I’m currently sat at home in our bedroom waiting for my son to go to sleep. It has been, of late, a fairly torturous process, usually accompanied by screams of needing his nose wiping, or “one more story” or simply repetition of the word “no”. Tonight is different. He’s currently reading Peppa Pig to his stuffed toy of Ms Rachel very peacefully, so I’ve cracked open my underused website to smash out a post.
I’ve decided to make some changes this year (aligned with my new year resolutions) and the two work-related ones were to write successes up monthly on Linkedin but then also write a monthly blog post about what I’ve been doing, learning and thinking about.
So here goes.
AI augmenting the handmade
We’ve been working with an amazing designer called Rebecca Pitt for a number of years. I think she’s a genius, one of those creatives who has a theatrical understanding but also a commercial sensibility who creates artwork that really punches. I’ve noticed that the better artwork comes from me (and show creatives) saying less – as soon as you become prescriptive with designers you end up with something worse. One of Rebecca’s great skills for Clwyd has been to design artwork that I can animate and bring alive for digital campaigns. The first we really did was for Kill Thy Neighbour. It was a floating island with a house on it and using shutterstock greenscreen clips I could make it move and feel inhabited. More recently I’ve been playing with some of Adobe’s new functionality around video generation. For our Under Milk Wood artwork I’ve used Rebecca’s literally handmade artwork and then used it as a starting frame, then created a slightly amended frame in photoshop or using AI to make an end frame. The video generation has then filled the gap. It’s kind of incredible. You can check it out on my linkedin feed – I also overlayed greenscreen birds and did some little bits with colour, but it really helps dial up static artwork.
PowerBi Update
I had a bit of a hiatus with my PowerBi dashboarding – a new building, time off and lots going on meant it kept dropping to the bottom of the things to do list. I also neede to rebuild it from scratch. I’d made the cardinal error of building a single purpose sheet and then adding – using one single table of data rather than multiple interconnected tables. I’ve been sorting that and the results have been brilliant. In particular I’ve been working on…
- Opentable – Using PowerBi to create flow diagrams to show how reservations and sales are progressing, but also looking at cancellation and no-show rates.
- Spektrix – Looking at custom segments to see how loyalty has been changing over time, particularly what our churn rate looks like and what percentage of new bookers come to us and then we never see them again. I’ve also changed how I look at tranactional data, finding shortcuts that speed up the whole process and make it far easier to get quick answers to nuanced questions.
- Meta/Facebook – A custom dashboard to look at our facebook ad campaigns – what’s working, what isn’t, where we might have creative fatigue and what the ROAS is over time.
- Jotform – This is the one I’m most proud of at the moment – it takes data from Jotform and turns it into three quickly actionable dashboards which has sped up the amount of time it takes for me to do monthly reporting.
Marketing a restaurant
I’ve a big marketing and strategy project looking at catering on the horizon. In particular I’ve got a new obsession around food & restaurant content creation and about what that looks like for a range of different venues. In particular I’d really recommend taking some time to follow Fallow, who have nearly 600k followers and who post interesting, brand aligned and dynamic videos (seriously check out their mashed potato video). I’m also a little obsessed with Marco Pierre White’s videos – his soughdough with anchovies and shallots is to die for.
Not all jobs are equal
I was chatting to another Director Of Marketing recently and realised quite how nuts my job is. I thought I’d write it down. We’re a major producing theatre, with three theatres, that also has a massive visiting programme, also runs another venue in a different city, has a Michelin awarded restaurant, shop, function rooms, has a cinema, over 1,000 event instances annually, runs Wales’ national artist development studio, a music service for Flintshire, tours shows, has a full creative engagement team, in house creative departments, in a small market town and works billingually. We’ve also just reopened our £50m building (and we never closed, we stayed open in tented venues on a windy hilltop) where the gardens are being done by a Chelsea award-winner.
Iterative Development
I’ve been leaning further into the idea of iterative change as a favoured approach to life. I’ve noticed that lots of the time there’s an expectation to nail it first time round, or there’s an inertia in case we get something wrong or not quite perfect. We’ve been talking as a team about how we do things and I’ve been trying to land more on the idea that so long as our current thing is better than our last thing and worse than our next thing then everything will be okay. As a perfectionist and obsessive I’m finding this very difficult to stick to.
Needing A Break
I was off work for a few weeks at the end of 2025. A combination of anxiety, stress and pressure building up and, frankly, I was close, if not slightly over the edge of a breakdown. I’ve always existed on adrenaline, but it was becoming more and more unmanageable – combined with sadness, and quite often fury at my own failings, it was adding up into a particularly nasty, and slightly crushing combo. I wasn’t the first to see it coming and I’m really lucky that my boss picked up on it and I’ve had some amazing support from people I work with. I guess why I say this is that it is very easy in this job to crush yourself without really realising you’re doing it, to justify potentially damaging yourself for the greater good. I worked silly hours, would have panic attacks about sales, was having trouble sleeping, an anxiety cough that made me sound ill, tight chest, struggling to find any joy any more. It’s all fairly bleak. I’m conscious that I’m trying to make changes in my life to not be that any more – I’m also conscious that blogging and success posting can leave people thinking “fuck, I should be doing better”. Arts marketing is relentless, it’s tough, it’s exhausting, it’s often under appreciated – all you can do is your best and then at the end of the day remember you’re only human and turn off a bit.
A Chest Infection
Finally… I’m meant to be about to start my tour of “We’re Not Getting A Dog” in Norwich tomorrow night. Sadly (and very frustratingly) I’ve had a chest infection that hit me right in my asthmatic lungs and have been ill so have pulled the date. It’s deeply annoying, but also, let’s be honest, I’m not sure audiences want to be coated in my phelgm as they wonder if the performer’s about to faint. Norwich have been utter legends about it – incredibly kind – which has taken the edge off significantly. Fingers crossed for Leeds next weekend. xx
From my own experience, Theatr Clwyd can be one of the steepest learning curves in the world for arts marketing and public engagement. It was only later – after we developed the analysis techniques – I realised how eccentric the extended catchment area was: geographically, demographically, economically, socially, culturally. But the core learning you have already Sam: it is never about perfectionism, it is about iterations for now (not yesterday or tmrw) and you learn most from what doesn’t achieve what you wanted. What I see today at Theatr Clwyd feels and looks right. But don’t rely on me: look at those attendances.
Sorry about the under the weather illness. Time for reflection is healing.