The bi-annual Splore arts and music festival offers its inter-generational audience an opportunity to immerse themselves in a weekend of contemporary culture where they experience quality entertainment. For the last two events held, Convergence Auckland’s Suzanne McNamara has been engaged as marketing and sponsorship manager.
Competitive pressure from a growing number of festivals meant that in 2007, the event management team identified the need for a strong promotional strategy and sponsorship support to ensure the event in early 2008 was profitable.
The solution:
Convergence developed and executed an integrated marketing communications plan targeting both generation Y & X.
The first marketing objective was to achieve sell out of early bird tickets as quickly as possible. This involved refreshing the brand and website which, for 2008, included a new banner ad that linked the user to purchase tickets from anywhere in the site. The banner space on each web page was later utilised by sponsors to advertise their products and was part of their sponsorship benefit package. We also created a short promo video that was posted on the website as a link to youtube.com. This featured ‘the best of Splore 06’ with the key message of ‘early birds on sale now’.
Earlybird tickets were offered exclusively to database members; no other forms of traditional advertising were engaged. Close to 1000 tickets sold online prior to the first line-up announcement on October 3. However with 45% of early purchasers attending for the first time, word of mouth was clearly an effective form of information dissemination.
Phase two of the marketing targeted new audiences via an initial launch party and announcement to the media. Artists’ videos linked to myspace pages were also linked to both the Splore website and a newly established Splore myspace and Facebook presence. Activating social networking channels proved a vital source of increasing awareness and driving ticket sales in the three-month lead in time to the festival.
As each headline act confirmed, street posters, TV and radio campaigns were engaged. With a relatively small marketing budget, Splore’s media partners played a critical role.
Phase three involved another set of initiatives made possible thanks to Creative New Zealand funding. This involved peer-to-peer initiatives that included launching a blog, an SMS text campaign and a viral ‘pass it on’ email linking to video on youtube. These methods proved so successful Creative New Zealand wrote an article about Splore’s marketing for Fuel4Arts, and Suzanne and Amanda Wright (Festival Director) were asked to speak at the Creative New Zealand 21st Century Arts Conference. View the case study as a pdf.
The text-to-win SMS promotion was particularly successful. It involved a new technology partner and attracted a significant number of entries. Importantly the technology employed allowed Splore to measure which advertising mediums were driving the responses and entries, as different key words were assigned to each advertising medium. The text campaign also featured sponsors’ products as prizes, creating some pre-event leverage for sponsors.
Suzanne was responsible for securing new sponsors and managing all sponsors in the lead up and during the event. She successfully achieved a solid financial base for the festival, with all sponsors providing free media time or a mix of cash and product.
Splore 08 achieved record ticket sales and a post event survey to the database generated overwhelmingly positive feedback. An impressive 80% of those surveyed indicated that would definitely return to the next Splore festival in 2010.