By Jim McCarthy May 13, 2009 0 comments

Awards or Sales? I’ll Take Sales

Today’s NYT has a piece about how recent Tony awards haven’t translated into a gold rush of sales for all winners and nominees.  Here’s a succinct overview of it:

“The Tony Award nominations on May 5 generated mixed results in Broadway ticket sales: most of the honored musicals and plays did normal business for the week — sluggish, compared with many nominees in years past — while several producers said their advance ticket sales were unusually strong.”

Mathematically speaking, there seems to be little correlation between sales and awards.

Does that surprise you?

It doesn’t surprise me because I don’t think people care nearly as much about the bestowing of an honor from on high by Tony voters or Oscar voters as they used to.

With more information available to them, consumers don’t need to rely on the seal of approval of the industry organization to guide their purchases.  And they’re certainly not waiting around to be told what to watch.

My advice to producers of shows is that awards are nice, but remember what they are: they’re compliments from your colleagues.  They don’t say much if anything about the people who pay the bills, which is your audience.

And while we’re talking about the Tony Awards, I simply have to include this Triumph the Insult Comic Dog video because it’s still funny after all these years (yes, annoyingly there’s an ad at the beginning, but it’s worth it.):

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