Background
Founded in 1968, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, now known as Berkeley Rep, has grown from a small storefront stage to an international theater that’s attracted over 5.5 million attendees to nearly 500 shows. Its productions have won six Tony Awards, seven Obie Awards, nine Drama Desk Awards, one Grammy Award, one Pulitzer Prize, and many other honors.
Berkeley Rep faced the challenge of bringing audiences back after the pandemic lockdowns. In late summer 2021, it contracted Grapeseed Media to find and re-engage audiences through its unique mix of arts-focused audience targeting strategies.
Project Goal
- Educate new and returning audiences about upcoming shows throughout the season.
- Increase single ticket sales and achieve a 400% return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Help the Berkeley Rep return to pre-pandemic attendance levels.
Strategy
- Target theater enthusiasts using Grapeseed’s cultivated arts audience data.
- Use real-time in-market data to target audiences actively in the consideration phase for theater tickets in the Berkeley area.
- Use contextual keyword targeting to serve ads directly related to the artists and themes of the upcoming productions (not simply broad theater content).
- Use mobile footprinting technology to build an audience pool of recent visitors to other SF area theaters.
- Use an extensive white list layered with the above audience data to place ads on premium publishers, including NY Times, Broadway World, SF Chronicle, CNN, and SFist.
- Use a consumer device graph to retarget visitors of Berkeley Rep’s website across all of their devices (desktop, smartphone, and tablet).
Platforms
- Display
- Video
- Audio
Results
- Digital advertising efforts immediately met the set goals.
- By spring 2022, Grapeseed achieved a 1,244% ROAS for the June 2022 production of Dana H by Lucus Hnath.
- Drove exceptional engagement with a $1.60 cost-per-page-visit.
- Captured campaign learnings like top-performing sites, geos, and audience data segments to roll into future campaigns, increasing efficiency with each new production.
- Grapeseed’s advanced audience targeting and optimization strategies ultimately achieved an over-12X ROAS.
