According to tallies by the Broadway League, the 2024-2025 Broadway season was the highest-grossing on record and the second-best attended. After years of building the industry back after the COVID-19 shutdown, Broadway enjoyed a resurgent year. But the industry is also at a turning point. Change is the only constant, and Broadway — as always — must simultaneously nurture loyal theater lovers while cultivating new audiences.
The stories that unfold onstage and the ways in which they are told is a part of the equation for success. The other part is ensuring potential ticket buyers know what’s on offer. That’s where advertising and marketing enters the conversation. Those who work in entertainment know about the “crowded landscape” and the need to “break through the noise.” As Broadway turns toward a new chapter, Broadway News wanted to learn from the advertisers themselves. What are the challenges of advertising Broadway shows in 2025? What are the innovations to which industry mavens need to pay attention?
Ahead of the 2025-2026 season, Broadway News hosted a roundtable with leaders of five top-tier Broadway advertising firms. While seated at the Algonquin Hotel’s Algonquin Roundtable, Liz Furze, chief executive officer of AKA NYC; Callie Goff, managing director and chief creative officer of SpotCo; Jeremy Kraus, managing partner of Situation; Ilene Rosen, founder of RPM; and Matt Upshaw, chief executive officer of Serino Coyne shared their expert perspectives on advertising in the biz. What ensued was a dynamic conversation that included 1) how they measure a successful campaign, 2) why every show needs to be a brand — or not, 3) what shows they think have created an effective brand, 4) what they’re concerned about with Broadway audiences, 5) what they think of budgets and more.
Watch the full conversation below or listen to it in the “Broadway Press Day with Ruthie Fierberg” podcast feed. Excerpts of the conversation are below.
Broadway News: The 2024-2025 Broadway season, our most recent at the time of this recording, clocked in with some record breaking numbers for Broadway as a whole. … The 2018-2019 season was the highest grossing, and the 2024-2025 season was also the second-best-attended second only to that same 2018-2019 season. Those are some economic snapshots of the whole of Broadway. I want to look at those two points in time from an advertising and marketing perspective as well. Paint a picture of what Broadway advertising and marketing generally looked like in 2019.
Liz Furze, AKA: Legacy media was still being used a lot more. I think we can’t underestimate how much people were still relying on TV, radio and some print pre-COVID. That is very much not the case now. I think the acceleration of digital media as the major component of selling Broadway tickets post-COVID is sort of at the center of most of the changes.
Callie Goff, SpotCo: In 2019 we were already seeing some of the trends emerge, and COVID just accelerated a lot of those trends. So buying patterns, people buying more closely. We were seeing that in 2019, but it’s exacerbated now where people are buying much closer in. So it affects how we spend money, when we spend money.
Jeremy Kraus, Situation: But I’ll also add that the places where we would put our ad budgets obviously have changed a lot. Definitely 10 years ago, you would be able to say, “I know where I can affect sales.” There’s no more silver bullet. It’s very much you have to be everywhere.
Matt Upshaw, Serino Coyne: Arguably everything has changed and arguably nothing has changed. If you think about the diversity of mediums, we have what, 10 times the number of potential platforms that we're placing ads on as we did back then. Buying TV doesn’t mean buying TV, it means buying across seven streaming platforms. All that diversity has increased dramatically. At the same time, the nature of what we're trying to do at its core is exactly the same as it was today as it was five years ago as it was 50 years ago, which is how do you effectively reduce down to: What’s the emotional promise of the product we’re trying to sell of a show? For what it’s worth, that’s not special to live entertainment. This is how advertising works in the larger industry.
Ilene Rosen, RPM: I feel like one of the biggest changes from a macro standpoint is we’ve lost time in real estate as far as people’s attention span, especially for new musicals where we have to educate so much to a consumer. We used to have more time and real estate to do that. TV commercials were longer, we had direct mail pieces. We had longer form email blasts.
Furze: Full-page newspaper ads.
Rosen: Right. Now it’s like we’re trying to get it across in a really organic, 15-second social ad or an audio script. I feel like that’s the biggest change in all of it.
