Digital Drama Queen Part I

Confessions of a Grown Up Digital Drama Queen

By Liesl Barrell
(A version of this article was previously published at The Charlebois Post - Montreal)

In this series, running over the next four days, I’ll be profiling theatre artists and companies to investigate their digital marketing strategies, online lives and incorporation of new media in production. 

In this first instalment, I’ll take you on a little trip through my twin passions (stage and web) and give you an idea of where this Digital Drama segment will be heading.

THE NET AND ITS DOUBLE

People are often surprised by what seems to them like a strange move for me, from theatre into the digital marketing world. When asked about it, I like to discuss how all communications stem from the oral tradition, and by extension, the ancient art of the stage. Or that the phrase “virtual reality” was first coined by avant garde theatre theorist Antonin Artaud. 

This often does little to lower their eyebrows, as I suspect the reasons they think of the two spaces in binary opposition are the same that bring them together for me: old or new, media is what I’m passionate about. 

THE EMPTY (CYBER)SPACE

Perhaps the first time I heard the siren call of the series of tubes was in 2007, when I watched a piece on one of my all-time favourite multi-platform marketing campaigns: The HBO Voyeur Project. It was launched by BBDO (the real life inspiration for Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, as well as their fictional onscreen rival) in partnership with a number of smaller agencies, vendors and media buyers. 

Watch the campaign summary video above and you’ll immediately notice the stunning theatricality of the silent vignettes that are at the heart of this award-winning campaign. 

The core messaging communicates HBO’s storytelling muscle by focusing on basic narratives such as “The Discovery,” “The Proposal” and “The Temptress” played out across outdoor, TV, digital, mobile, and social media. It’s no surprise that theatre practitioners often use exactly these kinds of snapshot summaries to isolate the action, drive or purpose behind a scene, act, or entire play: they are universal and have resonated with us since the dawn of oration.

SOCIAL DIVIDE

Thankfully, after a long hiatus, the archived promotional HBO Voyeur website is back up online, where you can watch each of the storylines play out to a score that evolves based on your chosen scenes. Big Spaceship, BBDO’s partner digital agency, built the site and drove online strategy, and they even created MySpace pages (remember MySpace? Meh, me neither) for the archetypal characters. This took HBO a step further into social than many brands had taken at the time. 

The single biggest criticism of all this work was that, cool though it was, the campaign seemed to have little meaning, it was all meta with no meat. Had they evolved their strategy to involve interaction between the characters and online users, HBO could have served up a little more substance to reach the greater level of engagement now more commonly played out on Twitter and Facebook. 

ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL PRODUCTION

Campaigns like these constantly transport me back to my worn copy of The Theatre and Its Double. To the pages where Artaud described the mirage of the theatre in virtual terms, that immersive space into which we project, find and lose ourselves. They remind me why the very best of new or any media is, has been, and aspires to be as profoundly performative as it is narrative. 

ON THE PLAYBILL

Now that you know a little more about what inspired my transition, I’m looking forward to diving in and covering home-grown tactics and theatrics, because there are some unique and exciting ways Montrealers in the theatre community are using emerging technologies. After all, campaigns like The HBO Voyeur Project are multi-million dollar executions, but they all start with an idea like any other. And if there’s one thing artists know, it’s that ideas are scalable. 

In the wake of a revitalized and increasingly competitive MTL indie theatre scene, theatre practitioners are marketing themselves with passion, creativity, innovation and sophistication. So it is with great anticipation that I close off tonight by saying that posts over the next few months will be spotlighting specific artists and companies and their use of viral video, email marketing, and social networking to build communities, promote themselves and find support. Stay tuned for more, and if you notice any crazy cool theatre marketing, feel free to drop me a line.  

Liesl is an account supervisor at Twist Image, a leading digital marketing agency ranked among the top 10 in Canada for the second year running by Marketing Magazine, and an organizer of Montreal Girl Geeks, a community run for and by women in tech centred around monthly talks. You can read more about her and the things she cares about on her blog at lieslbarrell.com or follow her on Twitter.