Image Credit: Dawn Farrow, founder of OnSale and GIEM.

Dawn Farrow’s story begins on stage. Trained as a ballet dancer, she arrived in London with a performer’s instinct for emotion, discipline, and audience connection – before pairing it with a business degree that would smartly shape the next chapter. That duality – creative intuition and commercial clarity – runs through everything she does today. As she reflects in this interview, she didn’t leave the arts; she simply found another way to be part of it, translating feeling into campaigns that move people to act.

Over the past two decades, Dawn has helped sell more than 36 million tickets across theatre, immersive experiences, attractions and live entertainment. She is now the founder of On Sale – with On Sale Live ’26 (15 May, King’s Cross) bringing together the marketers, ticketing professionals, producers and agencies driving the experience economy – and GIEM Experience Marketing Masterclasses, designed to upskill and connect an often under-supported workforce.

At its heart, her work is about community, capability, and confidence in a rapidly evolving industry. Off-duty? You’ll likely find her in Richmond Park with her dogs, or tracking down great coffee and ice cream across London.

Read on – and if you’re serious about this industry, book your place at On Sale Live ’26.

You trained in ballet as a child – so before the strategy, before the campaigns, there was performance. Can you take us back to those early years: what first drew you into the arts, and how did those formative experiences shape your instinct to champion and market culture?

I trained professionally in dance. That’s what brought me to London. But I also took a business degree, which probably tells you something about how I was wired even then.

The decision to stay in London and pay my rent is what led me into marketing. It wasn’t a grand strategic pivot. It was practical. And in the early years I cried endlessly about giving up dance. I won’t pretend that was easy.

But what I came to understand is that I hadn’t left the industry. I’d just found a different way to be in it.

And I think that matters more than people realise. Emotionally driven marketing is what sells experiences. You cannot write a campaign for something you’ve never felt. Having stood on a stage, having trained for years to make an audience feel something, you carry that into every brief. You understand the gap between what a show is and what it means to the person in the seat.

Some of my favourite people to work with are ex-performers. They’re not afraid to try things. They understand how hard the work is. And they bring a creative instinct that you can’t really teach.

Image Credit: On Sale Live ’26 → 15 May, King’s Cross, London → onsale.live

Across your work – from agencies to GIEM and On Sale Live – you’ve consistently sat at the intersection of culture and audience. What core values guide how you think about marketing the arts today, especially in a landscape that’s becoming more commercial, data-driven, and fast-moving?

Marketing exists to drive revenue. I’ve never been confused about that, even when working on productions with genuine cultural weight.

The thing I push back on is the idea that commercial rigour and emotional intelligence are in tension. They’re not. The best campaigns I’ve seen do both. They make you feel something and they convert.

What I’m seeing too much of right now is data being used as a substitute for understanding. You can have every audience insight tool available and still miss what actually makes someone buy a ticket. That decision is emotional. The data tells you when and where. It doesn’t tell you why.

My core position is simple. Know your audience as people, not just as segments. Be honest about what you’re selling. And measure what actually matters at that point in a campaign.

Image Credit: Dawn Farrow, founder of OnSale and GIEM.

Looking at this year’s programme, what are the big conversations you feel the industry most urgently needs to have right now – and how does On Sale Live 2026 respond to them?

Three things are sitting at the top of my list.

The first is AI. Not in the abstract, but practically. How are marketing teams actually using it? Where is it saving time and where is it creating noise? The industry needs honest conversations about this, not keynotes about disruption.

The second is audiences. The post-pandemic audience is not the same audience. Spending behaviour has changed, attention has changed, and the reasons people choose to go out have changed. We’re still seeing campaigns built on assumptions that no longer hold.

The third is the workforce. Marketing teams in this sector are under extraordinary pressure. Responsible for revenue, under-resourced, often carrying the expectations of three people. That conversation needs to happen in public.

