OKLAHOMA! Broadway's 'People Will Say We're In Love' campaign by RPM used a single performance asset to reintroduce Rodgers & Hammerstein to a new Broadway
OKLAHOMA! Broadway Turns a Classic Duet Into a 2019 Revival Campaign
OKLAHOMA! Broadway's 2019 campaign, 'People Will Say We're In Love,' is a single-asset content piece produced by New York agency RPM that captures performers Damon Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones performing the Rodgers and Hammerstein title song to reintroduce a radically reimagined Broadway revival to American audiences.
The campaign launched in May 2019, coinciding with the production's run at Circle in the Square in New York City, which had opened on April 7, 2019, according to records documented on Clapboard.com. The revival, directed by Daniel Fish, stripped the 1943 musical of its traditional staging conventions, presenting it in a more confrontational, stripped-back idiom that divided and fascinated the American theatre press in equal measure. RPM's creative challenge was therefore substantial: to signal a production that was simultaneously familiar and genuinely new, without alienating the Rodgers and Hammerstein faithful or underselling the revival's radical ambitions to a younger theatrical audience.
In the United States, where Broadway functions as both a cultural institution and a competitive leisure market, the campaign needed to cut through a crowded 2018–19 season. The production's marketing leaned into the emotional currency of its source material, anchoring the campaign in the most recognisable romantic duet from the original score. By centering the content asset on Daunno and Jones performing 'People Will Say We're In Love,' RPM produced something that served simultaneously as advertisement, editorial content, and cultural artifact. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting its focused creative economy and the strategic clarity of its single-asset approach within the recreation and leisure category.
RPM grounded the campaign in a precise consumer insight: Broadway audiences, particularly those in the United States who follow revival productions, respond to emotional authenticity before they respond to production scale. The decision to build the entire campaign around a single, unadorned performance of 'People Will Say We're In Love' reflects an understanding that the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalogue carries its own pre-existing cultural authority, and that the 2019 revival's greatest differentiator was the intimacy of its reinterpretation rather than any conventional Broadway spectacle.
The strategic context is significant. The 2018–19 Broadway season generated approximately $1.82 billion in ticket revenue from 14.7 million attendees across 38 shows, according to data cited by American Theatre magazine. Within that environment, OKLAHOMA! was competing not only against new musicals but against other high-profile revivals and long-running hits. The Lion King, Wicked, and Hamilton — productions with established mass-market identity — represent the dominant revenue tier of the American Broadway market, as noted by the Broadway Journal. Against that competitive backdrop, a revival of a 1943 musical required a campaign that repositioned familiar material as a discovery rather than a nostalgia exercise.
RPM's single-asset content strategy is consistent with a broader shift in theatrical marketing across the United States, where short-form performance video has displaced traditional print and outdoor as the primary awareness driver for new productions. By documenting Daunno and Jones in performance rather than constructing a conventional promotional narrative, the agency allowed the production's own aesthetic language to make the argument for itself, trusting the song's emotional legibility to do the persuasive work that a more conventional campaign would have assigned to copy or production design.
Director Ezra Hurwitz made a single, decisive formal choice in the campaign asset: he positioned the camera close enough to Damon Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones that performance detail — breath, expression, physical proximity — becomes the primary visual information. That choice is inseparable from the campaign's strategic intent. Where a conventional Broadway promotional video would establish production context first — set, costumes, ensemble — Hurwitz begins with the performers, allowing the song to accumulate its emotional charge before any broader theatrical frame is established.
Creative Director Steven Tartick and Art Director Jacob Cooper built the campaign's visual identity around that restraint. The single media asset does not attempt to summarise the full production; it isolates one emotional moment and allows it to stand as representative of the whole. Copywriter Nathan MacGaughey's contribution operates within the same economy: the campaign's title is drawn directly from the Rodgers and Hammerstein lyric, which means the copy and the content are unified rather than in tension. The song title functions simultaneously as campaign headline, emotional proposition, and performance descriptor.
The venue itself informed the visual grammar. Circle in the Square is a theatre-in-the-round configuration, and Daniel Fish's revival used that spatial intimacy as a core dramatic device, as documented by BroadwayWorld. Hurwitz's direction for the campaign asset reflects that spatial logic: the close framing mirrors the audience proximity that defines the Circle in the Square experience, giving a viewer who has not yet purchased a ticket an accurate physical impression of what attending the production feels like. In the United States, where content-driven theatrical marketing increasingly functions as a preview experience rather than a pure advertisement, that perceptual honesty carries measurable strategic value.
No verified performance data specific to the 'People Will Say We're In Love' campaign asset — including view counts, click-through rates, or attributed ticket sales — is publicly available for this campaign. Analysis of its structural effectiveness therefore draws on production-level outcomes and the broader market conditions in which it operated.
The production itself ran from April 7, 2019, through January 19, 2020, according to Clapboard.com, a run of more than nine months in a competitive Broadway season. The 2019 revival won the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival, as reported by BroadwayWorld, a result that both validated the production's artistic ambition and retroactively confirmed that its marketing had successfully communicated the revival's distinctive identity to the press, industry voters, and the wider American theatergoing public. The 2018–19 Broadway season averaged approximately $123.87 per ticket, according to data cited by American Theatre magazine, placing premium on campaigns that could justify price point through perceived cultural significance — precisely the register that RPM's content approach was designed to occupy.
The campaign's single-asset structure presents both a strength and a constraint. It achieves exceptional creative coherence at the cost of reach diversity; a multi-format campaign would have addressed more touchpoints across the United States leisure and entertainment media landscape. That trade-off is reflected in the campaign's Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, which acknowledges the work's creative discipline and strategic clarity while recognising that a single content asset, however well-executed, represents a structurally limited media footprint for a Broadway production operating in a season of the scale documented by American Theatre magazine.
The campaign is a 2019 content piece by RPM for the Broadway revival of OKLAHOMA! It features Damon Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones performing the Rodgers and Hammerstein duet. Published in May 2019, it served as the primary content marketing asset for the production's run at Circle in the Square in New York.
RPM, a New York advertising agency, created the campaign. The agency is credited as the advertising agency for the 2019 OKLAHOMA! revival, as documented by the Internet Broadway Database. Creative Director Steven Tartick, Art Director Jacob Cooper, Copywriter Nathan MacGaughey, and Director Ezra Hurwitz led the creative team.
The 2019 OKLAHOMA! Broadway revival won the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival, as reported by BroadwayWorld. The production ran at Circle in the Square from April 7, 2019, through January 19, 2020, directed by Daniel Fish, whose stripped-back staging defined the revival's distinctive identity in the United States.
Damon Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones performed in the campaign asset. Daunno played Curly McLain and Jones played Laurey Williams in the revival. Their performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein duet 'People Will Say We're In Love' forms the entirety of the single-asset campaign, as documented on Clapboard.com.
The 2018–19 Broadway season generated approximately $1.82 billion in ticket revenue from 14.7 million attendees, according to American Theatre magazine. OKLAHOMA! competed against long-running hits and new productions in the United States market, making RPM's strategy of anchoring the campaign in an emotionally legible Rodgers and Hammerstein performance a precise competitive response.
The campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100. The score reflects the work's creative discipline and strategic coherence as a single-asset content campaign. The primary structural limitation is its narrow media footprint, which constrains reach across the United States recreation and leisure advertising landscape despite strong creative focus.
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