Medardo Amyr Sarmiento Carmona and Angel Torres-Toukoumidis
Digital spaces have the potential to enhance the engagement of spectators, and the evolving digital interaction is making a tremendous change in art marketing. But this digital sphere requires comprehension of the new codes that have emerged, to lead to innovative synergies between the online and the offline world. Which only can be enhanced with bi-directional interaction, setting to interlock, involve and cause the spectator’s attention. The arrival of Covid-19 to Ecuador has been a big opportunity to advance in ICT dissemination and digital mediation techniques, even though it’s not enough to replace collective experience. This research is oriented to analyze the digital marketing strategies for artists and artistic products during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s an inductive quanti-qualitative approach, with a micro-ethnographic design, and we applied semi-structured interviews. We interviewed seventeen artists, producers, cultural managers, and cultural promotors from several fields of cultural activity in Cuenca, Ecuador. We looked for persons implicated in art projects during the sanitary emergency in the country. We’ve analyzed about nineteen projects in total, with a twenty questions questionary. The procedure of this research is to collect, systematize, and analyze all data we’re using with MAXQDA software. This study showed us that the arts and cultural sector are complex. Artists use to manage and promote events too, in other cases must generate formative processes like a sustainable source of income. This scenario turned out more complex, although, a part of the projects held on the pandemic and have created new kinds of entertaining and interactive content. Also, there is a thin line between entertaining and building community content. Finally, we found out that giving priority to customer loyalty is an indicator of high levels of cultural marketing practices.