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YOU LOVE THEM ALL EQUALLY
To understand what makes SpotCo work so well, it helps to understand that Hodges has a knack for viewing the challenges unique to marketing a Broadway show—and there are no shortages of these—as creative opportunities. In no other industry, for example, do agencies represent a cluster of clients who compete so directly with each other, each screaming for attention in The New York Times. This year, four of the plays SpotCo branded—Democracy, Gem of the Ocean, The Pillowman, and Doubt—filled all four Tony nomination slots for Best Play (Doubt won). And it’s not as though Hodges can pick a favorite; as he sees it, that would be like asking a parent to pick a favorite child. “You love them all equally,” he explains. As such, it can be tricky to represent so many competitors. “But the way it plays out is that you have to be very clear about what’s unique about each brand. It challenges us to be really good at branding.”

It would also be difficult to find too many industries that charge their agencies with advertising a product that, essentially, doesn’t exist. But SpotCo’s creative directors, Gail Anderson and Vinny Sainato, work months in advance of a production’s Broadway debut, guided only by a script whose moods are yet to be realized on stage, often by actors yet to be cast. The result is that these creative directors —relying on the producers who live and breathe whatever raw material does exist—are uncommonly close to their clients, and as emotionally invested in each production’s chance to take home a Tony as the producers themselves.

It takes a big man to admit, as Hodges did, that he’s found himself secretly wishing for producers to thank SpotCo during a Tony acceptance speech. “We’re here to support from the sidelines,” he says, “but the more emotionally involved we get, the better the work seems to be, so it is inevitable that you would love to think you helped.”

IT'S REALLY SO SIMPLE (THEORETICALLY)
Hodges’ conviction is that a campaign shouldn’t merely visually translate a plot, but make an emotional promise, giving consumers a sense of what it will feel like to see it. “You should be able to look at my ad and feel something that matches the experience of an evening at the theater,” he says. “And the more closely that emotion matches the show, the more successful the campaign.”

It’s no small feat to achieve that emotional parity between the aesthetic of a poster and the experience of a production. The first New York Times ad for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a comedy about two con artists, was ultimately what the clients wanted—a lush, deco illustration by David Cowles, based on a 1940s travel poster the producers saw and fell in love with. But the ad didn’t stand out. While the concept successfully evinced all the outrageousness of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ French Riviera setting, it lacked humor, breaking Hodges’ almost suspiciously intuitive law of branding Broadway. “If you’re selling a comedy,” he says, rubbing his forehead a little, “have the ads be funny. It’s really so simple.”

Very quickly, SpotCo steered the campaign in the direction of an earlier concept—one proposed by producer Marty Bell, and which had gotten lost in the concepting shuffle— rolling out a series of ads shot by Andrew Eccles that are every bit as much a con game as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels itself. While SpotCo couldn’t really swindle consumers—“There’s laws against that,” jokes Sainato—the ads wink with enough bonhomie to stay clearly on their side. In one ad, Sainato turns one of Broadway’s more aesthetically stifling requisites— whereby every millimeter of ad space is stuffed with critics’ quotations—into an ingenious display of the musical’s humor. Taking a good-natured crack at producers’ tendency to selectively pull one qualifying phrase from otherwise unenthusiastic reviews, the ad features one word from each of six newspapers.