Selling Chicago Theater
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Dubbed Theatre Week Chicago, the promotion is the brainchild of FM 100 general manager Bill Bungeroth. “We really don’t celebrate theater in Chicago the way New York does,” says Bungeroth, who mentioned this disparity several weeks ago to League of Chicago Theatres marketing director Michael Pauken. Pauken agreed with Bungeroth but noted that the league can’t afford to undertake high-visibility promotional campaigns, particularly ones that involve television advertising. Undeterred by the league’s paucity of funds, Bungeroth went to work organizing Theatre Week and even convinced FM 100 to make a 30-second television spot promoting the event. “These commercials will at least get the word ‘theater’ in front of a television audience,” says Pauken. Bungeroth intends to air the spot, which features FM 100 morning talent Steve Cochran, in slots already reserved for FM 100’s own TV commercials. Of course Bungeroth’s efforts on behalf of the city’s theater industry aren’t entirely philanthropic. FM 100 runs a considerable amount of theater advertising, much of it for high-profile touring productions, and the station stands to garner even more if it affiliates itself with theater audiences.
Looking ahead, Bungeroth hopes next year’s Theatre Week will include a free public event similar to New York’s recent “Broadway on Broadway” promotion, where cast members from numerous Broadway shows performed in front of more than 40,000 people on a stage erected in Times Square. He also wants to get other local radio and television executives involved in planning and promoting Theatre Week. In the past television executives in particular have turned a deaf ear when theater companies have asked their stations to devote more coverage to theater.
