84: Behind The Scenes: Classical Music PR (Part 1)
What is PR? and How to Begin Approaching It
with Beth Stewart
Today our guest is Beth Stewart, who is the founder of Verismo Communications, a boutique PR agency started about ten years ago. Reading from their website, it says” At Verismo Communications, we amplify the authentic voices of women, queer folks and people of color in classical music. We represent artists, projects, and organizations that align with our values.” I think it’s really amazing that you have found a way to bring what you’re most passionate about to a part of the industry that needs a lot of help – publicity for classical music. So welcome, Beth.
Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Kellogg:
Well, we talked a couple of years ago about publicity. I’d love to just carry on that conversation. If we could just begin with, what is publicity in classical music? Why does this why is this even a thing that we talk about?
Stewart:
Yeah, I think the best way I could describe it-- So I tend to think about public relations instead of publicity, public relations being the crafting of a narrative over time that you’re sharing with the public and with press, publicity being all news is good news, let’s promote this event coming up. So I tend to think that we do both, but I like to focus on PR, and the reason is that that storytelling is really long term.
So you mentioned that we recently celebrated our 10th anniversary as a company and we have clients, like Jamie Barton, who have been with us for nine years. So that is a heck of a long time to get to know one artist and really get to consciously craft how that artist wants to be perceived by the public, by the press, by presenters.
Kellogg:
For many artists, the most important thing they probably think about is the performance they do on stage, where they’re there, sharing, their art, communicating with an audience. But so much of what you’re doing is the preparation that communicates with an audience before they even get into the concert hall. You mentioned storytelling. What is storytelling for a classical musician?
Stewart:
Well, of course there’s the storytelling that happens on stage, as well as what we’re communicating when we put a program together, for example, for a recital or a concert. I think that what we do-- I often say that managers negotiate the contracts, they have to talk about money, which I would hate, and we sort of touch everything else.
So when it comes to-- you really put it beautifully when you said how an artist is perceived before they even get on stage, that's a great way to put that. The other thing that's really great about our side of the business is that increasingly there are avenues where we can control the messaging. I'm talking, of course, about social media and websites.
It used to be that if you wanted to affect a public image in advance of a performance, for example, there were about ten layers of gatekeepers that you had to get through. So ideally, you would have a publicist who is pitching you to an editor who would then assign a journalist who would talk to the house and get an interview and so many steps down the line.
You sort of hope that what gets published out there in the public realm has any relationship to what you're holding back here. But now we can put messaging on websites, we can put messaging on social media, and the fans and the public are right on the receiving end. So there's very little intervening hijinks that can happen. I think sometimes that stresses people out to feel that it's their job not only to be incredible musicians on stage, but also to be affable and intelligent and incisive on social media. But it's actually a huge opportunity.
Kellogg:
When you get started working with a musician, how do you even begin to think about who they are and what part of themselves that they want to share with the public?
Stewart:
Yeah. Well, I talk to them. That's the first thing. But I would say a pretty high percentage of professional artists have been so focused on becoming the best musicians that they can be that they haven't given a ton of thought to how they want to be perceived, especially by people who haven't encountered that music making.
So I have a series of guided questions that I ask. I often say that your “personal brand” - such a buzz word now, but - your brand is how people describe you when you're not in the room. So I often ask people, How would you want to be described when you're not in the room? Or, If your family or friends or colleagues had to describe you in 3 to 5 words, what would those words be?
And that's a nice entry point. Just to get a sense for how they're starting to view themselves. But the other thing is that we don't get to just dream up a personal brand. Like, I would never describe myself as a lithe ballerina type because I'm not. And I would look foolish if I tried to assert that I was.
So after I get sort of those guiding words from a prospective client, I then go on a deep dive and read everything that's been written about them, everything they've said in interviews, and what kinds of words are used in reviews discussing them.
I used to even take reviews and put them into a word cloud and see which words popped. To get a sense for sort of what the critical consensus was around an artist. Interviews are really useful to read because not only do they give me some insight to how the client thinks, but they show me where the pain points might be.
Like, I can tell if maybe this particular artist seems to get tripped up when they're asked about a particular topic that they don't really want to talk about. And that's a good cue that maybe that artist needs to work on pivoting or that maybe we need to ask that “this topic” not be included in an interview. So yeah, I think those are my first two steps: talk to the artist and then do a deep dive into their existing materials.
So that's a very verbal, word-based approach. The next step is the visual partner to all of that. So then we're looking at what their publicity photos, production photos, social media images, website, what all the visuals look like there, and we want to know, do these visuals have any relationship to these 3 to 5 words we identified over here? And honestly, they don't always. Sometimes someone will say, I really want to be seen as powerful a change maker, an activist. And then their images are pretty anodyne, pleasant, and those things-- that does not communicate this action-oriented idea.
So that tells me that this person might need a photoshoot where they have some images that really capture what they want to communicate about themselves.
Kellogg:
And when you think about image, it connects to everything. It's your hairstyle, it's the clothes that you look best in or the clothes that you look best in and you choose to wear on stage.
I often think about young artists coming out of music school and they don't get training to think about these things. They don't even necessarily have mentors that are helping them dig into it. How does a musician begin to equate that sort of brand, with a few words, with what the image is?
Stewart:
Yeah, I think in some ways singers have a bit of an advantage here because we are taught this in school. Because so much of getting a job happens in the 10 seconds before you open your mouth, those first impressions are really important. I would advise anybody who doesn't feel like they have a solid handle on what their visual brand is, to honestly do a little bit of creeping on social media. Find artists who you like, aspirational colleagues or people you want to emulate and see what's working for them. I think your own gut can be a solid barometer of what works well on social.
So if there's a particular artist who every time they come up in your feed, you're just thinking like, Man, they seem cool. Like, I would like that career. I feel like we would be friends. That might be a great person to follow and to get a sense for how they're representing themselves, not necessarily because you're going to do an exact duplication of their style, but it might give you some insight into how their visual representation of themselves ties in to how you perceive them as an artist and as a human.