Tango advertising - the giveaways

A now edited draft from 20.8.15, also about giveaways.

One of the biggest giveaways of people teaching performance dancing in place of social dancing is the picture or video in the advertisement.  This piece had links to a lot of pages now dead but some photos I had archived.

Edinburgh University Tango society at the time had some slick video footage of performers, which no doubt draws people in, but to what?  I am sure people join the society primarily because they want to learn the social dance, not to watch shows or to become performers.

The piece than compared it to a link from Thames Valley Tango, probably meant something like this (new venue).  I felt at the time that this was one Britain's best milongas for good music, excellent and careful floorcraft on what is usually a very busy floor and good dancing.  This picture shows it less busy than when I have usually been.  From the photo you can tell there will be tables, chairs, atmospheric lighting, busy but not overfull. The suggestion is, enough tables and seating for the attendees.  Actually, there is insufficient seating on busy days - both at the old venue and the new, at least at the special events.

Tango West Midlands no longer seems to have the website I had linked to where there was apparently a great example of the tango dancing they're selling. So I don't know if the good image I archived for their milonga was meant to be an ironic contrast to the advert, or not.   As far as the physical conditions for dancing, apart from the show pictures on the wall, it looks pretty much ideal.

It is surprisingly hard, certainly then and even now to to find a social dance advertised with a picture of the venue, especially with the dancers rather than a stylised photo of a performance dance. Marketing 101, the photo emphasises what they are selling, their focus. You can have a pretty good idea of the kind of dancing there will be at events advertised with a performance pose. There will be guys trying to pull performance style moves girls, or shoving them into ochos pushing them over a sandwich, pistoning them in and out of ocho cortado, whipping them into voleos, demanding they do ganchos and dropping them off axis into volcados that make the stomach feel as though it's in an elevator and give the woman no choice. 

It's 'island tango' where you go from one move to the next with dead sea between.  There's a harsh, dry wind blowing there and no music.

Let's take a 2024 example.  Belgrade encuentro - you can tell from the home page it is about a lot of people, teachers and performers. Come to think of it, an encuentro typically didn't use to have teachers and performers - that's why they call them festivals instead. Anyone who has attended an event that looks like this knows the dancing can be very hit and miss and trying invite or be invited is a nightmare in such a big venue. They claim "big yet cosy" but I've got no idea how they are going to pull that one off.  

Their Youtube video preview shouts, You wanna real party? You you get the picture and thank goodness.

Belgrade must have done a lot of work on prioritising their results because their images are all the first ones to come up in a search of tango encuentros.

There's a very different vibe in the Hobart encuentro photo for 2024.  It's an odd, stylized picture that on the one hand detracts from reality, which is always a worry, but at the same time gives it a retro feel, meaning traditional, which could be good.  The suggestion is olde-worlde glamour, elegance, respectful. There are tables and chairs.  It seems like the men are expected to wear suits, again suggesting a traditional, Buenos Aires formality and yet the seating is not separated.  The floor looks good. If it has all these good elements, I'm asking myself, why don't they show the real photo, instead of manipulating one?

There is an interesting photo of Tango Secreto Encuentro Milonguero from 2016 which may or may not have been used for advertising. All you see are women's legs.  But you can tell it's dressy, it looks like segregated seating for men and women, hence traditional.  The women are looking and chatting.  What about?  Probably the men.  It suggests femininity which attracts the guys and the bonding of female intrigue and the dressing up draw in the women. 

A local one to finish.  The headline photo is one I took inside Paisley tango's recent festival.  The venue looks quite glam - it was in a new, elegant venue and that was a draw for curious local dancers.  As such it was quite expensive.  They had performers, but it was a festival so that's what you expect.  The floor was good. It was dark, so it was hard to invite, the space was big, so, ditto, and same again because the tables were huge, not intimate as in a BA milonga. You had to prowl or dance with people on your table. Or sit and wait for ages in the hope of a prowling leader. 

How does that compare to the advert?  When you land on the festival you get a popup with photo of the organisers thanking you for visiting.  On the one hand it's a personal touch, and they are very much the face of the festival, well known for working hard to build up Paisley tango from nothing, overcoming personal setbacks on the way. Make of the vibe in that photo what you will. The festival home page is all about the performers and a singer they brought in.  They want people to be, or think their target audience will be attracted by the workshops and performances rather than the dancing. And my goodness, I don't know if that's the way festivals are nowadays, but both this and the Barcelona Queer Tango festival had performances that lasted about an hour. 

Luckily, it was the opportunity for that great chat about breath.

'Single' girls

A: I danced with a lovely dancer but he kept hold of my hands between tracks and conversation was personal questions not the music etc.

B: Single girls rarely allow that in a BA milonga

A was not single and B knew it.  It was no secret.  But if you arrive alone at a milonga in Buenos Aires, marital status doesn't necessarily count for much.  What matters when you arrive is how you appear.  

