BONDI FESTIVAL
Waverley Council’s 3 week arts festival, Bondi Festival 2022
Bondi Festival is a three-week long boutique arts festival for all ages that takes place in Australia’s most famous beach suburb, Bondi Beach. The festival takes place each winter within various iconic venues in the area and its program celebrates local artists, immersive performance and family-friendly activities.
Presented by Waverley Council in partnership with Bondi and Districts Chamber of Commerce, the 2022 event was the first time the festival resurfaced after the covid-19 lockdowns with both the 2020 and 2021 festival having to cancel.
This year’s event was held from the 1-17 July and featured a varied program including an ice rink, ferris wheel, a walking tour through North Bondi by local school children, multi-award-winning show Onstage Dating, a theatrical séance by well-known magician Harry Milas, a contemporary dance pub trivia show by artist Joel Bray and much more.
Waverley Council engaged Milestone to market their annual event, Bondi Festival. Due to covid-19, the 2020 and 2021 events were cancelled so the success of the 2022 event was paramount. We turned the campaign around within 3 weeks.
Challenges:
- Short campaign lead-time and turnaround
- Post-covid consumer purchasing behaviour changes
- Relatively small budget for an event of that size
- Bringing back awareness after a two year hiatus
Milestone delivered a topline event marketing strategy and key campaign messages. We developed website content and web build for launch and website maintenance throughout the campaign. We were responsible for creative and design briefings, promotional toolkits and materials for stakeholders, talent and partners. Our digital team developed content and managed budget and optimisation of a paid digital advertising campaigns across Meta Business and Google Search Network plus social media content creation, management and community engagement. We negotiated and managed partnerships with lifestyle Media Partner Time Out, media planning and buying, print materials distribution, eDM build, send and campaign analysis and alliance marketing.
The Results.
Despite the challenges, the event saw great results across the entirety of the campaign including half of the ticketed events selling out and a total marketing reach of 2.8 million eyeballs.
The trend we are consistently experiencing, presented the same challenge for Bondi Festival. That is, a slow start in ticket sales with less than 10% of sales being made within the 5 week on sale period. The remaining 90% of ticket sales were converted in the week before the event through to the event period. This is a repercussion from covid-19, with consumers being less confident to purchase tickets early.
Milestone provided social media services which included creating social media posts, content for the feed, stories and REELS, as well as community engagement. Our Social Media Editor filmed content onsite during the event period for the channels. Our team increased followers on Instagram by 37% and significantly increased the amount of video and carousel content onto the accounts channels. An objective identified within the event marketing strategy was to improve the accounts Engagement Rate (ER). Prior to commencing, this figure sat at 0.05%. Our team increased this figure to 0.62%, increasing the engagement by 1,140%.
The digital ad campaign also received fantastic results, especially through Google Search Ads which received an overall Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) of 82.78 for the campaign and a significant increase within the last 10 days at 189.73. Meta Business Ads took the responsibility of building general awareness for the campaign with ads receiving 143.6K impressions, 2K link clicks and 10K engagements.
RESULTS AT A GLANCE.
TOTAL CAMPAIGN EYEBALLS
0
M
INCREASED ENGAGEMENT BY
0
%
ROAS IN THE LAST 10 DAYS
0
INCREASE IN INSTA FOLLOWERS
0
%
