How to market a show to college students

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always taken great interest in everything related to theater, film, and TV. Now that I’m in college and my academics are focused on marketing, I still want to make sure I can tie in my passion for entertainment. So, when we had to choose a brand to study in my marketing class, I decided to look into a show whose advertising has always intrigued me: Saturday Night Live!

Upon taking a deeper dive into SNL’s marketing, I found that the show’s theater-like concept called for much different advertising tactics than typical television shows such as fellow NBC-produced Law and Order. Instead of focusing on the plot of the skits, promotional content almost always focused on the people who created these stories. Mainly, clips are posted showcasing the humor and enthusiasm of the cast and weekly guests while interacting with each other.?

In my personal life, as I’ve become more involved with our own performing arts community here at GW, I’ve noticed that interestingly enough, the principles behind the show promotions are not much different from those of SNL’s. Intrigued, I decided to speak with KT Zhao, one of the publicity directors of the GW Student Theater Council. I wanted to get a sense of her strategy behind marketing these shows, and whether they aligned with what I’ve noticed.

I asked KT how she goes about marketing specifically towards the GW college-age community, and not surprisingly, she said she focuses on social media. At the most obvious level, social media is good for advertising because a lot of people, especially Gen Z, spend a lot of time on it. Not only will a lot of users view the original promotional posts, but with people constantly reposting what their friends and favorite celebrities are up to, it allows posts to spread even further organically. I definitely recognized this as something I’ve seen with SNL’s Instagram posts before - oftentimes, I find out which celebrities will be featured because people I follow have reposted them on their stories.

While advertising on social media has many widely-known benefits like these, KT also informed me of another benefit that she noticed only recently. When school opened up again after quarantine, the amount of tickets sold for each show rose over time, but eventually reached a plateau and did not return to how they were pre-COVID. Solely posting flashy graphics on social media wasn’t capturing enough people’s attention, so KT decided to look back on what previous publicity directors were doing before COVID, and draw inspiration. She noticed that many of their posts were, ironically, more like typical social media posts rather than obvious promotions. They showed the cast and crew having fun with each other behind the scenes; they showed interviews of cast members talking about their characters, etc. KT decided to work with the actors and production team to make similar promotional content for their upcoming production of Little Women, and ticket sales absolutely skyrocketed, even surpassing those of pre-COVID numbers!

KT’s answers confirmed my theory: that good marketing often works because it showcases the human aspect of the brand, and thus demonstrates to the consumer that they could also benefit by getting involved. I am greatly appreciative of KT for taking the time to speak with me and for all the amazing work she’s done. I look forward to seeing the future of entertainment and social media marketing, starting right here on our own campus.