In this op-ed, Yango general manager of growth, Amy Carr, argues that the death of discretionary spending has been greatly exaggerated and explains why arts and entertainment marketers need to ditch the old retail mindset to capture it.
If you are a marketer at a cultural institution or live entertainment brand right now, your weekly WIP meetings probably feel less like a status update and more like a hostage negotiation.
On one side of the table, your CFO is pointing to the macroeconomic headlines. With non-discretionary expenses like transport up 8.9 per cent and housing up 6.5 per cent, they are telling you that consumer discretionary spend is dead, and you need to stretch your already-thin media budget even further.
On the other side of the table, your Artistic Director is demanding that the brand’s premium heritage and creative integrity be fiercely protected at all costs.
The arts sector is in a perfect storm of funding pressures and the cost-of-living crisis. In 2023-24, Australian state, territory, local and federal governments spent a combined $7 billion in recurrent funding for arts and culture – the lowest amount in almost a decade.
And somewhere in the middle, you are just trying to hit this Friday’s box-office targets without crying into your keyboard.But here is the plot twist you can take to your next board meeting: discretionary spend isn’t dead, it has just become fiercely curated.
While Australians are ruthlessly cutting back on physical things – skipping the fast fashion haul or holding off on that new air fryer – the “Experience Premium” is alive and well. Live Performance Australia reports that there was a 7 per cent increase in revenue year-on-year.
Even wilder is the “Youth Paradox.” CommBank iQ data reveals that young Australians aged 25–29, despite being hit hardest by the cost-of-living crunch, continued to prioritise spending on live entertainment experiences. They might be eating two-minute noodles for dinner on a Tuesday and living in a share house with seven other people, but they are absolutely saving up to sit in the dress circle on a Saturday night.
They aren’t buying stuff; they are buying an experience.
The problem is how our industry is responding to this highly selective audience. Under immense internal pressure to drive immediate yields, far too many brilliant entertainment brands are forced to default to a retail mindset.
You know the drill. You push out static, visually safe display banners and desperate retargeting to chase short-term sales. You slap a “Book Now” button on a beautiful production still and hope the algorithm takes pity on you. You end up drowning in a sea of visual sameness, attempting to sell a visceral, goosebump-inducing experience on a flat, silent screen.
We live in a world saturated by generative AI, deepfakes, and autotuned mediocrity. Raw, unedited human reality is the new scarcity. The ultimate brand differentiator for your live event isn’t a glossy poster; it’s the interruptive, unexpected power of the experience itself.
To capture a generation that is hyper-rationing its income, we need to stop treating media placements as standard retail ads and start treating them as sensory provocations.
In our experience, we see teams winning the internal battle when they adopt a two-speed media mandate:
1. The Efficiency Engine: You still have to harvest active demand and put bums in seats to keep finance happy. But you need to do it smarter, ditching the siloed spreadsheets. Integrate your CRM and ticketing platforms directly with your media buying engine. By deploying dynamic, show-specific messaging to capture cart abandoners (yes, we see you left those $200 tickets in your cart while you waited for pay day), you can aggressively drive down your CPA without cheapening the brand. This efficiency engine pays the bills and buys you the freedom to do the fun stuff.
2. The Growth Engine: Let’s be honest: given your line of work, your brand shouldn’t just be participating in the cultural conversation, it should be driving it. You cannot discount your way to relevance. To recruit the next generation of cultural explorers, you need to punch above your weight to capture a disproportionate share of that Experience Premium. This means building future demand through broad-reaching, premium placements that hijack high-attention, “sound-on” environments.
Think immersive audio. Imagine a commuter sitting on the bus, doomscrolling through their phone, suddenly enveloped by the raw, unamplified power of a soprano hitting a high note, or a behind the scenes look at a new dance production, through their headphones. Or better yet, an impromptu physical performance that breaks the fourth wall of their daily routine.
As an arts marketer, you are sitting on a cultural goldmine. But to unlock it, you have to break the internal cycle of selling tickets like they are groceries.
Frankly, you can’t do that if you are relying on an old and dated media playbook that you’ve used for the last decade. You need to take an independent, agile approach to rewrite the old rules.
The institutions that win the next decade won’t be the ones offering the deepest discounts on standard display banners. They will be the ones who prove, through every digital and physical touchpoint, that their real-world experience is the one thing actually worth saving up for.
