We’ve just launched a website for Night Of The Living Dead.
Since we’ve already got this lovely website, you might think we’ve sufficient room here to do our thing on the internet, and you’d probably be right. But for a theatre company who put a lot of emphasis on social media, it makes sense for us to create a website for a show we want to build into a solid brand. We want everyone to come see this show. And if you want to attract non traditional theatre goers, the name value of the company is not sufficient enough no matter how well developed your theatre brand is.
Night Of The Living Dead is a big show. And right now in Ireland, there’s not a whole lot of big shows being made. The reason for this is that the people with the money are (understandably) reluctant to fund big productions in these belt tightening times. However, we want this production to shuffle, groan and live for a long time so it’s important to give the show a base where we can push it hard, appeal to wider audiences, attract programmers and create a brand for a show that we really think has massive mainstream appeal outside of our initial week long run. We want this show to be the must see production of the latter half of 2012. So that in a nutshell is why the website exists.
And yes, it’s very like movie promotion methods but that’s the point. That’s how you appeal to wider audiences. And as an emerging company that’s how we compete, that’s how we carve a name for ourselves. In fact, we’ve always embraced movie style promotion. It’s been a big part of our development and yes, it gets bums on seats. In fact, we can’t understand why more companies don’t embrace it (although the proliferation of theatre trailers in the past year suggest that it’s catching on). It’s just ironic that our first show specific website is for something that’s best known as a movie.
It also gives us a platform to keep audiences up to date with the production, design, rehearsals, writing, promo, cast, crew, world of the play and general behind the scenes goings on. We realise this is a show that may appeal to a non traditional theatre audience who are not interested in the ins and outs of actors warm ups and they may just want to see how we do the blood, gore and destruction. And vice versa! So it will hopefully cater to everyone with an interest in both horror and theatre. And of course, anyone with an interest in how a young theatre company are going to pull off a horror classic for the first time on an Irish stage.
Whilst the main concentration of new content generated will be housed on the Night Of The Living Dead website, we will still be offering coverage of the play here and of course, we’ll be throwing tweets out left right and centre.
So keep an eye for further developments here but make sure to keep the other eye here.