The Business of Buzz-Building
How hype happens in 2025
If the ultimate goal of a show is reach, resonance, or the simple math of ticket sales, the first ingredient is always the same: buzz.
Buzz is part perception of quality, part measure of “hotness.” It’s the sense that something is happening—that if you’re not in the room, you’re missing out.
It’s how our industry interprets and pseudo-measures cultural relevance.
And this isn’t exclusive to just New York. Every city, every theater, every artist in every market is trying to spark—or plug into—that conversation.
To be honest, buzz is very much top of mind for me right now. I’m in an Off-Broadway show—a commercial run of a new musical—and I want people to see it!! I want butts in seats!! I want that good-good buzz!!
So you can understand my curiosity around the what, why, and how of this mythic onomatopoeia. If buzz is the most precious asset a show, producer, or performer can have—it’s probably worth donning our beekeeper suits and venturing inside the hive to find some answers.
Metaphors galore, we’re going in.
What’s the Buzz?
The word buzz existed long before Broadway or marketing decks.
Originally the word for the sound of bees: that collective hum of energy and motion. By the 1930s, it had evolved into slang for gossip—“What’s the buzz?”—a shorthand for rumor, hype, and the feeling that something was worth talking about.
And science backs it up: we share what stirs us. High-arousal moments—joy, awe, delight—fire dopamine and make memories sticky. Plus, sharing them signals something about us too: that we saw it first, felt it first. Buzz isn’t just contagious; it’s a subtle signal of status.
So in its purest form, buzz is a kind of biology. The social nervous system of the arts.
A helpful framework for understanding buzz might be the same idea we laid out in WTF is Brand. A quick refresh: lowercase brand is the artifacts—the ads, the clips, the posts, the press appearances. Capital-B Brand is the atmosphere those artifacts create—the curiosity, the intrigue, the conversation.
Buzz is what happens when enough little signals—the posts and clips and whispers—start to spin fast enough that they generate their own field of gravity.
They create a loop.
The Density Loop
Forget virality. It’s time we start talking about velocity.
It’s both how quickly a moment moves from the theater to the feed or group text, and how often we encounter those moments.
The more touch-points, the more real it feels. Repetition builds recognition. Recognition builds trust. Our brains equate familiarity with safety.
Audiences absorb the pattern subconsciously: “I’ve seen this show on my feed three, five, ten times this week. Everyone’s talking about it. Maybe I should see it.”
This is how Buzz builds. Each artifact—each clip, photo, headline, post, text—acts as a small electric pulse. Enough of them, firing closely together, start to buzz. The sound gets louder. The current gets stronger.
To be clear, this is not just frequency for frequency’s sake. It’s a steady rhythm of small, genuine moments. The keyword being genuine.
So what makes a moment genuine? And how do we generate them in a way that isn’t manufactured, or at least doesn’t feel that way?
The Art of Fluency
If there’s a single marker of smart and strong content right now, it’s fluency. Not how often we post, or even how polished it looks—but how naturally it fits the space it’s in.
Platform fluency is the ability to understand the stage you’re performing on. A TikTok is different than a TV spot is different than an Instagram carousel is different than a YouTube video and on and on. Each has its own architecture, rhythm, and tempo. When we ignore that, the content feels dissonant. When you honor it, the work sings.
It’s the same principle as choosing the right theater for a show. You can have a brilliant piece of writing, but if it’s staged in the wrong space, the energy gets lost. Online, the same thing happens—a post that might’ve killed on TikTok flops on Instagram.
That’s why social can’t sit neatly inside a traditional marketing department anymore. It’s too nuanced. Too fast. Too messy. Like a creative process, it requires an immense amount of flexibility and thoughtfulness. In that way, the distance between a show and its online presence is shorter than ever.
At its best, social doesn’t promote the work—it’s an extension of it. It carries the DNA of the piece into the places people already live. It translates tone, humor, and emotion into the native language of that particular social feed.
To be fair, this is all much easier said than done. And, all of this conjecture assumes that the work, the piece, is strong enough to be worthy of the buzz we’re trying to build.
Buzz Kill
There’s a phrase I find myself repeating often in conversations around this topic:
Bad marketing can kill a good show. Good marketing can’t save a bad one.
Of course, that’s the most binary version of the idea. In reality, it’s much more complicated. But the core truth holds.
Buzz can get people in the door, but the work is what makes them stay, share, and come back. Without a piece that’s truly entertaining, moving, or groundbreaking, buzz can only do so much. And more often, there won’t be much buzz at all.
Obvious as it may sound, it feels important to name. At least for me. I have to continue to remind myself that, at the end of the day, the work itself is what matters most.
And yet, I find spotting the patterns in the little building blocks of buzz—quite fun. And it’s been fascinating to watch how the ecosystem keeps evolving.
What Comes Next
Over the past 18 months, across Broadway and beyond, the tone online has shifted dramatically. Primarily, it’s less press release, more personality. Every show wants to sound alive.
The common thread? Irreverence. No matter the genre or audience, the copy and content feels younger, looser, more conversational. It’s smart, but it’s not trying too hard to sound smart. The danger, of course, is trying to sound young—because nothing kills cool faster than effort.
Visually, everything is stretching to the extremes. The content that pops is either gorgeous—cinematic, intentional, artful—or chaotic—iPhone-in-the-rehearsal-room messy. The middle ground just reads as noise. It’s either art or impulse; both feel real.
Then there’s the cast-as-creators movement, which feels less like a trend and more like a reset. Give the cast room to play, and the work promotes itself. Their content—solo or collaborative—almost always outperforms the official show account.
I’m thinking of Queen of Versailles’ Ryah Nixon and her video rehearsing a TikTok for the show’s account. Her clip broke a million views. Which is the perfect segue to…
Creative trend adoption. Not every meme, sound, or format fits every show—but the ones doing it well are doing it fast and with intention. They take the core idea of a trend and flip it in a way that feels unmistakably theirs. It requires thoughtfulness, not just speed. Otherwise, it slides into try-hard territory.
And have you noticed the rise of TikTok testimonials? Inviting influencers of every size isn’t new, but shows are now putting real ad money behind the videos these creators make. Those clips—honest, off-the-cuff, emotional—are starting to feel like what Playbill photos used to be: a way of saying, “I saw this.”
None of this is prescriptive or predictable. I’m no soothsayer. They’re just threads I’m seeing in the fabric of what buzz has become.
If had to pick a few shows that I think are building buzz beautifully right now, I’d say it’s worth studying Liberation, CATS: The Jellicle Ball, and New York City Center’s Bat Boy push.
At its core, buzz isn’t a marketing trick. It’s a measure of connection. Evidence that art is doing what it’s meant to do—moving through people, finding its way from one heart to another.
So maybe that’s the real work—not building the buzz, but making something that’s impossible to keep to ourselves.
One last thing…
Writing this piece has been my way of trying to hold something that mostly exists in the air.
Word of mouth isn’t measurable. Buzz isn’t something you can grip. And yet, when you’re in it—on stage, night after night—you can feel it. The energy shifts. The house hums differently.
And honestly, our team on BEAU has been doing incredible work on the marketing and influencer front—some of the smartest I’ve seen Off-Broadway. I feel proud to be part of something that’s pushing the boundaries of what a small show can do, and it’s been fascinating to watch from the inside.
Still, as fun as it is for me to think about all this, my job is to tell the story—to make sure that when someone finally walks through the door because of a TikTok or an ad, they leave having experienced something real.
Because at the end of the day, that’s all buzz really is—another word for the shared, mythical, undeniable current between the art, the artist, and the audience.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt