The New York Times: Ads Celebrate Mozart in the City

by Stuart Elliott

Each year, November becomes Movember as men raise money to fight cancer by growing mustaches. This year, November is Movember for another reason, as a radio station and website known for classical music celebrate what they are declaring to be a “month of Mozart.”

The station, WQXR, 105.9 FM, is one of three operated by New York Public Radio, along with WNYC AM and FM. For the last two Novembers, WQXR and its website, wqxr.org, have marked November as “Beethoven Awareness Month,” with an elaborate multimedia campaign that urged listeners to “Obey Thoven.”

For the campaign to promote the 30 days of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, WQXR and its agency, a New York shop named Eyeball, are adding more elements than they had deployed for the Beethoven months. There will be content on social media platforms like Instagram and Tumblr as well as Twitter and YouTube.

The campaign also includes ads in media that were used for the Beethoven campaign, among them a television commercial, to run on WNET, Channel 13; radio commercials; outdoor ads in the form of billboards and posters, which read “I AM A DEUS”; and banner ads on nymag.com, the website of New York magazine.

There will again be events, tote bags and T-shirts, along with a contest (with a piano as the prize) and a display in the windows of the New York Public Radio office at 44 Charlton Street, at Varick Street, in Manhattan.

The budget for the Mozart campaign, around $300,000, is about the same as each Beethoven campaign cost.

The goals of the Mozart campaign are the same as the goals of the Beethoven campaigns. One goal is to help WQXR find additional listeners, which is never easy for a station devoted to classical music. The other goal is to remind listeners, whether casual or regular, to seek out the station, whether on the air or online.

“So many people like classical music, but they don’t always remember to tune in,” says Noreen O’Loughlin, vice president of integrated marketing at New York Public Radio.

In the most recent ratings, compiled by the Nielsen Audio division of Nielsen, WQXR was in 22nd place last month among all New York radio stations, the same ranking that it had in October 2011.

However, there were 751,400 unique listeners each week of last month, Nielsen Audio reported, compared with about 700,000 each week of the same month two years ago.

Now, as then, WQXR has “the largest audience for any classical music station in the U.S.,” says Ms. O’Loughlin, who is also general manager of New York Public Radio’s Jerome L. Greene Performance Space.

The strategy behind the campaigns “is to choose these composers who are well known and well loved,” Ms. O’Loughlin says, “and expand programming so people can get a good dose of a great composer.”

Another part of the strategy, she adds, is to combine those “beloved composers” with “the unexpected creative” approach of Eyeball, which presents the composers and their music in a new, offbeat light to “make you laugh.”

“The persona, the personality we’re cultivating is very friendly, very available,” with programming “you can drop in and enjoy,” Ms. O’Loughlin says, to dispel perceptions of classical music as formidable, forbidding or lofty.

Such an approach also makes it seem as if the composers had “come to New York,” she adds, to “be viscerally a part of the city and WQXR.”

That is embodied not only by the “I AM A DEUS” assertions on the posters and billboards but also by the Tumblr page, titled “Life With Wolfie.” It is being written in the present-tense voice of his parents, recounting how they are raising their son in “the fast-paced life of classical music.”

“There’s kind of a story line of them going on tour across Europe with the family, with the dad trying to wrangle the kids,” Ms. O’Loughlin says. “It’s really funny.”

The puckish spirit of the campaign was also present in a teaser phase that preceded the formal introduction on Friday. WQXR and Eyeball brought back the “Obey Thoven” posters from the Beethoven campaign and had them put up around the city, in “wild posting” style.

The new Beethoven posters, however, were different: They were styled to look as if they had been defaced with graffiti. Beethoven’s face was adorned with elements like blue hair, a mustache, a goatee or glasses. On some posters, Beethoven’s face was even marked with what were intended to be wolf claws.

And “MOZART” was scribbled over “THOVEN,” with the “A” enclosed in a circle the way it appears when it is part of the word “Anarchy.”

Alex Moulton, executive creative director at Eyeball, says the graffiti art, as well as the bold words “I AM A DEUS,” can also be perceived as an effort to “channel Mozart’s rebellious personality.”

“He had such an amplified personality,” Mr. Moulton says, likening him — even if it is “going a little far" — to being “the Kanye West or the Lady Gaga” of his era.

Limore Shur, chief creative officer of Eyeball, describes the tone of the campaign this way: “Here comes Mozart, leading his wolf pack, or the ‘wolf gang.' ”

“We loved playing off his name,” Mr. Shur says. “As we contemporized it, it allows us to put a lot of ego behind it,” he adds, as when Mozart “calls himself a god” in the “I AM A DEUS” posters and tries “making his mark by defacing Beethoven,” with “the wolf claws as his way of ‘tagging.' ”

“We want to give classical music a fresh look, a new face,” Mr. Shur says, in order to woo “a younger audience, a broader audience.”

“In a very, very busy city with a lot of visual information, we have to cut through, with classical music of all things,” he adds, and “giving people a little bit of a nod and a wink” with the campaign’s playful approach can help accomplish that.

“We look forward to what next year will bring,” Mr. Shur says. Asked which composer may be the subject of a November 2014 campaign, he replied, “We’ll cross that musical bridge when we come to it.”

Ms. O’Loughlin says she believes the next composer will also be one of “the crowd-pleasers” like Mozart or Beethoven, someone “with a really deep repertoire and who resonates with many people.”

Will Verdi make Mozart and Beethoven green with envy? Will Rachmaninoff rock the city? Will Chopin show up next? Will Wagner wake the weary? Will Haydn come out of hiding? As they say on the radio, stay tuned.

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