Thursday, May 14, 2009

Parabasis: On Institutional Conservatism:

One force that frequently conservatises institutional theaters are their existing audiences.  Time and again as I've sat on panels and had conversations with people and read articles articulating the institutional perspective, they say "Look, we tried everything we could to attract younger/edgier audiences. They didn't come, it doesn't work, we're going back to doing what we're doing."  What this generally usually means is: "We adjusted our marketing language to try to trick them into liking the same stuff we always did and we lowered our ticket prices and they didn't respond".  The reason why is if they made the actual programming choices that would be necessary to attract the different audience they claim they want, they'd piss off their existing base.