Perhaps my father guessed as much.  Maybe that is why he thought the milongas inappropriate for someone in your situation.  There were no hard feelings and the clarity was useful.

Much earlier:

B: I get a slight shock when you ID a dancer with full name. I don't expect people to know the second name of a dancer from a milonga. Where I come from :) it would be very rude to ask a partner's second name. Often old accounts of the milongas say people never knew anything about a guy except his given name, nickname and dancing. They did not know where he lived, what he did for a job (if he had one), whether he was married. All stuff gets left outside -- by agreement of all.

I guess nowadays, you know someone's name from his advertising. Or Facebook. Or is that the same thing? :)

At the time I found the warning over-egged - until I was asked just those sorts of questions.

Milongas, advertising and Facebook

Having no Facebook event for a milonga is no bad thing. The milonga in Pant had no Facebook event and is in the middle of nowhere yet thirty people appeared. Facebook is notoriously unreliable for showing true numbers yet if not enough people show they are going it can occasionally put off those not savvy to this, though losing those swayed by such unreliable things is probably no great loss. 

Still, I wonder if the few organisers who do not use Facebook for their events do so because they expect numbers to be so low they think it might do more harm than good to advertise this way. This would not necessarily put me off. I don’t mind small milongas and have had a very nice time with a few good dancers or just nice people.

The other problem with Facebook events is that they are frequently not in synch with the organisers’ calendars.  One doesn't know then whether an event is on or cancelled.  I have seen this with Viva tango (empty calendar but an event on Facebook) and Northern Tango Academy (NTA) only last week. I have a feeling there may have been until recently a calendar on the website.  In any case there was enough ambiguity around the events that I had to ask whether their Una noche de garufa milonga was on in November or not.  But it is almost unfair to name names because it is so very common. I notice the NTA's Tango in Liverpool and Tango in Manchester groups on Facebook are closing to merge with the main NTA group, perhaps to minimise such maintenance.

The problem is less with milongas like the Manchester Popup (review) which because it doesn’t advertise classes, worskhops or shows only has a Facebook group and events, not a website. This approach is lower maintenance too.

For advertising I would rather organisers either just used their own site plus a national site like TangoTimetable or TangoCentral or a Facebook event; not, incidentally, a Facebook group cluttered up with adverts from other organisers.  That is just a pain.  All that cross-advertising can be avoided if organisers and dances used the same national site.  I mean what's not to like?  And besides - those not local can easily find what’s on for a weekend away and can check accuracy in one place: the organiser’s own website or Facebook event (but please not all three). 

I say please advertise using a national site, like the Dutch do, with tangokalendar.nl and torito.nl. Honestly it's easier to know what milongas are on in the Netherlands than it is in the UK.  While I can hold quite a lot of tango group names in my head I can't hold them all and for weekends away I really want to know what is on in certain regions without trawling Facebook or bothering all my acquaintance.  Please suggest it to your local organisers.  You will surely get more visitors in general that way (assuming you want them!).  Or the Dutch will. 

I'm so sorry.  I gave in to bold for non-linked text.  I'll try not to do it again.

The only reason I may put down “interested/going” to events on Facebook is to remind myself what’s on and usually I do that more for non-tango events when there may end up being several things to choose from at a weekend. Otherwise, the only purpose would be to tell others one is going to a milonga and I don’t expect whether I go or not to sway anybody. 

When a friend, travelling, got in touch privately to ask if I was coming out to dance the compliment was lasting and the effect disproportionate to that small act. So if there is someone I would really like to dance with I hope I have learnt from that and will do the same.

Advertising the DJ

Last year on the day the Edinburgh International Tango Festival started I asked who the cafe DJs were as they were not advertised.  Shortly afterwards they were advertised on the EITF site. This year with a month to go the festival DJs are still not advertised. The first time I wondered if it was an oversight, if a serious one. Now I'm inclined to think it's perhaps if not policy then simply that the organisers just don't think that the music is all that important. 

It says here from here only “Each evening will feature an international DJ and a dance performance from our world-class maestros”. This non-advertisement of the DJs is astonishing because the DJ line-up at any festival that attracts good social dancers is a prominent, probably the most prominent feature of a festival.  But then many good social dancers tend to avoid festivals where the home page features show dancers preferring events that seem to be more obviously about embrace and connection. E.g. Encuentro Porteño.  I heard over a month ago who the DJs will be at the EITF from a friend who enquired and was disappointed when local DJ Claudia Esslinger (who DJd here recently) was not one of them. But so far the message is: this festival is for people for whom the music isn’t really the main thing, for whom the music isn’t really important enough that you’d much care who the DJs are. No surprise though when it was only after public request (now hidden/deleted) last year to the Edinburgh Tango Society that the rotating DJs were at last advertised on their calendar.

On the other hand, the EITF is hosting the orchestra La Juan D’Arienzo, which is great news. So this mismatch between not advertising the DJs and this great orchestra feels like a right hand/left hand situation.