On Sale Live ’26 is built around future technology, future audiences and the future workforce. Those themes weren’t chosen because they sound good on a programme. They were chosen because these are the conversations I hear every time I’m in a room with the people doing this work.

Image Credit: Attendees at On Sale Live ’25.

AI and data are increasingly shaping how events are marketed, priced, and even programmed. From your perspective, where are the real opportunities – and where should the industry be cautious?

The opportunity is time. AI gives marketers time back. If you’re spending hours on first drafts, on scheduling, on pulling together reports, that time can be redirected into thinking. Strategy. Creative judgment. The things that actually differentiate a campaign.

Where I’d be cautious is in using AI to replace the insight that comes from knowing your audience properly. There’s a real risk that teams reach for AI-generated content because it’s fast, without asking whether it reflects anything true about the experience they’re selling.

The other caution is around pricing. Dynamic pricing done well is a smart commercial tool. Done badly, it destroys the relationship between a venue and its audience. The data can tell you what the market will bear. It can’t tell you what your audience will forgive.

Image Credit: Promotional film for OnSale Live ’26.

With rising costs and saturated channels, marketing live events feels harder than ever. What are you seeing actually work right now when it comes to reaching and converting audiences?

Honestly? The things that have always worked, done with more discipline.

Peer recommendation still converts better than paid. Word of mouth, community, people telling other people. The channel has changed but the mechanism hasn’t.

What I’m also seeing work is specificity. Campaigns that speak directly to a defined audience, that name the person they’re for and what they’ll get from the experience, outperform campaigns trying to speak to everyone.

And timing matters more than people account for. A good campaign at the wrong point in the sales cycle underperforms. The brief has to include when, not just what.

The marketers who are converting right now are the ones who understand the full funnel, not just the top of it.

There’s a lot of talk about moving from transactions to relationships – from selling tickets to building communities. What does that shift look like in practice, and who’s doing it well?

The language around this can get quite vague quite fast. So I’d rather be specific about what it actually means.

A transaction is: buy a ticket, attend, leave. A relationship is: buy a ticket, attend, tell someone, come back, become the kind of person who identifies with this experience.

The difference in practice is whether you’re communicating with your audience between purchases. Not selling at them continuously. Communicating. Giving them something. Making them feel they’re part of something before the doors open and after they close.

The experiences building genuine fandom are the ones treating their audience as a community with an identity, not a database with a purchase history. The fans panel at On Sale Live ’26 goes into exactly this. It’s one of the sessions I’m most looking forward to.

Image Credit: Dawn Farrow, founder of OnSale and GIEM.

Looking ahead to London’s arts, culture and entertainment, what are you personally most excited to see or experience later this year?

I’ll be honest. I’m watching the evolution of what counts as an experience more than I’m tracking a specific show.

The word immersive has taken a beating, and not without reason. The early light projection and VR formats were genuinely exciting. Some of them are now quite formulaic. That’s what happens when a format becomes a template.

What’s catching my attention is businesses like Therme, which are bringing health, wellbeing and experience together in a way that feels like a different kind of proposition entirely. The question of what people are actually choosing to spend money on in 2025 and 2026 is genuinely fascinating to me. And the answer isn’t always what the industry assumes.

Finally, could you share three cultural places or communities you love in London that our readers should go visit or experience?

I should say upfront: I’m not a natural Londoner. But I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else, and these three places are genuinely part of my life.

Dog community: Richmond Park, with my dogs, is where I go when the city gets too much. It doesn’t feel like London. That’s why I love it.

Ice-cream community: Fouberts in Chiswick does a giant ice cream that my daughter considers non-negotiable. It’s a simple pleasure and it’s perfect.

Coffee community: And Trindle Store in Kew is where I stop on my commute for coffee and deli treats. Proper coffee, good food, no fuss.

Find Dawn Farrow at onsale.live and @dawn.onsalegroup

On Sale Live ’26
15 May 2026
King’s Cross, London
Book Now → onsale.live

Fine out more about GIEM – Experience Marketing Masterclasses → thegiem.com