There's no business like show business, especially for marketing

Today's New York Times has a great article aboutWal-Mart producing "Wal-Mart The Musical" for its annual meeting. We here at Blackfriars give Wal-Mart a standing ovation for using a musical play as a way to communicate. We've written and directed a couple of those for our clients, and they are hugely effective, particularly if you compare them with the traditional "death by PowerPoint approach."

As an example of how powerful plays can be at communicating messages, we had one client who wanted to launch 15 different products to their dealer network. If each product manager had been given 30 minutes to present their product, that would have meant 7.5 hours of presentations. Instead, we wrote and directed a 10 minute play that put the needs for the products in the context of real people and showed how the new products satisfied those needs. All the data we collected indicated that the dealers understood the products better and were vastly more engaged than they had been in prior years where more traditional presentations were given. We later put on a larger and more elaborate industrial play for the client's 650 person International sales force, which met similar acclaim.

To quote IBM's new ad campaign, "The only way to succeed in a globalized economy is to be different, unique, special." Ditching the PowerPoint in favor of a musical isn't the only way to be special, but it's a great way to start.

One final plug: for any marketers considering taking this approach, I highly recommend using a professional casting director and Equity actors, just as Ethos Design, the team that did the Wal-Mart production did. We always use them, and their skills can make a weak script look good, and a good one great.

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