The Joy Formidable at Notre Dame

About a month ago, the Welsh band "The Joy Formidable" performed on campus at Legends. I got the weekly email from Legends which mentioned somewhere within the email that the band was performing the next day and got super excited as I had already seen them live, while opening for Muse in Madrid. I told my friends how good they were and rallied a bunch of people who, although had never heard of them, took my word for it and got excited in turn.
Planning on getting there early to get a good spot in line, I was a bit worried when I realized I was running late and would only get there about 30 minutes before the concert started. When I got there, however, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was third in line. There was no one there yet.

The opening band performed on a close to empty venue and though more people had arrived when the Joy Formidable came on stage, Legends was still noticeably empty. The opening band did a great job at warming out the crowd, but the Joy Formidable took it to another level. They absolutely rocked on stage and put the crowd into a frenzy, which is particularly hard to do when most people haven't heard you before and even harder to do when you have an almost empty venue. You had to give it to them, they're just that good.

So what happened then that caused such an amazing band to go unnoticed? Well, lets look at the media strategy taken and how it measures in terms of engagement:

Media Strategy: email sent by Legends of Notre Dame to Notre Dame students. Subject line: "If you could go anywhere, anywhere... Go to Legends". Sent on wednesday Apr. 10, show was Apr. 11.

Matching: GOOD Only ND students received the email and since this was the target audience, this criteria was successfully met.
Monopolization: NONE. The email sent was an advertisement for Legends, containing an ad for this band and several others. The media strategy failed completely in this criteria. 
Moment: NO. The email was sent one day before the concert. As an email, it doesn't ensure capturing people's attention at their decisional moment. If people opened the email and saw it before they had plans for the next day, moment was good. However, if they either didn't open the email until after the concert or if they already had plans, moment was not good. When I spoke to my friends however, no one had seen the email.
Mind-set: MAYBE. The email had references to other indie bands (if you know anything about indie bands, you know that one of the reasons they're indie is because few people know of them) and one of their most famous songs. People could've gone online to look for the song but I wonder how many did it.

With an empty venue to such a good performance as proof of failed advertising, I see questions arising within my mind. However, for the purposes of this blog, I think the most important take-away of this case study is that advertising exclusively through email is dangerous. Based on the responses of most of my friends who came because of my involvement but who said that they hadn't even see the email, I can safely conclude that we rarely pay attention anymore to weekly emails or newsletters and advertising solely through email can result in failing the most important step of advertising: getting people to see it.