From the heights of the ‘super club’ days of the early nineties, the nightclub industry has needed to evolve in order to maintain their audience. One such brand has bucked the clubbing decline by entering the potentially lucrative festival scene. Sheffield based Gatecrasher; who is renowned for staging one off events, embarked on creating the UK’s biggest dance music festival entitled ‘Summer Sound System’. Although the event took place over the second bank holiday weekend in May, the organisation and marketing started back in 2007.
With an audience predominately online Gatecrasher turned to new media agency Quba to assist them in their quest for festival dominance. Firstly the agency created a micro site for the event, and built an e-commerce system; eliminating commissions payable to third party ticketing companies, in turn saving thousands of pounds. Extensive research was carried out to build a profile of the target audience. The information was then used to ensure everyone who needed to know about the festival did.
Quba strategically placed the online marketing spend, within a highly focused range of music websites and social networking destinations. The subsequent results from this targeted approach were no less than ‘phenomenal’ with ROI at 2488% on their spend with Google. While the Facebook campaign created ‘outstanding’ click through rates of 47%, and conversions to purchase of 12% above and beyond the industry average of 0.5%. Speaking on the results, Gatecrasher’s Electronic Marketing Manager Jamie Wilkins said “We have used digital marketing in the past, but chose to invest more of the marketing spend online for our biggest venture to date. The results we received from our investment were beyond our expectations”.
Notes to editors:
The Gatecrasher Summer Sound System event hosted a line-up of 200 DJ’s, 20 Dance arenas and 20 live artists. The event was stage on 24th & 25th May 2008 at Turweston Aerodrome in Northamptonshire with a capacity of 60,000 people.
ROI – Return On Investment
http://www.qubadigitalmarketing.com/
http://www.quba.co.uk
http://summersoundsystem.com