KEY CAMPAIGN HIGHLIGHTS

• In order to compete within an increasingly saturated festival market, we knew we could not just rely on the iconic Reading & Leeds Festival name, and decided to play much more heavily on artist-led content across our digital strategy to help drive ticket sales. Over the space of three years, I commissioned 70+ artist video interviews for both our You Tube, website and social platforms, 25+ written interviews and 30+ social media takeovers, both in the run up to each festival, and on-site, which proved to be highly popular with our fan base, and saw You Tube subscribers increase by 21%, website traffic increase by 32% and helped grow our socials to over 750k. We also found artists were much more likely to talk about the festival on their own socials, if we provided with them with bespoke artist filmed content, and this in turn helped drive ticket sales as we reached their audiences alongside our own. 

• In a bid to drive more traffic (and therefore more sales) through the festival websites, I oversaw a website rebrand, which included overseeing new branding and visuals for the website, and a more simplified navigation system to improve the user journey. We also created a series of new content strands within the website, to encourage visitors to stay longer within the site. This included featuring artist content pieces, topical news stories and improved picture galleries. All of this saw website traffic increase by 29%, and we achieved a higher dwell time within the website, which in turn led to increased ticket sales. 

• As part of my role, I oversaw all advertising spend and ad creative across the festivals, including overseeing all online, TV and print ads. This was a huge job, and we constantly A/B tested new creative to try and reach new audiences, and year on year we increased our engagement across online ads and sold out three Reading Festivals in a row. In a bid to reach new audiences, I also launched the festival’s first TV ad in 2014, which saw us reach our biggest audience to date (4.5 million) and also helped secure a sold out Reading Festival. 

• As part of the drive to capture more artist content on-site at the festival, we wanted to create a content space that artists would actually want to be in, and that was different to the average backstage interview space. This led to us working with Love Live to create an experiential ‘Leeds Festival Artist Pub’ filming area at Leeds Festival, where we built a full scale pub complete with a bar, seating area, bespoke artwork and pub games. This led to a huge pick up in artist participation, and we secured our highest number of interviews to date (over 35 on-site interviews), producing content that reached fans into the thousands and increased our You Tube subscribers by 15%.