In terms of measuring the results of your campaigns, are you measuring effectiveness as a holistic strategy or are you looking at, say, the social component being successful?
Upshaw: There’s a trap that happens with the lowest common denominator, the ROI trap. [The idea that] this particular activity is working fantastic, let’s just funnel all our efforts towards it. It’s not mindful of the way a consumer goes through their life or reacts to advertising. A blended approach when thinking about ROAS is what we should be talking about.
Translate that for me.
Upshaw: Return on ad spin. We’re thinking about, “what is the effectiveness of a campaign?” not “what is the effectiveness of a specific tactic?” Understanding that there’s plenty of data out there that would teach us — outside of the Broadway space — that outdoor added to a campaign that had only, say, paid social… Add the outdoor element, and suddenly your paid social results are better, not because the paid social is performing better, but because the second touchpoint in that person’s life now means that they’re more likely to interact with that ad. So it is about understanding the holistic approach.
Does every show need to be a brand?
Furze: When you look at brand architecture, there’s different elements that exist if you’re looking at a mainstream brand. And I think visual identity and brand personality are two components that are absolutely vital for a Broadway show in doing what Ilene just mentioned, which is finding some white space for them and finding the audience. If I’m someone that wants to see a Broadway show, why am I going to see that one? What is it about that show, the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds, that’s enticing me to buy a ticket?
Can give an example of a show that you’ve worked on that you feel like you achieved brand cohesiveness?
Goff: We worked on the “Merrily [We Roll Along]” revival, and I remember Sonia Friedman, the lead producer, came into the room the very first meeting — before we had developed art or anything. She said, “This is not a story about show business, and it’s also not a story about moving backwards and all of these things that if you look at previous brands, visual brands had clocks and big marquee signs. This is a story about friendships.” And that also goes back to your point about does the press work in tandem with the marketing? It absolutely did in that case where our three leads were never alone during an interview, they were always together and they really did develop this beautiful friendship backstage.
Furze: I’ve got two that come to mind. Last season, “Romeo + Juliet.” Super proud of the work that the team did on that show. This comes to talking about audience targeting, as well. We worked with the producing team to say, ‘This is a show where we’re targeting young people,” and there was risk involved in that because as we all know, there’s a lot of conversations about young people aren’t willing to buy tickets at the same price at the traditional theatergoer is. All of the content was very specific and very focused in the world of the play, which we were doing long before we really knew and understood the world of the play. So it was one of those ones — which I’m sure everyone’s been through — where you start an advertising and marketing campaign thinking the direction that the show's going in. But everything was feeding each other. The other I would say is “& Juliet.” The cohesiveness of that campaign is something that brings me joy to this day across everything that we've ever put out — from logo look to the content to the organic social.
What’s that secret sauce in there?
Furze: A clear vision is always helpful. When a producing team comes with a clear vision for what their show’s going to be, it always helps speed the marketing. We are big fans of working closely with creative team members and we did in both of those instances. I think “Oh, Mary!” [an RMP show] is a great example of having a writer that’s central to the campaign and being able to tap into that voice. We worked super closely with [director] Sam Gold on creating all of those assets for “Romeo + Juliet.” It’s also knowing who you’re going after. It’s much easier to be clear and specific about what you want to say about a show when you know who you’re trying to appeal to.
Upshaw: I think there's a truism that no show has ever run a year without finding a way to communicate successfully to the Broadway audience. However, we collectively want to define that. And then probably no show’s ever run five [years] that hasn’t found a way to understand what is special about their content that appeals to [people] on the edge of that Broadway audience.
Furze: Can I build on that though? Because I was thinking about this a lot lately: that “Broadway avid.” This comes back to your very first question about what’s changed pre- and post-COVID. The Broadway avid makes up typically 30 percent of an audience in its first year. That Broadway avid has shifted — how reliable they are as an audience group, how easy it is to communicate to them, how much you can count on them coming out and buying tickets in advance of your show beginning performances has really shifted.
