From church groups to AI, Auckland Theatre Company found innovative ways to get audiences in to see Red, White and Brass – a celebration of community engagement.
In Red, White and Brass, Tongan rugby superfan Maka will stop at nothing to see his team play the opening match against France at the 2011 Rugby World Cup…Including starting his own brass brand to perform at the international tournament, with only four weeks to spare.
Naturally, a comedy of errors ensues, laughs ATC Marketing Director Joanna O’Connor.
Red, White and Brass is a stage adaptation of a 2023 film by the same name. It’s based on true events and is one of the eight plays to be performed by Auckland Theatre Company in 2024.
O’Connor highlights it for how every aspect – from adaptation to the casting to the marketing – embodies ATC’s goal, set by artistic director and CEO, Jonathan Bielski.
“That we are not the theatre company for a group of Auckland, we are Auckland’s theatre company, so we have to reflect Auckland with our programming that’s on stage, but also the audiences we invite in,” says O’Connor.
“It’s a large-scale professional production, but it speaks to a particular community. It is their story, it is told by them for them – and everybody can enjoy it.”
The play’s co-producers and talent are vibrantly active in their communities – with playwright Leki Jackson-Bourke hugely involved in the Polynesian theatre world and cast member Diamond Langi with 58,000 Instagram followers.
While a large social media following is not a requirement for casting, it helps to create a groundswell and speaks to the heart of the target audience, O’Connor adds.
For Red, White and Brass, ATC produced a lot of visual assets, bilingual videos and ran open photo shoots, giving the team full rein to capture and share content.
While tapping into the networks of their creatives and talent, ATC also sought out community leaders to spread the word at local churches, town hall groups, libraries and in Facebook groups.
Tastemakers and social media influencers also made an appearance, says O’Connor. They were invited to experience theatremaking, whether at a script reading or sitting in on a rehearsal.
Sponsored content prices not-for-profits organisations like ATC out of the market, so there was no pay for play.
But O’Connor says some of the niche influencers have more impact than ATC getting a four-minute spot on a mainstream TV show.
Sometimes – being a Pākehā organisation with a predominantly Pākehā marketing team – it can feel daunting to deliver work like Red, White Brass in a culturally competent way, she says.
“You want to make sure the artist feels safe… that you are not asking them to do anything which to you just automatically feels fine.
“But what’s really awesome about this group is that everything is just so warm and fun. It’s been a lot of fun doing this show and working with them and engaging new influencers we haven’t worked with before.”
O’Connor says the play’s co-producers are the team’s most important cultural competency ambassadors – they set the direction and support ATC to take the right steps.
“It is a shared kaupapa. Sometimes we start with a lot of initial meetings where we just listen… They hold the mana to be able to say, ‘This is our work, this is our story, this is how we want to tell our story and this is how you can properly connect with our community in order to tell it.’”
For O’Connor, coming from the Australian Ballet in Melbourne, practising cultural competency has been a fascinating learning curve – when you’re used to being nimble and reactive, this takes time and patience as well as leaving your ego at the door, she says.
Best of all, she loves the myth-busting that happens when the traditional theatre audiences come to watch plays like Red, White and Brass.
“There’s a myth that if you do a Tongan play, then it’s only for Tongan people and that’s absolutely not the case.
“That’s why these co-productions works so well because the idea is these are works that reflect our multicultural city.”
ATC’s community outreach work has become even more important after Meta recently changed its advertising policies to prevent companies from targeting people based on their lifestyle preferences or ethnicity.
It’s a measure to protect vulnerable groups from agressive advertising practices, but it also prevents arts institutions from getting their content in front of key audiences, says O’Connor.
For example, Pride Festival can’t target the LGBTQIA+ community and Black Theatre NYC can’t target African Americans, even though these not-for-profits specifically produce art for those groups, she adds.
AI eases friction
Keeping ATC’s marketing inclusive but not stigmatised, while working within a limited budget, means teams like O’Connor’s have to be creative. That’s where AI comes in.
O’Connor was one of the first million users to jump on board with ChatGPT. Her first uses were personal – as a vegan, it took ages to trawl through blog posts to get to the recipes. With ChatGPT she could input what ingredients she had and ask the AI for cooking instructions.
Could this tool that eased the friction from her personal life do the same for her professional life?
Rewind to August last year, when O’Connor was presented with the eight plays ATC were to perform in 2024.
“And I need to come up with creative concepts for how we are going to promote these plays… When I’m confronted with eight plays, there’s a lot of reading,” she laughs.
“So I use CodyAI to upload the scripts and it told me the themes, the major conflicts, the character profiles, top quotes. I even went so far as to ask it to give me some taglines.”
Anyone who has used ChatGPT knows that what it gives you is never the final product, but it gave O’Connor a foundation to quickly build upon.
To produce the artwork for the each of the plays, she talked with her team of artists about how they wanted it to look, then got their consent to use AI tools to render these concepts before the photo shoots.
“There’s usually this almost conflicting space between an artist wanting to uphold their artistic integrity and then a marketer wanting to commercialise the artwork. AI was able to help us meet in the middle,” says O’Connor.
“I present them with the image, and they’re like, ‘We love that, that’s what we were imagining.’
“We go into the photoshoot and the artist, photographer, the talent, everybody knows what we’re trying to do. It removed all friction from the process.”
AI didn’t replace anyone’s jobs, it just made everyone get on better, she says.
The challenges lie in the AI learning profiles being predominantly American – O’Connor says it’s hard to find proper representations of people of colour, particularly Polynesian people.
Because of this, she remains cautious of how, and who in her team uses the AI tools – reminds herself to check for any subconscious biases and remains aware the AI might not be right.
“You can’t just take the AI for what it’s saying, because sometimes it goes off on its own tangent.”
Overall, O’Connor says AI has levelled the playing field for ATC.
“These are enterprise solutions that are completely democratised and accessible for organisations of any scale. It’s really enabled us to be progressive.”
This was first published in the 2024 June-July NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
