Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Coming to Their Senses

This past Sunday, the New York Times' Arts and Leisure Section, published it's Broadway Fall Preview. It was chockablock with full page and mult-page ads for several shows slated to arrive this fall.

It's always nice to see these splashy ads placed by hopeful and confident producers anxious to promote their latest offerings. What's even nicer this time around, is that most (but not all) of the big ads actually display the theater that each show will be presented in.

At first glance, this might be considered no big deal. It seems like simple common sense to put the location of the show you are spending thousands of dollars to promote. Strangely enough, this hasn't been the case lately.

Most recently, these newspaper ads, television and radio ads, and even billboard ads for shows have conspicuously omitted this information. The game being played was to steer ticket buyers to internet and phone sales that would have added commissions and fees to the purchase price of tickets for these shows. These added fees are not charged on purchases made at the box office.

I wonder why this trend seems to have stopped, at least for the ads I saw last Sunday, but it is unmistakably a consumer friendly development and hopefully it will continue. It isn't often that Broadway ticket buyers get a bone thrown their way, so it should be enjoyed, nay, savored, by those that prefer to buy tickets in person.  

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