No one likes taking tests.

Blood tests, Scholastic Aptitude Tests, Life Expectancy Tests . . . none of them are fun (I’m a goner by 63, BTW, in case anyone wants to send flowers now).

But, in order to stay healthy, go to college, and find out what we’re doing wrong in order to start doing it right, we take tests.

You’ve heard me preach about the importance of testing in advertising and marketing before, so this post is nothing new.  And frankly, a lot more important and successful people have preached about it since the beginning of modern advertising itself, so it shouldn’t be anything new to anyone selling anything.

That’s why it’s so shocking that testing in the commercial theater is as rare as a 5th row seat to Jersey Boys.

What other industry would spend 10 to 15 million dollars on developing a product and not test it before going to market?

But this isn’t about them, this is about you.

How can you test your advertising or your Act II?  What do you do if you can’t afford one of the companies out there that offer these services, like the super-smart peeps at Live Theatrical Events (no coincidence that they are a Nielsen company).

Here’s my rule of thumb and forefinger . . . when anyone, anywhere, pitches me a product or service (especially one that I can’t afford), I immediately go to google and see if I can find out a way to do it myself.

Enter SurveyMonkey.com, the online survey system that lets you design custom surveys and it promises to have your answers to you faster than you got your SAT scores.

If you took my Producer’s Perspective Tony Pool, then you used a SurveyMonkey survey.  Or if you attended a reading of My First Time and got an email the next day asking for feedback on tag lines, the set, etc., then you used SurveyMonkey.

Test.  Then take your results and stir them in with your gut instincts.  And cook up a response that’ll increase the life expectancy of your show.

And so . . . I’d be a hungry-hungry hypocrite if I didn’t test myself!

So here it is, folks, The Producer’s Perspective survey!  Your chance to rate how I’ve been doing over the past year and give me feedback on what else you want from the blog!