The PR Shop

WITH DAVE BULLARD

IN 2022, CHALLENGE WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW

Each year, we hire performers and acts at the Great New York State Fair -- a comic juggler, a diving-dog show, racing pigs, colorful stilt walkers and more. Each year, after the fair is over, we sit down to decide which performers should return next year and which should not.

Normally, that process is driven by our perception of the quality of the act and the size of crowd it draws. As you can imagine, this is a very subjective process. No one can watch every performance, every day. Also, the staff member may just be in the wrong mood -- hot, tired or hungry (for example, research shows that parole boards grant parole far more often after lunch than before lunch).

This year will be different. This year, I asked the research company that conducts our annual survey of fairgoers to visit each grounds entertainment show a few times and ask less than a minute’s worth of questions to attendees as the show ended. As I write this, I’ve just received the results and it’s safe to say our committee is in for a few surprises -- what we think we know may not be what we ought to know.

In the larger picture, the pandemic has upended so many things we used to know and take for granted. Could 2022 be the year you examine some long-held beliefs for signs of change?

Take, for example, customer service. Our festivals and events are public, and the public often has questions and occasionally has comments or criticisms. How are you set up to respond to the public?

If your answer is that the primary means of communicating with you are by phone and email, this may be an assumption you should challenge. The social media software firm Sprout Social finds in its annual survey that social media is the number one path consumers prefer to take to resolve a question or offer feedback. It also finds that consumers make purchases from companies that respond quickly to their questions.

The survey highlights the disconnect between what consumers want and what companies believe they want. Consumers say great customer service on social platforms is the #1 reason why a brand is the best in its class, while marketers rank great customer service on social only #6. Most festivals have someone assigned to answer the phone. Who answers the social media “phone”? Is 2022 the year you shake up your media mix? Newspapers continue to die the death of a thousand paper cuts and the decay has finally begun to reach the smaller markets. Marketers have always relied on print for advertising, in part because newspapers also provide coverage of their events. They are often media partners.

The media landscape, however, continues to change and change hit warp speed during the pandemic.

The radio consulting firm Edison Research publishes an annual survey called The Infinite Dial. This year’s edition is striking. We all know that when it comes to reaching an audience via social media, Facebook is still king. Except that’s not exactly true.

While Facebook remains a massive #1 for most consumers, when the consumer is under age 35, there is no dominant single platform. The top platform for people age 12 - 34 (which is an important demo for events such as modern music festivals and also for influencing kids to get their parents to take them to an event) is Instagram, used most often by 33% of people in that age group. Facebook, SnapChat and TikTok follow behind.

It also finds that about 193 million Americans age 12 and up -- 68% of the population -- listened to online audio sometime in the last month, from services such as Pandora and Spotify, about a quarter of those surveyed had listened to SiriusXM satellite radio, 41% of those surveyed had listened to a podcast in the last month and regular listeners caught an average of five podcasts each week and many people have three smart speakers such as Alexa in their homes.

If ever there was a time to think hard about breaking away from your traditional media mix, it’s now.

There are also large assumptions about race and class that are being challenged in the wider world and, as we embrace diversity, equity and inclusion, these are issues ripe for re-examination as well.

People have always been resistant to change. Doing the same thing year after year requires less work than making changes and it’s less likely to be punished by risk-averse bosses. However, it’s a simple argument in the end: The world has changed and if we stay the same, we’re actually falling behind.

Dave Bullard is the Public Relations and Marketing Manager for The Great New York State Fair in Syracuse, the nation’s first and oldest state fair, dating to 1841. He has spent his entire life in and around media, spending many years in print, radio, TV and online media in addition to running a solo PR, marketing and video production business and founding one of the nation’s first online-only local news publications in 1999.

Dave is also the moderator for the IFEA PR and Marketing Virtual Affinity Group every 2nd Tuesday of the month and welcomes you to attend their monthly chat! Dave can be reached anytime at dave.bullard@agriculture.ny.gov and is here to support the great people and events of our industry. Don’t hesitate to drop him a note with suggestions, thoughts or counterarguments anytime.

WWW.KALIFF.COM