The marketing department is not run by Dr. Evil. Honest.

In several instances over the past few months, I have been in meetings with creatives who say “What can we do to help?”

And I get super excited and run down a bunch of ideas that could be fun to help market and publicize the show. And then their eyes glaze over and they never follow through, regardless of how much haranguing is coming from my general vicinity.

(As an aside, I am pretty bummed about one of them, because it involved a clever use of Twitter that would have engaged Twitter followers that had the potential to lead to a nice press story. Le sigh.)

Anyway, the point is, as a creative, sometimes your job goes beyond what’s on that stage. If you want marketing, if you want press, sometimes we need your help.

For example, we need you to take part in interviews. Frankly, the press really has no interest in quoting ME. And the audience would much rather interact with the artists, (notice the marketing department isn’t asked questions at talk backs).

We need you to be a part of the marketing story.

But, you need to trust us to lead this initiative. Some ideas, while interesting, aren’t going to help sell a ticket. (And here’s a tip off, if anyone uses the word “interesting” in a marketing meeting, it probably isn’t. If “interesting” is the best adjective people can come up with, look for another idea.)

I’ve caught a lot of creatives on Twitter lamenting the marketing people. Mistrust is an understatement–some see the marketing department as the enemy.

We need to drop that mindset.

Marketing people aren’t evil. We don’t want to misrepresent your project. In fact, we are among your biggest cheerleaders. But we need to get people excited about the project–a task we must often accomplish in sound bites–so they will part with not only their money but their time.