The Insight
Sell the experience, not the performance. Opera is one of the world’s most complex art forms–a feast for the senses. Campaigns needed to reinforce the brand of the institution and the excitement of the experience–from the moment you approached the Neoclassical edifice to the last clap of a standing ovation. While each performance was unique from the next, San Francisco Opera was doing more than selling an individual production. It was inviting audiences to experience the sublime.
The Journey
For over a decade Mission Minded created the subscription and single-ticket campaigns that kept the opera house full. Each year, we partnered with San Francisco Opera to invent a new campaign to grab the attention of a young subway rider, and stir the excitement of an established patron alike.
The 2018–19 Season campaign, for example, reveals how opera is a portal to hidden emotions and experiences. Through opera, we unlock something deep and embrace primal feelings. It is a tool to self-discovery that taps into what’s alive in you. You feel, relate, connect, and share.
Or take the 17-18 Season campaign. Opera is the music that moves the City. Music comes to life in different ways for different people, creating variety in the storytelling. With custom, motion blur photography created to capture the pulse of patrons, and the vibrant neighborhood surrounding the opera house, we see that San Francisco and its opera create a synergy that feeds off each other—one can’t exist without the other.
And on the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, we led the Opera to be bold and embrace 60’s inspired psychedelic posters—which were themselves inspired by late 19th-century art nouveau opera posters. With original illustrations commissioned from renowned Oakland poster designer Matt Leunig, the posters capture a trippy tryptic of love in all forms: unconditional parental love, lustful bacchanal lust, and youthful passionate romance.
The Impact
At a time when other performing arts organizations around the world struggled to bring audiences through their doors, San Francisco Opera grew ticket sales and subscriptions. Packed performances left audiences dazzled whether they were attending their first performance or their 100th.
San Francisco Opera continues to be perceived as the most exciting force in the opera world.
It’s not easy to sell this stuff. We appreciate Mission Minded’s youth, enthusiasm, and their first-hand knowledge of the work. So often agencies think they know everything but only operate on a very peripheral level. Mission Minded recognizes that to sell the arts, you really need to understand them.
David Gockley, as General Director of San Francisco Opera