Broadway's ‘Oh, Mary!’ Takes Social Very Seriously

I talk to Austin Spero, Social Director for 'Oh, Mary!', about treating audiences with intelligence, operating on gut instinct, and the importance of flirtation in marketing.

For the uninitiated, Oh, Mary! is a dark comedy play about a miserable Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading up to Abraham Lincoln's assassination. It’s campy, unserious, and shocking in all the right ways. The New York Times calls it “one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years.”

So how does one take such a specific vision, laid out by writer/star Cole Escola and director Sam Pinkleton, and turn it into an engaging social strategy? It’s a job that was seemingly made for Austin Spero, who has zero formal marketing experience and operates mainly on well-informed gut instinct. It’s clearly working. The account feels like one big inside joke that you want to be a part of.

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A post shared by @ohmaryplay

For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Austin about the importance of flirtation in marketing, what his drag persona Reese Havoc taught him about comedy, and the state of Broadway social in general. It’s one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had for this newsletter.

Quick reminder that the Link in Bio Birthday Sale ends tomorrow! To celebrate four years of writing about social media, all annual subscriptions are 20% off until February 7th. The paid tier gets you access to weekly strategy emails, quarterly trend reports, my running list of post ideas, and a Discord invitation.

Austin Spero, Social Director for Oh, Mary!

Rachel Karten: First, can you tell me a bit about your current role and background in social media?

Austin Spero: Right now, I’m working on Broadway as Social Director for Oh, Mary! and John Proctor is the Villain, and closing a three-year chapter at New York City Center as Social Media Manager & Video Producer with our Encores! production of Urinetown.

I have zero formal marketing experience and fell into social as both a sick and twisted and oh-of-course cosmic convergence of the gay boy DNA that makes me simultaneously deeply intelligent and deeply annoying. Ultimately, this feels like the pendulum swinging back on the too many tweets sent via text from my flip phone in high school biology that got me into trouble. While I was falling out of love with performing, social sort of grabbed me by the throat and said, “This is everything you’re good at.” I’m deeply unserious and care a lot. As a kid, I’d stay up all night teaching myself Photoshop to elevate an inconsequential Tumblr. I’m lucky to chase the projects that excite me in that way.

RK: How would you describe your social media philosophy?

AS: The best social is a coy, playful flirtation. How do I authentically share the experience of a piece, a project, and leave you wanting more? My goal is to find, fulfill, and subvert where storytelling needs meet the expectations of the audience. Where does “clever marketing” intersect with what excites me as a fan? Does it, honestly, make me smile? Make me laugh? These are the questions I ask myself, then throw out the window. I operate on well-informed gut instinct in the same way I feel like a sailor would talk about finding an island. I look to pop stars a lot and the way an album has a distinct, world-building rollout. Good social should be an event, the go-to destination for your brand.

ohmaryplay

A post shared by @ohmaryplay

RK: Can you talk to me about what it was like developing the initial social strategy for Oh, Mary!

AS: We started downtown at the Lucille Lortel with one key art image and a brilliant script. The most important thing was making sure our social identity—and eventually, the scope of the Oh, Mary! brand—matched the intelligence and wit and sheer lunacy of Cole Escola and director Sam Pinkleton’s singular world. I wanted to enhance that experience, not dilute their genius. Nobody knew what antics these artists were really up to yet, so I wanted to lean into the “greatest play of the generation,” we’re-producing-an-American-classic of it all for as long as possible and take this stupid thing dead ass seriously, before really downing the paint thinner and letting the voice of Mary Todd Lincoln run the hamster wheel. It’s the nicest, best feeling when someone says, “This feels like Cole behind the account!” because that’s the idea. You know it’s not. But what if it was?

All love, social media is a lowbrow medium. Which is exciting to me and should be to you! The idea of a play, a Broadway play, is very high art. So what a gift of a juxtaposition for a play that is a generational classic and also the dumbest thing on earth. Audiences are so much smarter than we think, but we can still teach them how to treat us. If you feed them good content, they’ll eat good content. Good Oh, Mary! content is smart, brash, coy, bratty, quick, gay, playful, no-fucks-given, and deadly serious.

RK: What would you say is unique about doing social media for a play? How does the tone of the show impact the overall strategy on social?

