Really interesting and offbeat article in the New York Times today about a company, Transamerica, that sponsered a Broadway show (and lost a ton of money on it) just in order to get a big sign up on Broadway and amplify it’s branding efforts.

"The idea had occurred to Mr. Durand that shows were ideal branding vehicles for corporations, far more efficient than a $6 million two-minute Super Bowl commercial. While a dollar spent on Broadway will probably not yield a financial return, a dollar spent on commercials will most certainly not."

Brad Barket/Getty Images  Rudy Durand put Transamerica and the show’s creators together.

Transamerica did something bold that requires vision - they reached out to people who would go and see Broadway shows to create, in them, an awareness of their company and what it does.

“Obviously, you always hope that the actual business side of the production could have done better, but stepping back, we accomplished a lot of things that we set out to do,” said Lon Olejniczak, the chief distribution officer for Transamerica Capital Inc. and the company’s force behind the musical. He spoke yesterday, after the closing was announced. The entire $8 million, including the company’s investment, will be lost.

Early in the show’s run, Mr. Olejniczak explained how he saw Transamerica’s Broadway presence. “A Broadway play is a branding opportunity,” he said.

The NYT article goes on to explain that Transamerica lost money on the Broadway show:

"As it turns out, there was no gravy. Critics generally dismissed the show. In its three months on Broadway, the 1,800-seat Hilton Theater has never had a week when it was more than half filled, and the musical’s grosses have never reached what production officials said was a $450,000 weekly operating budget."

 "…Transamerica is not the only nonentertainment company to invest on Broadway. In the early 1980’s, the Mutual Benefit Financial Service Company, through its brokers, raised more than $1 million, a third of the capitalization costs, for the Broadway and London productions of the Cameron Mackintosh musical “Les Misérables.”

Mutual Benefit, however, saw Broadway primarily as an investment, not a branding opportunity."

So using Broadway shows as a Branding Opportunity is still pretty new.

But how do you measure Brand Lift for something like this?  Well, we can use a couple of tools like BlogPulse and the Buzz Tracker that I found out about a couple of posts ago.