Is Your Company On View In The Summer Exhibition?

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition started on Monday. As exhibitions go, it has a long pedigree, having not missed a year since the first one in 1769.

I was invited to the preview on Sunday and went up to London with Laura and our three kids.

The Summer Exhibition is a chance to see a huge amount of new art in one place from both upcoming and established artists. It includes painting and sculpture, photographs, printmaking, and architecture. A committee selects around 1,000 pieces from those submitted for inclusion (somewhere in the region of 10,000) and then the 80 current members of the Academy itself get to choose 6 of their own works each to include.

All very nice – but sales is the name of the game

Now, for all the history and artistic endeavour that lies behind the exhibition, one of the main reasons many of the exhibitors put their work on show is to sell them. This is lucky because a large number of the visitors to the show – especially at the preview – are hoping to buy something. Actually, ‘intending’ would be a stronger word. And as you go round the exhibition, it’s great to see the little orange stickers against an exhibit’s number when it has been sold. Many of the prints, of course, can be sold many times. And many were.

So, if I was an aspiring artist, this is where I would want my art to be on show. In many ways, this the Google first page of search results for people looking to buy new art. Even if I was an aspiring artist who believed that my art was so radically different that it bore little resemblance to anything else, I would want to have something on show here.

Low barriers – what’s preventing you from jumping them?

Let’s take the analogy a little further, if only because it occurred to me yesterday as I was squeezing with the family into one of the small rooms of the gallery where the smallest scale works covered the walls (and where the proportion of orange stickers was significantly higher than elsewhere). Imagine the artists as bog standard businesses and each work as a product line for sale (which, in many ways, is exactly what they are – however much you may believe in art for art’s sake). Submitting a work for inclusion costs £25 (I think). Pretty low marketing overhead. Even if the product gets rejected at the store’s buyer stage (the RA’s panel of experts) you’ve spent little and got some valuable feedback (ie not a likely seller). And if you get through? A very good chance of making a sale. It’s like being put on a supermarket shelf.

So, if you’re a company and you have the chance to be one of the relatively small number getting in the face of potential buyers – who have actually chosen to let their faces be gotten into! – what’s stopping you? Why is your web presence so poor? Here are some of the reasons I come across:

1. The web audience in general is not who we’re aiming for. (Excuse me? I don’t think there is a ‘web audience’ any more. Unless that’s a synonym for ‘potential customers’.)
2. I don’t think we have the budget to create a decent web site right now. (But they’ll happily spend thousands every quarter on new brochures which sit in the stock room!)

We’re a B2B organization, so the whole e-commerce thing isn’t relevant. (Right, there’s no place for email and pdf downloads and on-line product tours in B2B.)

3. We have a web site and it has never scored us any business. (That would be because it was designed by the CEO’s godson in 1999, only works in IE5, and contains spelling mistakes and broken links. Classy.)
4. Our site’s there but it never appears in Google searches. (That might be down to the lack of content and general feeling that tumbleweed might blow across the screen at any time. When was it last updated? A brief aside: I was asked to quote for doing some work for a lettings agency in Kent. When I looked at their site and did some sample searches etc I found that they failed to appear in the first 10 pages of search results even when using ‘lettings’ and the part of Kent they were. Lettings agencies from outside the area were getting higher rankings. That’s a sad state of affairs. In the end they decided that spending money to improve this was not worth it. Go figure.)

The list of reasons companies use to back away from improving their on-line presence is as long as the list of sites that come ahead of them in the rankings. And, of course, once they have a web site, many of them think that’s that; no more needs to be done. This is like believing that all there is to networking is turning up and standing in the corner. You’re there but……. what’s the point?

What wasn’t there went unmissed

The range of works on view was huge. There was stuff I liked, there was stuff that I coveted, and there was stuff that sparked no interest in me at all. In that way I was like most of the visitors to the gallery. But I saw stuff I wouldn’t see anywhere else and had I had the spare cash, I think I would have bought at least one piece. All because it was there in front of me.

Get your business on the gallery wall. The web is a summer exhibition every day of the year and you’re missing potential customers by keeping your best stuff in the storeroom rather than hanging in the well-lit rooms of Google and other search engines.