Where Did the Audience Go? Hannes Tronsberg in Conversation with nachtkritik.de

Theatres across Germany are asking the same question after the pandemic: where did the audience go? In the interview “Publikumsschwund” (German only), published on August 31, 2022 by the theatre platform nachtkritik.de, journalist Sophie Diesselhorst talks to Future Demand founder and CEO Hannes Tronsberg about what is really behind falling attendance and how data-driven marketing can help.

Oversupply, Not Just Audience Loss

A key point of the conversation: many venues are not only facing fewer visitors, they are also facing an oversupply of events. Postponed productions and a packed post-pandemic calendar mean that more shows compete for the same audience. Attendance per event drops, even where interest in culture itself has not disappeared. For venues, the answer is not simply more marketing, but marketing that reaches the right people with the right message.

Why People Attend, Not Just Who They Are

Classic audience analysis looks at demographics: age, postcode, ticket history. Future Demand takes a different approach. Its segmentation groups people by motivation, in so-called Taste Clusters, inspired by the way streaming services such as Netflix personalize recommendations.

• Every performance is described by more than 1,000 attributes, from content and artists to timing, weather and competing events.
• Around 120 external data sources, such as Wikipedia, Spotify and genre databases, are combined with a venue’s own transaction history.
• The result is behavioral clusters of audiences with shared interests, without targeting individuals.

This makes it possible to understand why a certain group is drawn to a certain production, and to speak to them accordingly.

From Hours of Setup to Minutes

The second theme of the interview is campaign automation. Setting up a single paid social campaign manually can take hours. With Future Demand, targeting and optimization run automatically, while people stay in charge of what matters most: the message, the story and the creative direction. In the interview, Tronsberg describes uplifts of 10 to 20 percent in ticket sales for cultural venues.

Why It Matters for Cultural Venues

The conversation also touches on a broader question: how can theatres, orchestras and festivals become less dependent on large platforms and build a more resilient relationship with their audiences? Understanding audience motivation is the starting point. Personalized campaigns across paid social, email and web are the way to put that understanding to work.

Read the Full Interview

The full interview is available on nachtkritik.de (German only).

Want to see how audience segmentation and campaign automation could work for your venue? Get in touch with the Future Demand team.