The Marketing and IT Expense of Italian Performing Arts in the Post-pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had a considerable impact on Italian performing arts. While the market was suffering for losses both on the demand side and on the supply side, digitization grew as concerns contents and communication of organizations, most of them, theatres. This paper aims to understand how much the COVID-19 pandemic forced a sample of more than 1200 Italian performing arts to cope with stringency and develop a digital strategy, which was accounted with the Marketing and IT (Information Technology) expense and was supported by the legislative Italian and European context. This strategy remained a precious legacy in 2022, post-pandemic year, the empirics will be here concentrated on. A two-stage least squares regression will be implemented to show how much 2022 program service revenues depend on predictors of the Marketing and IT expense, the personnel expense and public grants, which are supporting the digitization of both contents and communication. Instrumental variables are total expenses, total revenues, private grants and sponsorships. Our results confirm that the topic of cultural digitization and social media marketing is quite new in the Italian theatre, and this paper outlines a framework to better understand how much these organizations are now competing with other entertainment suppliers.