Why don't cold advertising campaigns work for selling art?

Cold ads—where you pay to show your art to people who’ve never heard of you before—consistently fail for artists. Over many years of observation across thousands of artists, not a single one has run cold ads consistently for more than a few months, let alone years. They all stop because they see no return on investment. The reason is fundamental: that’s simply not how art sells. Art purchases are rarely impulse decisions from seeing an ad. When a purchase happens, it’s typically 50% about the art itself and 50% about the artist’s story. Cold ads only show the art to strangers with no context or connection, missing the crucial relationship-building component that drives art sales.

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Asked by synthesized from teaching · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2023-11-02