Music Funding 101
Assistants and Street Teams
While bands may be familiar with putting up flyers and posters for themselves, they won't have the time to do it properly when they get a big enough sponsor. Either the band will be doing a few shows per week while working day jobs, or they’ll be doing shows full time. Either way, to get street and lifestyle marketing (both referred to here as "street") taken care of on a scale that will benefit the sponsor, a paid assistant needs to be brought in.
The paid assistant starts by taking over all the outdoor poster and flyer hanging that the band had been doing previously by themselves. The band can give the assistant tips on the best places to go, where to post, and most importantly... where not to post because of local regulations or irate property owners. The assistant must also carry a digital camera and take a picture of every area he covers. The pictures will prove that the assistant has done the work in areas where the band and/or the sponsor don't get a chance to drive to. (And they should drive, to check for themselves.)
Even at part-time (20 hours/wk), a single assistant can cover three or four times the area that the band could cover themselves, because of the band's limited time. It can take an entire eight hour day to put up signage on just a few blocks. This would include posters on walls, fences and construction areas, flyers on widows and poles, postcards handed out to pedestrians, stickers and CDs given to stores, etc. This leaves the band free to focus on important things like setting up shows, and rehearsing.
In regional (multi-market) sponsorships, an assistant must be hired in each market. Each assistant must know their own city, or more realistically they must know just their own part of town. The number of assistants needed per market, and the number of hours worked, will depend on how much of what kind of signage the sponsor agrees to pay for when negotiating with the band. But that's why the band and the sponsor used TalentFunding.com: to find the right negotiated match.
When more dollars are available, and when time is short, you then can add "street teams" to the sponsorship. A street team is a company that employs kids to put up street signage in a more organized way. Street team companies already know who is available and reliable to employ, and what the local regulations are as far as signage is concerned. Also, some street team companies are familiar with or have done regional and national campaigns already (hiring hundreds of kids) so they are more capable of getting a lot of signage up quickly than if the band tried to do the hiring themselves.
In the music business, "lifestyle" marketing is also used and is similar to street: kids go out and physically put out marketing items in select locations that attract the right fans for the band. But in lifestyle marketing, the focus is more on particular retail establishments. (For example: skate and surf shops could be targeted for a metal band.) The items handed out differ a bit too; more trinkets, postcards, stickers and CD samples, and less of the big items like banners and posters. This is because more of the items are going inside stores than are going outside in the open.
Lifestyle marketing, however, gets a bit too far away from how non-music-business sponsors think. These (most) sponsors don't go that often to the lifestyle specialty retail shops, so they not only might feel uneasy about paying to put their name on something that is going into these "strange" places, but they wouldn't even see it if it did get put up. And for a band trying to sell their own sponsorships, things don't need to be any more difficult than they already are. Similar to my recommendation to only run print ads in papers that the sponsors consider to be "proper," you should also stick with outdoor marketing that the sponsor feels good about being involved with.
So it's recommended that you not do lifestyle marketing, per se. If anything is to be placed in retail stores, just do it as needed, as part of the street marketing. But I would not recommend a full lifestyle campaign: leave that to the big record labels.
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