Why cultural marketing needs to think beyond social media

No one working in culture today can do without social media. The problem is not the channel: it is the quiet replacement of strategy by channel.

When the conversation about a campaign begins and ends with platforms, we have stopped talking about audiences and started talking about distribution.

They create presence, accelerate recognition, let us test messages quickly and reveal language — the way people talk about what they see. That is valuable and irreplaceable.

They do not, on their own, build the reason to attend. They do not resolve positioning, price, calendar, accessibility, transport, habit or institutional trust. And they do not replace the channels that sustain relationships: email, group relations, press, partnerships, front-of-house service and the experience in the room itself.

A significant part of the cultural decision still happens offline, in conversations we cannot measure and can only influence indirectly, through the quality of what we offer.

I prefer to design campaigns as ecosystems: one narrative core, several channels with distinct functions, and a joint reading of the signals. Social serves discovery and desire; email serves relationship and conversion; press serves legitimacy; the box office serves truth.

When each channel has a clear function, we stop demanding from one channel what it cannot give.

The best outcome of a campaign is not only revenue: it is the learning that transfers to the next one. Which argument worked, which audience arrived early, which objection kept returning.

Cultural institutions that accumulate that learning become progressively less dependent on any single platform. For me, that is the point of the work.