In the summer of 2020, during a long, weary lockdown, you couldn’t walk the streets of Dublin without being reminded of an arts sector in shutdown. Outdoor posters installed before the pandemic were now prompting passersby about a lost season of plays, concerts and exhibitions — events that help form the lifeblood of the city. When I shared photographs of such posters on Twitter, one theatre director commented on the surreality of the situation: “Ours is the darkest timeline”.
As it falls, events did take a grim turn. In April, this newspaper reported that one of the overlooked institutions lost to Covid-19 was Irish Poster Advertising, the company that, over the past 36 years, transformed many hoardings across the city into outdoor advertising sites. At the end of last year, the company announced it would cease trading after taking a toll from the live events sector being shut.
It is worrying to see this when Dublin’s venue crisis has already been brought into stark focus by a wave of venue closures (Focus Theatre, Block T’s Smithfield premises, Andrew’s Lane Theatre, South Studios, Theatre Upstairs, Tivoli Theatre), taking place against a backdrop of spiralling costs and unchecked urban development. Already at a risk of little to see, how are we to know what is on?
This poses a problem for theatre producers trying to sell tickets. When online marketing grew in sophistication in the last decade, as a result of people’s reliance on smartphones, studies revealed that print media was important to older consumers, while younger people preferred digital media. These findings map on to data about theatre audiences in Ireland. A report by Arts Audiences showed that in 2013 37 per cent of people aged over 55 attended plays, while the percentage of audiences aged under 34 was 25 per cent. Seemingly, the majority of the audience were in the age group being reached by print advertising.
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“We would have run poster campaigns on 30 or 40 sites. That’s a lot of profile that has gone down,” says Stephen Boylan, head of audience and media at the Gate Theatre. That institution could be an effective barometer — the Gate Theatre’s audiences have previously been characterised as older. The loss of Irish Poster Advertising could be a serious setback.
When the poster company went into liquidation, Boylan sought out alternative methods of outdoor advertising. The Gate secured Dublin City Council’s flagpole banners to promote its starry, standout production of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Endgame. For the gig theatre play Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster, it bought advertising from the digital billboard company Micromedia, and focused on sites based on college campuses; “We were trying to change the profile of the audience,” says Boylan.
His outlook doesn’t easily separate “print” and “digital” as synonymous with “older” and “younger”, instead insisting that a good marketing approach is about recognising the strengths of both mediums. “It’s not a case of either/or. Print is still very important to us because it provides a strong presence that digital doesn’t always do. We advertise using digital out-of-home and on the street, but that is 10 seconds on a public screen and then it changes to another advert. With an Irish Poster Advertising poster, they are there in situ and they create an impact in themselves”, he says.
There is no evidence of a specific demographic of the Gate Theatre’s audience being lost without Irish Poster Advertising. “There’s a strong profile of people aged 65 and older who have gotten on board with digital. They may not be on Twitter or Instagram but they are on email, and the emarketing is reaching them,” says Boylan.
What has been lost, he clarifies, is the opportunity to create an impact with potential first-timers who would have a spontaneous encounter with the posters: “It’s a real shame to have lost that because it’s not only locals who would have seen the posters but tourists who come into the city and who are unfamiliar with the work.”
For John Morton, founder of Devious Theatre, Irish Poster Advertising was an important asset to the independent sector. “Their deals were always very favourable. For companies working with smaller budgets, Irish Poster Advertising helped level the playing field,” he says.
Devious Theatre stand out as a company which takes poster design very seriously. A decade ago, when the theatre establishment’s struggle with advertising was often characterised by vague design, Devious Theatre’s posters situated immediate, photographic portraits of actors into detailed epic backdrops. “We’ll pre-design the poster for a couple of weeks, and then we’ll shoot it. You bring it to the point when the cast are brought together, dressed in costume, and you have the designers’ input,” he says.
In 2019, Devious Theatre had its longest run of a play in Dublin. The Roaring Banshees, co-written by Morton and Peter McGann, was programmed to run at the Main Space in Smock Alley Theatre for a month. The poster — gathering the female ensemble into a contrast of poses, from sociopathic to wholesome, and surrounding them with clever historical details — reflected a Tarantinoesque dark comedy, dropping a group of Cumann na mBan fighters into the plot of an American gangster film. The company purchased sites from Irish Poster Advertising to spread the word.
“It was the single biggest investment in marketing the show because we really needed to widen the net in terms of audience. It ended up driving in younger audiences, tourists, even historical societies,” he says. As it happened, the advertising paid off. It was reported back to him by Smock Alley Theatre that The Roaring Banshees had been the highest-grossing original play presented at the venue.
“Now, if I’m putting on a play with a smaller budget, I would be concerned about the lack of exposure without Irish Poster Advertising,” he says.
Morton observes that the space for theatre postering is being squeezed out in general. Recently, he reviewed an old list sent by Dublin Fringe Festival with names of private businesses that would allow producers to hang posters. “A lot of those places were family-owned businesses and are gone. I don’t know if the businesses replacing them will take posters,” he says.
Aside from the impact on the box office, the loss of Irish Poster Advertising also raises serious questions about Dublin’s urbanism. The posters were design objects that people interacted with daily, their details having aesthetic as well as promotional value. “They’re almost like accidental public art,” says photographer and poster designer Ste Murray.
Murray’s poster for Dubliners, an adaptation of James Joyce’s collection of short stories, was recently on display outside Smock Alley Theatre. (The exterior walls of a theatre are few of the only places left for outdoor display.) For this modern-dress production of Joyce’s stories, Murray’s poster put the play title against a Georgian facade, its red brick blurring into a stretch of cold, unembellished concrete. The city’s character looks like it is being erased over time.
Murray describes the arrival of new posters and the departure of old ones on the Irish Poster Advertising sites as a rhythmic experience for the city’s inhabitants, who noticed them on their commutes and travels, and were stirred into conversation and prompted to make plans by them. “They gave you a pulse about what’s happening. They would change every week, and you’d notice that change. I say ‘pulse’ because it’s like something time-based, and that speaks to something bigger,” he says.
That “something bigger” seems to be the defining mood of the city, which now feels at risk of losing its lustre. “The posters are part of the zeitgeist of the city, to remind people of what’s on. They seep into the consciousness of the city, and of the citizen,” says Murray.
It was easier to sort through the accidental combination of events when you could walk past visual representations of them. Without that, has the on-street cultural directory been replaced by a newsfeed of social media posts and online ads on our phones?
The final batch of posters, installed late last year, can still be seen on some of the former Irish Poster Advertising sites. By now, they are discoloured and fading away. Without a new wave of displays to come along to replace them, the city recedes into an expanse of empty hoardings and concrete walls that give the impression there is nothing to go see.
