NAC Orchestra’s AI powered Marketing Transformation

About

The National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO), based in Ottawa, is a leading force in Canada’s performing arts landscape, celebrated both for its artistic excellence and for its drive to make music accessible to all. As digital marketing became increasingly complex, NACO set out to discover the best approach to reaching untapped audience segments, particularly those less likely to engage with traditional classical programming.

Challenge

NACO wanted to go beyond traditional marketing—to find out how to effectively reach and activate new and less-involved audience groups for its diverse concert offerings. The team needed to:

• Identify, target, and engage previously underrepresented audience segments
• Increase ticket sales from new audiences while maximizing ROI
• Streamline campaign creation and optimization, given limited internal resources

Solution

By implementing Future Demand’s Audience Intelligence platform and the Wave application, NACO was able to:

• Pinpoint high-potential new audience segments using AI-driven Taste Clusters, identifying which people were most likely to respond to each unique concert
• Automate the full marketing workflow—from segment definition and creative testing to real-time optimization—so campaigns could be launched and refined in minutes
• Experiment with tailored messaging for each concert, quickly learning which topics, themes, and language resonated best with new and less-involved audiences

Results

• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): 98% higher than previous campaigns, confirming that precisely targeted, automated marketing drives measurable growth‍
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): 5.44%—more than 11 times better than before, driven especially by strong engagement from new and less-involved audience segments‍
• Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Just 0.13 CAD, far below sector benchmarks‍
• Conversion Efficiency: Cost per acquisition (CPA) dropped by 53%

Most notably, the new and less-involved audiences that NACO specifically aimed to reach showed exceptional response rates to the highly targeted, tailored messaging and automated campaign delivery enabled by Wave.

Conclusion

NACO’s collaboration with Future Demand’s Audience Intelligence platform, and specifically the Wave application, shows how AI-powered segmentation, tailored messaging, and campaign automation can transform marketing results—especially when the goal is to attract and convert new audiences. By uncovering both who to target and how to engage them, NACO set a new standard for effective, data-driven audience development in the performing arts sector.

‍