AS: I love working on plays because you’re gifted a guidebook that gives you 90% of the nuances and world of what will make your content sing. The audience will help you figure out the other 10%. I look to the playwright the most. Cole in particular wrote something so hilarious, so smart and well-crafted, and Sam is so studied in what makes theatre theatre and built so much heart and real stakes into this clown show Crimes of the Heart. I’m really just blowing on their creative dandelion trying to bring that joy to the audience.

Broadway is exciting, a new play is exciting because there’s an air of mystery. I really try to balance access with that. That’s part of the flirtation idea. Some social strategy gives everything away, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With other live events, you’ve seen the whole shabang online months before you ever step through the door. Oh, Mary!’s initial run had five production photos and no B-roll, which a lot of other productions rely on completely. I had to figure out other ways to build the world. The key there was Cole and Sam’s bulletproof point-of-view.

Like I said, I have zero marketing background. But I did go to acting school and thank god I paid attention because I have a real love and appreciation for, yuck, the art of the play. Elinor Fuchs has an essay “Visit to a Small Planet,” which is always the way I start to think about how a brand voice will think, feel, taste. And then Picture This by Molly Bang, which is about essential visual storytelling. My entry point is not target audiences and demographics and case studies and focus groups, it’s about how a play makes me feel, and I think that’s where most of the Austin Spero spark comes from.

ohmaryplay

A post shared by @ohmaryplay

RK: When you think about who you are creating content for—is it for people who haven't seen the play yet? Or for people who have seen the play and are fans? Both? I'd imagine you sort of need to thread that needle.

AS: Both! I generally think about it as a 1:1 ratio: something to reward you, something to draw you in. My friend Izzy puts it best where she says a callback is an inside joke with your audience. You want to satisfy the niche of your most engaged fans, while also leaving room for the curious. Remember, I want my audience to be smart. I don’t want to give them the most low-hanging fruit. The first five lines you love and remember from the play are not gonna be the thing I stick on a production photo and call it a day. I want to give the tastemakers breadcrumbs that lead somewhere, not just patter out into a messy see-what-sticks forest.

So much social gets lost at a conversion goal. I always use the metaphor of The Person in Australia. That person who will never buy a ticket because they can’t! How do I excite them? How do I still make sure brand social is the television channel you have to tune in for?

RK: You are clearly very funny. Do you have a background in comedy?

AS: Like, no. I have no background in anything other than Twitter. I live a Hannah Montana life as a drag queen (Reese Havoc) which has taught me more than anything about, to quote Cole, the serious business of being a fool. I’ve done a lot of writing. I’ve done a lot of performing. I’d take a class, but I’m a horrible student. I do think early days on the Internet informed my sensibility the most, which is what makes me a horrible person and a once-in-a-generation talent uniquely suited for this. Print that.

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A post shared by @reesehavocnyc

RK: Can you share a few of your favorite Oh, Mary! posts and a little background on how they came together?

AS: No amount of strategizing and hindsight prophesying can every make up for the weird alchemy that is social media. But here are a few of my favorites that I haven’t really talked about yet:

Betty Gilpin Press Day: This is a good example of how you can subvert traditional content (here, the “talking head”) into something uniquely your brand. We didn’t have custom Betty Gilpin key art standees, so I took the limitation and made it an opportunity. We’ve all become obsessed with actors on press tours recently, so I pitched Betty, our new Mary, on tapping into her inner starlet and getting Cole’s photo out of the frame. The rest is her and her unique deranged genius. Sometimes, it’s as simple as giving your actors space to play. The clip ends up showing, not telling, what’s so exciting about this stage and screen genius coming to Broadway.

“Saturday Night” Parody: Spoof and loving send-up is in the language of Oh, Mary!. This was really perfect storm. I think I edited this in, like, an hour after release of the poster for “Saturday Night,” so the timeliness was part of the electricity. This is not, like, a trend people were doing. We were the trend, baby. It’s a parody of a poster, it communicated basic plot elements, and it engaged the community of fans and artists who we wanted to come see our play, which led to some record engagement.

Abraham Lincoln’s Summer Reading List: I like to be sparing in the ways we engage more presidential framings on social because this play is the antithesis of political and it’s not Mary’s Husband’s story. But. Obama’s yearly summer reading lists are so camp to me and felt like the perfect distillation of the highbrow-lowbrow tension in Oh, Mary! on Broadway, and a way to sort of sneak in some of the ideas (see: alcoholism, gay) present in the play, without hitting you over the head. God, I love this one. Merriam Webster took notice which was one of my favorite @ohmaryplay moments.

