This mail has nothing to do with dance or technology, but since you nearly
all have experience advertising performances I though I'd ask whether you
might help soothe my guilty conscience about postering for my latest
concert. Or maybe you'll scold me.
Every time I go through the process of marching through the streets
plastering people's visual space with my posters, I have plenty of time to
churn it over and conclude that I'm very unhappy about it:
It uses a lot of paper.
It uses a lot of ink.
It occupies space that doesn't really "belong" to me.
Nobody asked to look at my posters or flyers anyway.
The only thing positive about it is that in doing this one becomes
frighteningly aware of the fight for advertising space. Here in Germany
that war is EASILY won by a single TV guide magazine called "TV
Spielfilm", which covers thousands of square kilometers of walls with a
shinier, browner and firmer pair of breasts each week. Their front page
models no doubt cover virgin rainforest paper with ink containing heavy
metal and other nasties. I'm certainly not as bad as that, but Mum told
me two wrongs don't make a right.
I can't help thinking that advertising by computer is environmentally
preferable, but I loathe SPAM arriving in my Email-box. Web pages are
polite and passive, since they have to be called up by a user wanting to
see them, but how do you draw someone's attention to the "link" to your
pages ? To hook them you have to invade their computer space. I certainly
get annoyed by bandwidth-hogging advertising on, for example, yahoo.com,
silly animated cars screaming across the top of the news promising I can
win $10000.
The only advertising "hooks" on web pages I find acceptable are those
on web pages dedicated to promoting performances, or announcements
on discussion groups such as this. These sources must be selected by the
would-be audience member, who has thus already expressed an interest in
finding out about such performances.
Radio announcements are great, but it's _very_ hard to get a mention
unless you are already very well known.
I ask myself how I find out about concerts. My major source is music,
theatre and performance magazines, radio announcements, and lists of
forthcoming events from venues. I suspect this is however very unusual.
There's something ridiculous about Michael Jackson singing about the
"hurting Earth" and then covering the area of Brazil with posters to get
people to his concerts.
Yours compromised,
Darren
PS: I use home-made flour and water paste, and feel guilty about wasting
food.
************************ SPAM FREE ZONE *****************************
PLAY spielt im Prinzenbar, (im Docks), Kastanienallee, Hamburg
am 10.06.98 um 21:00 <--- :)---
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Darren Kelly, DESY -MPY-, Notkestr.85,22603 Hamburg, Germany
Phone:+49-40-8998-4569 Fax:+49-40-8998-4305 Email:kelly@x4u2.desy.de
New residential phone number: 8227 4024 <---------
(All correspondence to my DESY address please)
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