The musical Allegiance has announced it will be closing after 150 performances on Broadway, per Playbill.com. That's not a big surprise, the show only got fair to middling reviews and never really caught fire at the box office.
The interesting thing about it is how a much vaunted social media campaign absolutely failed to turn this show into a long running hit.
Allegiance starred George Takei, whose life story the musical takes its inspiration from. Takei is also, for all intents and purposes, an internet and social media juggernaut. With nearly 1.8 million Twitter followers, and nearly 10 million Facebook "likes", Takei had a large and devoted audience to promote his show to, and he was quite diligent doing so. He seemed to turn up on all the usual TV spots also to promote Allegiance.
The producers of the show even sold $5.00 "warrants" to buy tickets to the show before it even had a theater. The response apparently helped it secure a theater in the always crowded Broadway theater season.
With the closing of the show, it is clear that so far, Broadway still has no idea how to profitably use social media to sell tickets to a show that isn't already a bona fide hit. Perhaps that is the true lesson to be learned as well.
Broadway producers would be wise to view skeptically the next time their marketing departments call for any major money to be spent on trying to squeeze money out of the social media rock.
The interesting thing about it is how a much vaunted social media campaign absolutely failed to turn this show into a long running hit.
Allegiance starred George Takei, whose life story the musical takes its inspiration from. Takei is also, for all intents and purposes, an internet and social media juggernaut. With nearly 1.8 million Twitter followers, and nearly 10 million Facebook "likes", Takei had a large and devoted audience to promote his show to, and he was quite diligent doing so. He seemed to turn up on all the usual TV spots also to promote Allegiance.
The producers of the show even sold $5.00 "warrants" to buy tickets to the show before it even had a theater. The response apparently helped it secure a theater in the always crowded Broadway theater season.
With the closing of the show, it is clear that so far, Broadway still has no idea how to profitably use social media to sell tickets to a show that isn't already a bona fide hit. Perhaps that is the true lesson to be learned as well.
Broadway producers would be wise to view skeptically the next time their marketing departments call for any major money to be spent on trying to squeeze money out of the social media rock.
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