, well, if your last "event" of the day is earlier . . . you get the picture.  Earlier curtain times might be great for locals, but it might not help the tourist trade.

3.  Fear is a Factor.

NYC is scary.  It's not as scary as it was twenty years ago, when parts of Times Square were like an minimum security prison, but for the tourist, who has found himself right in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world, it's a frightening place.  Being anywhere that isn't home is always a little scary, but when that anywhere is NYC, well, the fear can cause . . . consumer paralysis.  Consumer paralysis is what I call that moment where a potential buyer feels so far out of their element, that they would rather not ask a question, not look for an option . . . and therefore not make a purchase . . . because they are so far out of their comfort zone.  They'd just rather go back to their hotel room or worse . . . go to The Olive Garden (because they have one in their home town).  I talked to so many people last week that just wanted someone to talk to.  A billboard wasn't enough for them.  They wanted needed someone to interact with if they were going to purchase a ticket to a Broadway show.  Expensive, impossible to get, etc. were just a few things I heard from folks who were too naive about buying tickets to do so on their own.  And let me tell you, as I've written about before in this blog (which I recommend you read and try and do something about), the bullet proof glass in our box offices is not helping.  It's actually doing the opposite and pushing people away.  We've got to find ways to reduce the fear factor.  And it's not going to be as easy as eating a few bugs.

 

The holiday week is a lucrative time . . . not only in terms of bucks, but also in terms of information.  Stew on the above, and see what ideas you can come up with to make it an even better experience for the hundreds of thousands of tourists that come in every year.  

Because if this is our busiest week of the year, then guess what week provides the most word of mouth?  

 

(Got a comment?  I love 'em, so comment below!  Email subscribers, click here, then scroll down, to say what's on your mind!) 

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My New Year's Resolution - what's yours?

Let me be one of the first to wish you all a Happy New Year!

I love New Year's.  It's my favorite holiday, and probably the favorite holiday of most entrepreneurs out there. It represents a new beginning, a chance to take stock of where you are, and make plans (aka resolutions) about where you want to go.

I'm a big resolution setter.  I set a whole ton of 'em for the shows and projects that I'm working on, as well as the shows and projects I want to be working on for the next year.  I throw some personal ones in there as well (drink less coke, eat less Wendy's - good luck to me!), because I also know that a more balanced personal life leads to a more successful professional life.

This year, I'm also setting another resolution.  And here it is.

I resolve to produce something I wouldn't normally produce.  I'm going to take a risk on something that might not be my cup of tea, because that's the only way I'll learn, the only way I'll diversify, and the only way I'll broaden my own artistic horizons.

I don't know what it'll be.  I don't know if it'll even make it to a stage this year.  But I will do something . . . different.  I'm going to produce outside of my comfort zone.

What's your resolution?

 

(Got a comment?  I love 'em, so comment below!  Email subscribers, click here, then scroll down, to say what's on your mind!) 

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Who is the Producer of the Year? WINNER ANNOUNCED!

We had a record number of votes in this year's POTY contest, and it was a very, very tight race (reminded me of the Millie vs. Urinetown Tony battle royale in 2002).

But the winner, with no recount necessary, is . . . none other than . . .

Superhero Producer, Michael Cohl!

Congratulations, Michael.  The readers have spoken (well, e-checked a box, actually), and your work in getting Spider-Man through the forest of bad buzz, across the finish line, and into the million dollar club has made you the Broadway Producer of the Year.

Thanks to everyone that voted!  

Let the handicapping for next year's race begin!  

 

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