Theatre audience marketing with leaflets and posters
Theatre audience marketing with leaflets means season brochures, show specific leaflets and posters placed inside a theatre's local catchment, usually 20 to 30 minutes travel. iDO (Info Display OOH Ltd) distributes more than 5 million brochures every month across 150,000 print points, the biggest print distribution network in the UK.
Sugandan Balaji
How do theatres use leaflets to fill seats?
Theatres fill seats with print by running two jobs at once. A season brochure is a printed programme of everything on sale across a season, racked and delivered to build the booking habit. A show specific leaflet is a single title sheet, usually A5 or DL, that sells one production to one audience in the weeks before it opens.
iDO (Info Display OOH Ltd), founded 1997, distributes both through 150,000 print points served by 60+ distribution centres, each staffed by teams local to their own areas. The season brochure goes to past bookers and to racked sites that hold it for weeks. The show leaflet goes wide, close to the venue, in the four to six weeks before the run.
What print formats does a theatre actually need?
A theatre needs three print formats: a season brochure, a show leaflet and posters. The table below sets out the sizes UK theatres use and where each one works. A5 is 148 x 210 mm and DL is 99 x 210 mm, the size that fits a standard rack pocket and a letterbox without folding.
| Format | Typical size | Where it works |
|---|---|---|
| Season brochure | A5, 16 to 32 pages | Racked sites, libraries, cafes, direct mail to past bookers |
| Show leaflet | A5 or DL, 130 to 170gsm | Door to door, hand to hand, front of house, partner venues |
| Window poster | A4 210 x 297 mm, A3 297 x 420 mm | Shops, cafes, community and heritage sites |
| Large window poster | A2 420 x 594 mm | Supermarket boards, larger retail windows |
| Four sheet | 1016 x 1524 mm | Roadside and retail panels near the venue |
| Six sheet | 1200 x 1800 mm | High footfall pedestrian sites in town |
Where should a theatre display posters in its town?
A theatre should blanket its own town rather than buy scattered sites across a region. An ultra local poster blanket is a display plan that covers every independent window, noticeboard and public site in a defined town centre, so a resident sees the show repeatedly on an ordinary week.
iDO ran exactly that for Trestle Theatre in St Albans: an ultra local poster blanket of every retail, food and drink, supermarket, community and heritage site in the town. The performance was oversubscribed. A town blanket for a theatre normally covers these sites.
- Independent shops, hairdressers and cafe windows
- Supermarket and convenience store community boards
- Libraries, community centres and church halls
- Heritage sites, museums and galleries
- Pubs, bars and restaurants near the venue
How large is a theatre's catchment for leaflet distribution?
A theatre's catchment for leaflet distribution is small. Most audiences for a regional or producing theatre travel 20 to 30 minutes, so the addresses worth leafleting are the postcode sectors around the venue, not a whole county. Depth inside those sectors beats reach across them.
For the Royal Albert Hall, iDO targeted Christmas bookers with 6,600 addresses solus door to door across SW7 1 to SW7 5, plus 300 first class direct mail to a named list. Solus means the theatre's leaflet was the only item delivered to that address, with nothing else in the drop competing for attention. The Design Museum used the same shape: solus door to door in W8 6 plus an ultra local blanket of Kensington High Street, Earls Court Road and Notting Hill Gate, which produced a spike in membership applications.
How fast can a theatre run a last minute push on an under sold show?
A last minute push can be in the street within days. The Royal Albert Hall Christmas campaign started within 2 days of the tier two announcement, and a blanket leaflet and poster distribution for the Welsh Rugby Union covered Cardiff, Newport and Swansea in three days. A theatre sitting on unsold seats two weeks out can reprint an A5 leaflet and get it delivered inside its own catchment in the same window.
Speed only helps if the theatre can see what happened. iDO has invested over £250,000 in its reporting system: GPS tracked distribution, photographed proof of display and a live dashboard with geo located maps, so the marketing manager can match a rise in bookings to the streets and windows that were covered.
Frequently asked
- How many leaflets does a theatre need for one show?
- It depends on the catchment, not the venue size. A town centre theatre covering its nearest postcode sectors door to door typically needs 5,000 to 20,000 A5 leaflets per production, plus a few hundred A3 and A4 posters for shop windows in the same town.
- Do posters still sell theatre tickets?
- Yes. Posters build recognition of a title across an ordinary week in a town where the theatre is a known building. iDO blanketed every retail, food and drink, supermarket, community and heritage site in St Albans for Trestle Theatre, and that performance was oversubscribed.
- When should a season brochure be distributed?
- Distribute a theatre season brochure four to six weeks before the on sale date, so bookers have it in hand when priority booking opens. Racked copies then need replenishing through the season, because a rack that runs empty in week three sells nothing for the remaining months.
- Can iDO cover a theatre outside London?
- Yes. iDO (Info Display OOH Ltd) works from 60+ distribution centres across the UK with teams local to their own areas, across 150,000 print points. Head office is Unit 3, Vale Business Park, Cardiff, CF71 7PF. Phone 020 3876 4268 or email hello@infodisplayooh.com.