Missing the Mark(eting) at the Met

Dear Metropolitan Opera,

Thank you for the gorgeous Metropolitan Opera Season Calendar for 2010-11! The photo on the front cover of Bryn Trefel as Wotan is arresting.

I’m a huge fan of Sondra Radvanovsky so I immediately thumbed through to see if she’s performing and sure enough – page 17 – Puccini’s Tosca – (not the best photo of her, though). And nice shot of Natalie Dessay as Luccia Di Lammermoor with her dress all bloody. And they’re doing Rossini’s Le Comte Ory – Juan Diego Flores is dressed as a nun.

I think I’ll hang this calendar on my wall… but wait… It starts with September 27. And right now, we’re in August. What am I supposed to do with this until then? The calendar ends mysteriously May 14. What happened to the middle of May through September? Furthermore the weeks begin on Monday and if that’s not enough, there’s no Sunday!

There’s a missed opportunity here. First of all, what am I going to do with this between now and September 27? By the time this calendar goes into effect it will be buried under a pile of stuff I’ll eventually get to. And even if I do remember to put it up, my brain is wired for seven day weeks that start on Sunday – not weeks that start on Monday and certainly not weeks that have only six days. I’m funny that way.

I’m sure if I were working at the Met, say, as an usher or a sales clerk, this would be the perfect calendar. But as you might surmise, I’m not moonlighting at the Opera these days.

To the Met I say, if you’re going to go through the expense of designing and printing a 48 page full color calendar then mailing it to everybody on your mailing list – including a guy who went to a whopping total of one opera last season, why not invest a little more and make it something I might actually use? Something I might hang up right away and that might be in front of me 365 days out of the year?

For those of you who know Seth Godin – this qualifies as broken – see Seth at Gel 2006