Festival & Event Marketing Case Study: Tour de Moon Southampton

Overview

Tour de Moon needed a well-rounded marketing solution to their large scale festival event.

About Tour de Moon

Tour de Moon was a festival that consisted of free public events to promote radical thinking for the purposes of an alternative future. The cosmic-themed event toured throughout England with talks, presentations and interactive experiences aimed to connect people to the moon and to draw attention to under-represented social groups.

Tour de Moon is the creation of Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun, an internationally renowned ‘creator of experiences’. She has worked on unique projects including the creation of the first International Space Orchestra with scientists from NASA.

Her fascination with outer space – and her desire to bring it closer to home – was the driving force behind Tour de Moon.

The thought-provoking, original and immersive experiences that were part of the tour were welcomed by 11 towns and three major cities. It was totally free, and designed to involve anyone and everyone, with values of inclusion and accessibility at it’s very core.

Why Tour de Moon chose ADVRT 

As part of their overall marketing strategy, Tour de Moon’s organisers decided to enlist the help of three local marketing agencies – one agency per city the tour was visiting – to assist with local knowledge and connections, as well as getting the message out that the event was coming to town.

ADVRT was enlisted to look after their Southampton advertising, which included multi-channel paid advertising, influencer management, local business partnerships, physical flyers and digital billboards.

Our close ties to the event industry were a big advantage, as we understand the links between the online and offline worlds, and the threads that bring them closer. We have the tools, connections and the local insight required to help bring the event to life, and bring it to those who require it the most.

ADVRT’s marketing strategy solution for Tour de Moon

Aims:

The client’s goals were to raise awareness of the festival, and the deeper message behind their events. They also wanted sign-ups to their grant scheme for creative 18-25 year-olds, drive traffic to their ticket booking partner, and get local businesses behind the brand to support the event.

Challenges and solutions:

Due to the tight timescale, deployment of local outreach and paid advertising had to be proposed, specified, designed and deployed within an incredibly quick timescale. To achieve this, regular meetings and concise communication with everyone involved were essential to ensure everything worked in harmony.

Ensuring pre-event graphics and video content portrayed the event accurately was another challenge, but we worked closely with the client’s in-house designers to achieve on-brand graphics that fit the required dimensions for every platform used. As soon as the tour was on the road, however, videos of the event became the most self-explanatory form of advertising.

Strategy:

ADVRT worked closely with the client to determine their ideal audience to confirm the correct tone and ad placement that should be used. ADVRT concluded that the messaging would need to be friendly, inviting and all-inclusive to involve minority groups and close-knit, creative communities.

With the ideal demographic in mind, ADVRT took care of the entire local marketing strategy for both digital and print. This included organising digital billboards and other physical placements within the local area, delivering city-wide flyers, influencer management, and paid digital advertising.

The paid digital adverts were a fully integrated solution from beginning to end, implemented by our dedicated PPC team across Facebook, Instagram, Google and Tik Tok.

We also produced and distributed an approved press release about the event to six local publications who all published the article. With the internal resources to write longer-form marketing copy, such as press releases, and the local contacts to distribute it were valuable strengths of ADVRT.

ADVRT’s results

Across all paid channels we designed, deployed and tested 351 individual adverts, which attracted a reach of more than 8,000,000, and achieved more than 93,000 clicks for the campaign in total.

By leveraging strategic partnerships that we have gained by working in the city, we were able to consult and deliver on a digital out-of-home (OOH) campaign that provided 291,000 plays of the event artwork per month, delivered across a network of 13 hospitality venues.

For the show days, we organised additional OOH for the campaign, including: ad walkers, a digital ad van displaying event artwork and the targeted delivery of 20,000 flyers in the local area.

We were able to define successful audience niches through interest-based targeting. This allowed us to tailor our messaging to the correct audience, ensuring we were maximising the campaign potential.

We achieved the client’s initial aims to portray the event accurately to the ideal audience, increase ticket sales via the client’s booking partner, increase scheme sign-ups, and organise local brand support.

ADVRT contributed to the booking of 2,348 pre-booked tickets for the Southampton events before the campaign’s messaging shifted to promoting ticketless entries at the client’s request.