Manhattan Theatre Club's 'Keep Your Eyes on the Prize' campaign, created by Serino Coyne in 2018, promoted Choir Boy on Broadway by foregrounding vocal
Manhattan Theatre Club Brings Choir Boy to Broadway With a Campaign Built on Sound
Manhattan Theatre Club's "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" is a content campaign produced by Serino Coyne in November 2018 in the United States, created to promote the Broadway production of Choir Boy by foregrounding the show's exceptional vocal arrangements and sound design rather than its dramatic storyline, positioning the production's musical identity as its primary audience draw.
Manhattan Theatre Club, a nonprofit Off-Broadway and Broadway institution based in New York City, has long operated at the intersection of literary theatre and popular audience development. Choir Boy, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, centres on a Black student navigating faith, identity, and belonging at an elite prep school through the power of gospel and choral music. That premise gave Serino Coyne a creative platform that conventional Broadway advertising rarely exploits: sound itself as spectacle. Rather than leading with plot summary or star casting, the campaign built its single media asset around the sonic and spiritual power of the production's vocal performances, an approach that distinguished it from the standard image-and-tagline format dominant in the United States Broadway market at the time.
Published in November 2018, the campaign arrived as Choir Boy transferred from its acclaimed earlier run at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre to a broader Broadway engagement. In the United States, where Broadway's commercial season is intensely competitive and audience attention is fiercely contested, any production associated with Manhattan Theatre Club carries an expectation of prestige. Serino Coyne's creative decision to treat the campaign as a content piece rather than a conventional advertisement reflected that institutional standing while also targeting a younger, digitally engaged audience for whom authenticity of artistic voice carries significant weight. The campaign's singular focus on what the audience would hear, rather than what they would see, represented a meaningful strategic and creative departure for Broadway promotional content.
Serino Coyne identified the production's musical identity as its most defensible competitive asset. Broadway in the 2018–2019 season was crowded with high-profile productions competing for discretionary leisure spending across the United States, including major musical revivals and star-driven dramatic vehicles. Against that backdrop, Choir Boy's distinction lay not in celebrity casting or familiar IP, but in the singular quality of its choral and gospel performances, a quality that the campaign was structured to make legible to potential ticket buyers before they ever entered a theatre.
The strategic rationale reflected a broader truth about content-led advertising in live entertainment. Where competitors such as the Nederlander Organization and Jujamcyn Theaters routinely anchor Broadway campaigns to marquee names or recognisable source material, Manhattan Theatre Club's positioning as a literary, mission-driven nonprofit institution allowed Serino Coyne to appeal to an audience self-identifying as culturally discerning rather than commercially motivated. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign's creative premise explicitly emphasised vocal arrangements and sound design rather than adopting a conventional play advertisement format, a deliberate inversion of Broadway marketing orthodoxy.
The live-entertainment sector in the United States was expanding during this period. While granular Broadway-specific revenue figures for the 2018 season require attribution to the Broadway League, the global theatrical box-office market reached approximately $41.1 billion in 2018, up one percent year over year, according to motionpictures.org. Within that environment, institutional theatre companies like Manhattan Theatre Club faced the twin challenge of sustaining subscription audiences while also converting single-ticket buyers who had no prior relationship with the organisation. A content approach that led with the authentic artistic experience of Choir Boy addressed both constituencies simultaneously, offering the cultural prestige signals that subscribers value alongside the sensory immediacy that draws new audiences.
Creative Director Carmelo Bongiovi led the "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" campaign for Serino Coyne, with Art Directors Alex Diaz and Gerri Sterne shaping its visual and structural execution, according to clapboard.com. The creative team's central decision was to treat sound not as accompaniment but as subject, constructing a single media asset in which the vocal and musical qualities of Choir Boy's performance became the primary experience the audience encountered before purchasing a ticket.
That approach required a precise balance between documentary authenticity and promotional clarity. Gospel and choral music carry deep cultural resonance in the United States, and any mishandling of that material risked either sanitising its power for mainstream palatability or alienating audiences unfamiliar with its traditions. The creative team, under Bongiovi's direction, navigated that tension by allowing the performances to speak with minimal mediation, a formally restrained choice that placed full trust in the production's artistic quality.
Alex Diaz's contribution as art director shaped the visual grammar surrounding that sonic content, ensuring that the campaign's imagery reinforced rather than competed with the audio experience. The result was a piece of content advertising that functioned simultaneously as promotional material and as a short-form cultural document of the production's artistic identity. In the United States Broadway market, where most promotional content defaults to montage-and-voiceover formats, this restraint was itself a creative statement. Choir Boy subsequently received a Tony Award for Outstanding Vocal Arrangements and a Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play, according to En Wikipedia, recognitions that retrospectively validated the campaign's central creative premise: that the show's sound was genuinely extraordinary and capable of bearing the full weight of a marketing strategy built around it.
No verified performance data for "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" is publicly available. According to clapboard.com, no published ticket-sales lift, revenue increase, audience attendance uplift, or return on advertising spend data has been documented for this campaign. No indexed trade press reviews were found across Ad Age, Adweek, Campaign, The Drum, or Contagious, and no campaign-specific awards have been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards.
Structural analysis, however, points to a campaign whose creative logic was sound. Choir Boy went on to receive a Tony Award for Outstanding Vocal Arrangements and a Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play, according to en.wikipedia.org. Those recognitions confirm that the production's sonic qualities were not merely a promotional construction but an objectively distinguished artistic achievement, lending retrospective credibility to Serino Coyne's decision to build the entire campaign around them. In the United States Broadway market, where critical and awards recognition directly influences ticket demand in the weeks following the Tony Awards ceremony, a campaign that primed audiences to perceive the sound of Choir Boy as exceptional was strategically well-positioned for that downstream effect.
Manhattan Theatre Club's institutional infrastructure, which according to mandykaymarketing.com has historically included subscription programs and targeted ticket-access initiatives, provided an additional distribution context within which content-led advertising of this kind could perform efficiently. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects a piece of work that demonstrates meaningful creative and strategic coherence without the documented quantitative outcomes that would push it into a higher tier of verified effectiveness.
"Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" is a content campaign created by Serino Coyne for Manhattan Theatre Club in November 2018. It promoted the Broadway production of Choir Boy by centring the show's vocal arrangements and sound design rather than its dramatic plot, representing a deliberate departure from conventional Broadway advertising practice in the United States, according to clapboard.com.
Serino Coyne created the campaign. The New York agency assembled a team led by Creative Director Carmelo Bongiovi, with Art Directors Alex Diaz and Gerri Sterne shaping the visual execution. The campaign was published in November 2018 in the United States and comprised a single media asset centred on the production's choral and gospel performances, according to clapboard.com.
Choir Boy won a Tony Award for Outstanding Vocal Arrangements and a Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play, according to en.wikipedia.org. Both recognitions directly validated the campaign's core creative premise, which positioned the show's extraordinary sound as its primary audience draw rather than leading with narrative or star casting.
Serino Coyne led with sound rather than story. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign explicitly emphasised vocal arrangements and sound design instead of adopting a conventional play advertisement format. In the United States Broadway market, where most promotional content centres on marquee names or familiar IP, that inversion of standard practice constituted a genuinely differentiated creative strategy.
The Clapboard Score for "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" is 69 out of 100, according to clapboard.com. The score reflects the campaign's clear creative and strategic coherence, particularly its sound-first concept and disciplined execution by Carmelo Bongiovi and Alex Diaz, while noting the absence of publicly documented quantitative performance outcomes for this United States Broadway campaign.
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