by Dana Lee on 30th Sep 2026 in Video Interviews

In this episode of A Coffee With... Adam Kirkham, head of digital media at Dewynters, joins ExchangeWire's head of content, John Still, over a flat white to chat digital strategy in live entertainment.

Post-Covid, audiences showed a strong hunger to return to live, in-person experiences, underscoring their enduring value in an era of screen-based consumption. Hit shows and cultural events such as The Odyssey in IMAX reflect a continued desire for collective, monoculture moments – spanning theatre, nightlife, and social activities – even in an algorithmically fragmented media landscape.

The West End theatre market is inherently competitive, and reduced household disposable income has impacted entertainment spend. Success requires agile, data-driven marketing: audience segmentation, nuanced messaging, and a media-agnostic mix balancing broad brand elevation with precise, addressable targeting. AI is challenging traditional funnels, shifting focus towards digital PR for visibility in chatbots.

Audience Segmentation and Targeting

Dewynters operates as a full-service agency focused on brand, audience insights, and sales. Its bespoke system, Dewynters Prism, aggregates large datasets: past shows, market trends, digital campaigns, geolocation, credit card data, etc. This enables deep insight into audience motivations and identifies postcode hotspots for segments, including those willing to pay a higher average ticket price.

Different audience segments demand different messaging. Show-related references may appeal to core fan bases, but not to casual audiences. Temporal dynamics also matter—for example, targeting date night audiences midweek instead of families. While platforms like Meta and Google are important, Adam believes every agency should be media-agnostic. Good strategy balances broad, high-frequency campaigns with highly addressable, UID-focused efforts to reach specific, high-value audiences.

Advertising Formats & Effectiveness

Creative quality is paramount, contributing an estimated 60–70% of campaign effectiveness. Creatives must be nuanced and tailored to audience and objective. Strong out-of-home complements digital as a trusted environment that elevates brand beyond purely conversion-focused digital activity. High-impact programmatic digital supports OOH bursts, timed to key moments in a show's lifecycle.

As theatre tickets are perishable, creating urgency is necessary. Campaigns are planned around pre-opening sales to gauge demand and find gaps. The team stays agile, ready to accelerate spend or re-evaluate targeting based on real-time sales data, as audience profiles and motivations can shift post-opening.

Impact of AI on Digital Marketing

With more audiences using tools like ChatGPT to decide what shows they should see, AI visibility is increasingly becoming a focal point. This renews the importance of digital PR and ensuring the brand is cited in sources that AI models reference. Social proof such as Reddit threads and YouTube reviews are significant as LLMs crawl this content for recommendations.

Chatbots may also enable native conversion within AI environments, potentially disrupting the traditional brand–consideration–conversion funnel. This is challenging in an industry where the producer (client) and venue (conversion point) are separate, complicating first-party data.

AudienceCultureDigitalEventsMediaStrategy