BOOM! INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF PERCUSSION
Percussion Australia’s week-long festival, BOOM! International Festival of Percussion 2022
BOOM! International Festival of Percussion was a week-long festival that celebrated percussion in all its many styles from around the world. From Afro Latin, through to Asian to Western orchestral, popular and art music. BOOM! Festival brought all these styles together with a program full of talks, workshops and concerts by leading artists from Australia and around the world.
Presented by Percussion Australia, the late-2022 event was the first time the festival resurfaced after the Covid-19 lockdowns with the early 2022 festival having to be postponed.
This year’s event was held from the 1-8 October and featured a varied program at the Sydney Town Hall and Seymour Centre.
Milestone Creative was engaged by Percussion Australia to develop and lead a high quality, targeted and effective marketing campaign for its week-long festival, BOOM! International Festival of Percussion, that played at the Seymour Centre and Sydney Town Hall from the 1-8 October 2022.
Challenges:
- Post-Covid consumer purchasing behaviour changes
- Changes in consumer purchasing behaviour due to heightened cost of living
- Relatively small budget for an event of that size
- Creating awareness around the festival as it launched for the first time
Milestone was responsible for marketing management of the campaign including 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 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 with many workshops close to selling out, a high amount of sales overall, and a marketing reach over 600,000 eyeballs.
The trend we are consistently experiencing, presented the same challenge for BOOM! International Festival of Percussion. That is, a slow start in ticket sales with less than 35% of sales being made within the 10 week on sale period. The remaining 65% of ticket sales were converted in the week before or of the event through to the event period. This is a repercussion from Covid-19, with consumers being less confident to purchase tickets early.
Paid digital advertising contributed to the awareness of the festival with approximately 300,000 impressions. Media buy, which was planned and organised by Milestone, also contributed to the awareness of the festival with BOOM! featured in Time Out, Limelight Magazine, Fine Music Radio and more. Alliance marketing was particularly successful for this campaign with other arts organisations cross-promoting the festival. Through this, we reached new large audience databases with similar interests.
