Festival Fever

It’s that time of year again, and as the days begin to get longer and lighter our thoughts start to turn to summer; it's festival announcement time!

Most of our favourite festivals, from heavy metal and ultra cool to the wonderfully mad will, over the next few weeks, be strategically adding to their performance line up.

In a fiercely competitive, heavily populated and diverse UK market, much is made of these initial announcements. Many of our long standing festivals have a loyal and regular following that are bound to gleefully attend; Glastonbury2014 sold out in record time when tickets went on sale in October last year. 

Yet this is the period when those unsure on which festival to attend are swayed by the announcements of the headliners. Reportedly there are now over 600 outdoor summer festivals ranging in scale, theme, genre and demographic all taking place within the space of four months! An absolutely astonishing figure for a notoriously unreliable summer such as ours!

So just how do you know which tickets to book?  The experience starts from the upcoming, exciting announcements of headlining acts. Then you begin checking the websites – here the battle is won or lost. The website itself must grab your attention, explain the festival in a nutshell and entice you to part with your hard earned cash, all the while embodying everything that the entire festival stands for. Easy right? Perhaps one of the finest examples of this is the Wilderness Festival, a uniquely branded experience offering an altogether different festival experience.

The next experience is to increase interest and awareness of your event via the mediums of social media, encouraging everyone to ‘join the party’.  Again if the content, artwork and information appeals then it’s likely you’ve gained an attendee and brand ambassador for your festival!

So which festival headliners have caught your interest so far?  Which festival websites capture your imagination?.....And most importantly, have you got your wellies, rain mac and sun cream?!

It’s not too late to create your own festival for your employees and guests…in fact we're specialists on the subject! Check out some of our case studies for more information or join the conversation on our blog or Twitter.  We look forward to speaking to you!

Is there such a thing as bad publicity?

For those of us involved within the creative and promotional industries we all appreciate the power of print and the value in checking grammar, word flow and spellings before a big event. Occasionally slogans can get lost in translation with computers formatted slightly differently, not to mention the less Shakespearean versions of English used throughout the world.

But imagine our surprise when we heard about the latest news from multinational electronics company, Samsung at this weeks CES conference in Las Vegas.

We've all heard about Hollywood Producer Michael Bay leaving the stage during the launch of Samsung’s new curved TV, but the experiential side of the launch revealed a technological rain wall, sadly containing a misspelled ‘Experiece’; an otherwise inspired concept which looked great but sadly also captured the attention of social media.

Perceptions of brands have never been formed or altered quicker than they are right now with the accessibility of the internet and social media.

Both of these occurrences have gained huge exposure for Samsung, so you could argue that they have received more coverage than they could have dreamt of, albeit not directly about their product but it certainly goes a long way for brand exposure. So is it true that 'there's no such thing as bad publicity’?

See previous Blog entries for some of the experiential escapes The MotivAction Group have provided.

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