Digital marketing has given Broadway more visibility into what is driving ticket sales. Because of the tracking built into digital advertising, we can see which campaigns, audiences and platforms are helping drive sales and use that data to put more money behind what is working.
But there is a limit to how much we can get from simply spending more on what already works. As media costs rise and the people most likely to buy become more expensive to reach, putting more money behind the same channels does not always produce the same results.
At some point, the question becomes: How much more can we get from people who are already interested, and how do we reach people who are not thinking about buying a ticket yet?
This is where AI comes in. AI is changing the way people discover information, including how they may discover which Broadway show to see. A potential ticket buyer can now ask a broad question, get a recommendation for a specific Broadway show and begin considering that show without ever having searched for it by name.
If discovery is moving upstream in this way, our approach to media should move with it. The opportunity is not simply to capture more existing demand, but to think more deliberately about how our budgets create demand in the first place.
