Driving Growth For Carnegie Hall Through Channel Expansion

The Challenge:Scaling Performance Across a Complex CALENDAR

Carnegie Hall presents a high volume of performances and initiatives across genres, audiences, and timelines. Supporting their season’s worth of advertising requires a complex digital strategy that can scale beyond a single channel or two.

Historically, digital investment leaned heavily on Meta, with a campaign structure built around individual performances. While effective, it limited flexibility and made it harder to support upper-funnel growth.

Year-over-year comparisons always come with nuance. Programming shifts, external factors, and changing audience behavior all influence performance. Still, when comparing FY25 to FY26, clear patterns emerged.

The Strategy:Expand Channels, Rethink Structure

Rebalancing the media mix

We expanded investment beyond Meta to reach audiences in more places where they spend time.

• Prior year’s spend distribution: 72% Meta / 25% Google / 3% Other
• This year’s spend distribution: 45% Meta / 42% Google / 13% Other

This shift reduced reliance on a single platform and created more opportunities to engage new audiences.

Increasing upper-funnel investment on Google

We directed a larger share of Google spend toward upper-funnel activity, moving beyond paid search and investing more heavily in Demand Gen. Importantly, the thematic structure enabled this shift—the variety of assets required for this type of campaign made it a much less viable option when campaigns were focused largely on single shows.

While this lowered overall ROI efficiency as expected, it increased total revenue (+59% YoY) and effectively prioritized acquisition.

Shifting to a thematic campaign structure

We moved from a fully concert-specific model to a thematic approach, grouping campaigns by genre or programming.

This made it easier to promote events earlier in the decision process, maintain always-on visibility, and reduce operational complexity while supporting priority performances.

Concert-specific campaigns remained in place for key events (there will always be some that require it!), creating a hybrid structure.

Testing emerging platforms—with strong results from Reddit

As part of channel expansion, we tested new platforms. One specifically worth noting: Reddit.

Reddit offered access to audiences not as active on other platforms, and boasts highly engaged communities. We were able to run both concert-specific and broader NYC campaigns within relevant communities where users actively discuss culture, travel, and events.

The Results:Growth Across Channels

Meta continued to perform—even with a smaller share of spend

Despite representing a reduced percentage of the overall mix, investment in Meta remained steady year over year. With a comparable spend and remixed campaign strategy (thematic focus), results improved: 

• +6% reach YoY
• +51% ROI YoY

Google drove meaningful revenue growth

Even with increased upper-funnel investment:

• +59% YoY growth in attributed revenue
• Lower ROI reflected a deliberate focus on acquisition

Reddit delivered strong efficiency and scale

For concert-specific campaigns:

• ~$6 CPM
• ~$12 CPA (lowest across platforms for these campaigns)

A large share of conversions came through view-through attribution, reinforcing Reddit’s role as a discovery and influence channel.

The Takeaway

Expanding beyond a single dominant channel drove measurable growth for Carnegie Hall.

By rebalancing investment, evolving campaign structure, and testing platforms like Reddit, we built a more resilient, full-funnel strategy—one that supports both immediate performance and long-term audience growth.

Ready to Expand Your Strategy?

If you’re looking to scale performance, reach new audiences, and build a more balanced digital ecosystem, Capacity can help. 

Talk to Us