Meet a Marketer: Josh Katzker, Director of Marketing at The REV Theatre Company

This interview originally appeared in the new BroadwayWorld Monthly Marketing Update, a monthly email designed for theatre marketing professionals. In each update, we'll share data and trends from our audience, wider trends in the marketing industry, helpful tools and resources that you can use to promote your shows and seasons, and, introduce you to some of the best marketers working in the arts today.

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Josh Katzker (he/him) is the Director of Marketing for The REV Theatre Company. He has served The REV in several capacities since 2005. He spent several seasons acting and road managing with The REV on Tour before joining the administrative staff in 2015. As Artistic Associate, Josh developed and administered The REV’s Junior Stars and All Access programs while directing, writing, and providing administrative support for The REV on Tour and coordinating The REV’s new musicals series, The PiTCH. He has also appeared in several REV productions at the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse. In January of 2022, Josh became the company's Director of Marketing. He is committed to ensuring the theatre is accessible to all and that The REV continues to touch the hearts and minds of Central New Yorkers, young and old, for many years to come. He holds a BFA in Musical Theatre from the University of Central Florida and an MFA in Theatre Performance from Arizona State University.

What is your biggest challenge marketing productions at the moment? How are you facing it?

Among our greatest challenges at the moment is understanding and, more specifically, predicting our audiences’ shifting behaviors in terms of attendance, ticket purchasing, and media consumption. We are shifting alongside them in an effort to meet them where they are.  For example, we have seen a spike in demand for seats at our matinee performances and a decline in demand for Friday and Saturday evening performances, so we made an adjustment to our performance schedule to allow for more matinees and fewer evenings. As our patrons adjust to an increasingly digital world, we are relying less on physical marketing collateral and putting a focus on building our digital footprint. As I’m sure other companies are doing, we’re working to strike the right balance between legacy and digital media. To help with that process, we’re leaning into attribution models for television and radio to supplement the wealth of data provided by our digital ad partners.

What advice would you offer to other marketers based on what is working for The REV at the moment? 

It sounds so simple, but I think the single biggest thing I would tell other marketers in the theatre is to really listen to what your specific patrons are telling you. As marketers, we’re often dealing with enormous datasets — here’s what patrons are doing across the state, the region, the country, the world. It’s really easy for that information to become overwhelming. I think we’ve found here that really honing in on what our patrons are saying — with their words, their actions, their dollars — enables us to make decisions based on the unique needs of our community.

How do you approach designing the various assets for your campaign? Is it driven by the marketing department, the show's creative teams, or a hybrid? 

Our creative is typically born of collaboration between myself, our Marketing Associate, Jess Norkus, and our Producing Artistic Director, Brett Smock. All three of us have very specific artistic sensibilities which would seem, on the face, to clash, but we communicate well and have a way of building off of one another’s ideas. As we move closer to the season, we also bring in a team of interns who bring fresh perspectives to the work. I think it’s that collaboration that I’m so proud of in our office. Our department is truly a team.

Why do you utilize BroadwayWorld as part of your marketing mix? 

Given our relatively central location in between Syracuse and Rochester, our audience is spread out over a rather large geographic area. BroadwayWorld gives us one central place where we know theatre lovers and appreciators are visiting regularly, so it was a no-brainer to utilize the tools they offered. As such, the ads we’ve run on BWW have had some of the highest engagement rates of any of our digital campaigns.

What has been your favorite show that you’ve had the pleasure of putting together a campaign for? 

I have several shows I could share just because they were so stunning: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Evita, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. The answer I’ll go with, though, is our recent production of A Chorus Line. For this production, we created a social media campaign where various members of our community, from the county sheriff to barbers to local business owners, shared stories of times where they faced high stakes situations similar to the characters in the show. The campaign did an excellent job of capturing the universality of putting yourself “on the line” and I think encouraged audiences to view the production through a slightly different lens than they might have otherwise.

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