The Arts and (Database) Sciences

IT'S A LUCKY MAN WHO COMBINES passion and profession: It's a talented man who wins accolades for doing so.

Meet that talented man — John Elliott, president of Elliott Marketing Group and co-winner of the 2004 National Center for Database Marketing's Platinum Excellence Award in the modeling applications category.

Elliott's work with Mitch Swain, director of Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's shared services division, earned them the award. Elliott teamed up with Swain's group, a communal purchasing, ticketing and marketing organization, to create the SmArt database, a file of more than 400,000 Iron City-area culture lovers.

In its first two years, the system served as the backbone for more than 500 individual marketing campaigns. It also boosted revenue from ticket sales and subscriptions for Cultural Trust members from $32.2 million to $36.4 million.

The SmArt database links customer files from the Cultural Trust and several member organizations, among them the Civic Light Opera, Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, Pittsburgh Opera and Pittsburgh Public Theater. Participants can withdraw up to six times the number of prospect names they've contributed within the last 12 months.

Members are allowed to use the cooperative database for ticket sales only, and names can't be pulled for fundraising purposes. And they don't see the names; Elliott sends electronic files straight to service bureaus. The one institution that does in-house telemarketing gets a paper list.

“The degree of cooperation has been remarkable,” Elliott said. “They really play well together.” And why not? This setup enabled him to correct an erroneous assumption.

When asked about their top customers, marketing managers at participating organizations initially described affluent, middle-aged individuals with at least some college education. To put it bluntly, they were wrong. Yes, there were more than a few Pittsburgh culture lovers who fit that bill. But analysis of lifestyle and demographic attributes found that a strong predictor of whether a ticket buyer would make an additional purchase was if that person made a multiple catalog purchases.

Which makes sense. These were people comfortable with buying items through the mail and via telephone, the two channels most commonly used by theaters.

Furthermore, Elliott was able to demonstrate that most culture-seekers were already well known within the Pittsburgh arts community. There was no reason for the theaters to protect their customer lists.

By linking the six organizations, theatergoers were able to view the offerings as sections within a catalog, picking and choosing the ones they wanted. One holiday mailer featured a misanthropic-looking gnome who offered to solve gifting concerns for Scrooge-like recipients.

The 60,000 pieces that featured this creative mailed by the Cultural Trust in 2002 cost only $36,000, and generated $171,000 in sales. A 2003 mailing yielded $121,000, but that year the theater season did not have the advantage of “Beauty and the Beast” as one of the offerings.

There were other similarities between heavy catalog users and consumers with a high affinity for the theater. In their NCDM award application, Swain and Elliott noted that catalog users see a promotion and are able to envision themselves enjoying the product or experience featured, and will place a large order quickly. They also value time and experience over discount pricing.

Using this information, Swain added 150,000 catalog multibuyers from Experian's consumer database to the SmArt file. These individuals are available for any of the participating institutions to contact.

Another strong predictor was if the person purchased a ticket to a second event. It represents a commitment to culture, Elliott said. As such, much of the group's marketing has focused on trying to convince one-off customers to buy tickets to a number of events across the Cultural Trust's various offerings.

Merging and analyzing the files also allowed Elliott to better understand who buys subscriptions based on transaction-specific data, such as seating selection, number of seasons subscribed, and subscription package. This information has fed into participants' solicitation efforts.

The Elliott Marketing Group updates the SmArt database monthly. It also provides data hygiene services; householding (which allows it to have a fuller picture of theatergoers' involvement with the Pittsburgh cultural community); mail and telephone suppression services for each individual organization and for the Cultural Trust as a whole; and coordination with state, federal, and DMA contact preference services.

Swain's group, Shared Services, is economically self-sufficient. The organization is funded by a 50-cent surcharge on every ticket sold — whether through a database-backed marketing program or not — by participating members. This fee funds both Elliott's database activity as well as Shared Services' other marketing and theater-support functions.

Elliott may offer database services, but it's up to representatives from each of the participating groups to coordinate their activities and ensure that campaigns don't run too closely together.

So far, participants have little to complain about.

“We found that households receive less information than they once did, but they [get it] from organizations they were more likely to attend,” Elliott said.

Elliott and Swain will be discussing their work during a session at the 2005 National Center for Database Marketing conference in Orlando, FL on Tuesday, Dec. 13. The 2005 winner will be announced that day as well.