Description
AGENCY:
CLIENT NAME: Sziget Festival
Campaign started: March 1, 2019
Campaign ended: August 13, 2019
Created at: August 24, 2020
BRIEF
Held in August in Budapest, Hungary, Sziget Festival is one of the top five music festivals in Europe. Total attendance across the seven days of the festival was 565,000 people in 2019 – with more than half of the audience coming from outside of Hungary.
Harvest managed paid digital media across Europe, with a goal of driving ticket sales to maximize profitability and keep within a strict CPA of €25 and an ROAS target of 3. We focused on 5 key markets: UK & Ireland, France, Netherlands and Germany with the remainder of the budget seeking out opportunities of demand in other markets.
STRATEGY:
This was a difficult brief as we were working to relatively small budgets which needed to be invested carefully to deliver a fully integrated pan-European campaign.
The heart of our strategy was driving efficiency through a sophisticated bid adjustment strategy across demographics and location combined with careful budget management. This was linked to extensive upper funnel awareness activity, delivered via paid social, display and video creatives.
Budget phasing was vitally important. Festival goers from distant markets like the Irish Republic make buying decisions early. By contrast, the Hungarian market and other neighbouring countries see a lot of ticket sales occurring within the month of the festival itself. We revised audience segments and targeting strategies as we drew closer to the festival in order to capture and reach as many in-market individuals as possible.
Our strategy which saw significant uplifts in ticket sales by matching spend to pay days was crucial to the success of the campaign. By learning and understanding these trends and spend patterns we were able to push and pull budget effectively using an integrated digital multi-channel strategy to deliver an ROAS that significantly beat target.
RESULTS:
Across the 2019 season, we have sold over 64,000 incremental tickets to the festival across 26 different markets with activity uncovering demand in previously un-targeted regions such as Malta, Israel, Australia and America. Following pushes in Hungary and local markets in the month of the festival we drove 7,184 tickets in the weeks leading up to the festival.
Overall cost per sale was 72% below target and in some major markets (France, Italy, UK & Ireland and Netherlands), we achieved a return on advertising spend of 25:1.
DOWNLOADS:
sziget case study
