Austin Improv

We ordered another 1000 AIC free tickets. Anyone have any brilliant ideas about how to distribute them and generate large audiences?

I think I'm gonna take a day next week and hand free tickets out on the UT campus. Anybody wanna come with?

Crossover suggestion from diversity thread: Why not Huston-Tillotson?

If you gave me some I could take some to St. Edwards and have theatre professors and the like give them away to students.

Hey, I bet you'll be told to watch theatre for homework assignments. You should carry the tickets with you and hand them out en-masse right after your class is told ot watch a show for homework.

Save me some for media, 150 or so. I want to get some back to DJs and the press and the like.

And I'll spread some among yuppie-dom and dancers.

always carry two free tickets in your wallet. give them as additional TIPS to waiters, bartenders, etc.

these service industry folks are always up for seeing free shows. then, they turn around and spread the word to dining boozing outoftowners

I can use a few (15) to use as prizes for cheesy work competitions. We've got 2,000 bored engineers in the building looking for something to do, this might help get them up and out to the theater

If you give a stack to my mom, she'll hand them out to her patients.

She sees 15-20 people a day and tells at least half of them about improv.

Sweet. Anyone that wants to distribute free tickets or give them to someone else to distribute can pick some up at the Hideout.

I like to hand them out to people I meet out in the news world on a daily basis, but I have no more cards.

Has anyone considered dropping off some with downtown hotel concierges? I bet they would love to have additional entertainment options to recommend to their guests.

I'm also a founding member and currently on the board of the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association (DANA) which could potentially take this as an in-kind donation / sponsorship and distribute some tickets at its next meeting or happy hour. Like myself, they live close by and would be a good audience to cultivate.

Taking a riff on this for a moment, I would like to say that while free tickets are a powerful promotions tool, it is just one marketing tactic that should fall under and support an overall marketing strategy. The marketing strategy should tie in to the organization's mission, its vision for its own product and its hopes for its audience. It is informed by the current and planned-for resources of the organization and with some semblance of market data (who is our audience today? Who can we get interested in being in the audience tomorrow?).

Marketing strategy also has, with some touch of irony, a lot to do with some of the other debates on these boards. Succesful marketing can be wrapped around diferrentiating features, a personality (Character) or a narative (Plot). We are not the theatre lackey of some great figure in improv as has occured in other cities so we would be wise to adopt the second approach. The recent Chronicle article did a great job of laying out some of that narrative in a somewhat scattered but pleasantly conversational way. What would change if we were profiled on short "Downtown" segment on KLRU (we may have been already - I don't have a TV to know)? That Emmy award winning show is produced a block away from the Hideout at the Downtown Austin Alliance (DAA). What would our tight, concise story be? Religions are not the only entitites in need of a creation myth. Our story should be tight, but expandable, and ideally often repeated... something that lends itself to good gossip and word of mouth.

Hmm... how did I go from free tickets to creation myths? No wonder I confuse audiences with my improv

Anyway... I digress. Strategies don't develop overnight. These things take time to develop, and I would be happy to work with whomever ends up being on the marketing committee after this executive director decision is made. I know from reading past postings that they get the equivelant of offer overloading, but I think these and some other ideas are pretty achievable and ultimately the total presentation should tie together - from who we're targeting for free tickets to how we represent ourselves in the press.

In the meantime, I would be happy to distribute some free tickets to whomever Andy wants.

-Mike McGill

Bob always leaves them as part of a tip to likable waitstaff.

Concierges? Oh, that takes me back!


I took 10 today and wrote things on the back like "Congrats! You won!" and hid them all over the Physics building on campus before rehearsal. I put one in the change tray of the coke machine, I rolled one up in the toilet paper about 5 layers deep, I taped one to a fold-down desktop so when someone got to use it, voila!

I kept them all easy to find and hoped that finding them randomly and in weird places would spur people to be interested enough to come use it.

If you see tickets with that written on the back, let me know it worked and I'll do it again.

I appreciate all the different approaches people are taking to distributing these and I think that's a good idea. I regret, though, if my suggestion was too old-fashioned. Concierge desks do exist at the numerous downtown hotels as do confused and bored visitors and I find myself providing entertainment suggestions to lost-looking people all the time.

I thought about it and, while a fun exercise, I don't think I would use a ticket found in the manner you describe...or at least not have great respect for it. The comment was made by Andy that no matter how many of these we hand out, very few come back. I would argue that we're not targeting people that would actually use them and instead we're inserting them in the toilet paper in the men's bathroom of the Physics building. That's my only qualm....Perhaps it's just a difference of opinion...and there's room for plenty of that on such matters.