Broadway Extension with Patti LuPone: I wanted to include this because it’s an example of how you can do the “Broadway commercial” for effectively zero budget and more clearly communicate the tone of the show than any huge production could. We shot this in maybe fifteen minutes on an iPhone. Like, I got to direct Patti LuPone. That shouldn’t be happening. She was so game to play and a true professional and we’re so grateful she was willing to support the show in this way, literally while she was in rehearsal down the street for her own show. I grew up watching Cole’s YouTube videos and this feels like bringing that “this-is-only-for-me” experience of watching Cole for the first time to more people. This was a huge collaboration between everyone in the Oh, Mary! universe and reminds me why I love doing this in the first place.

RK: So much of good social (and comedy tbh) is in the details. Your #repost in this caption. Using Snapchat text here. Posting the interview like this so people can add to IG Stories. Can you talk to me about your creative process and prioritizing those details?

AS: That’s literally so nice of you to notice these things. I’m smiling. My biggest inspiration is always real people, real accounts, versus other brands. My M.O. is that I set the trends, I make the memes, and people can be inspired from me. Real people are the funniest, smartest people out there. I like to track what audiences are engaging with, what I as Austin am engaging with, then seeing how and if it fits in the world of the brand. I think all three of those examples hit on subverting authentic social media behavior from people. And I’m thankful our producers just sort of took me at face value with, “Trust me.”

ohmaryplay

A post shared by @ohmaryplay

RK: What does your approval process look like?

AS: It’s different for different projects. It’s helpful to look at approvals as a collaboration: how can we all make this better? I’m not an agency; I’m one person. So I’ve been gifted with a lot of trust, and the close relationships help the whole thing sing. I’m the one in meetings with producers, I’m strategizing with the press team, I’m building the asset, I’m on the ground with the artists. It’s me you’re in dialogue with, so the process can have a bit more ease than maybe ways I’ve worked in the past. Cole, Sam; our producers, Mike, Carlee, Lucas, Kevin; our press team at Grapevine; they’re all a text away and ten times smarter than me and I trust them completely. Their creative sign-off means a lot to me.

RK: I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the state of Broadway social in general—I'd imagine your work and approach has inspired more than a few social teams.

AS: It’s nice to see people inspired by my work. I’m really proud in particular of my work at New York City Center, which I saw go from 34k to 111k Instagram followers in my time here. As I transition into working on new plays, new musicals, and new career opportunities, it’s bittersweet. To the next person, take care of my baby. I really feel like I built a relationship with City Center’s fans, new fans, and Urinetown has been a real gift to leave on. If there’s one thing I did it’s that I think I showed you can have a little fun, give a little zazz with what people once thought might just be some old musicals.

I want to make clear that what works on social for Oh, Mary! is built into the text and not just balls-to-the-wall chaos. It’s studied. I spoke a little about that artistic highbrow-lowbrow juxtaposition being a perfect fit for how we engage online. I found a voice that works for Oh, Mary!, I found a flexible voice that works for City Center, and I encourage every brand to find their own. Sometimes I see where the recreation of tactics I use end up feeling cheesy or having the energy of please-like-me from other brands. At the same time, I can always taste when content feels so by committee that all kinetic energy is stripped from it all together.

I go back to authenticity. Does that actually make you laugh? Does this actually feel like the show? Or does this just feel like the smart thing we should do? Are we just satisfying our own cleverness? What would happen if we really treated our audiences with the intelligence they deserve?

RK: What do you love about working in social media?

AS: Don’t make fun of me, but, beyond extending the voice of a brand, it’s a great privilege to steward the experience of something I love so much for an audience, then advocate for them in return. People getting excited because @ohmaryplay reposted their photo. Like, that’s just a gay boy tapping away in a subway car. Pushing “post” on a really great Betty Gilpin (in should-be-EGOTted-then-immediately-locked-up performances as Mary Todd Lincoln now) talking head. It’s all exciting and new. It’s my dream to keep working creatively in big brand storytelling, developing a voice, because that’s my favorite part. And when I get bored, I’ll do something else.

Thank you all for reading! And shout out Angela in the Discord for requesting this interview! Final reminder that it’s your last chance to get 20% off an annual subscription to Link in Bio. This is the only sale I’ll run this year, so if you’ve been thinking about going paid, now is a good time. See you next week!