A record breaking festival
Every year, the Adelaide Fringe consumes our home state like no other event. It gives artists a platform, it showcases Adelaide and is genuinely loved and embraced by South Australians.
The Challenge
Adelaide Fringe is the biggest arts festival in Australia. The “covid years” saw a dip in tickets and heading towards the 2023 season, they came to us with the goal of a bigger and better festival than ever.
To smash their previous 2020 ticket sales record. We pushed them to go one step further – to hit 1 million ticket sales – something no event in Australia had ever done. Not even the Australian Open.
1. Million. Tickets. That’s a big number, it’s more than a few ad campaigns, it required a deep partnership and a strategic mindset.
The Adelaide Fringe has cemented its place in the hearts and minds of South Australians, so as part of our ambitious target, we broadened our horizons and placed much of our strategy around interstate visitors – seeking to boost our state’s economy as well as spread the joy of the Fringe to the rest of Australia.
We started with a strategic workshop to give the organisation greater focus. We wanted to position Fringe under the proposition of being ‘unedited’, and pinpointed our target audience as Sarah, a 30-something year old from Sydney.
The Solution
We developed an integrated campaign with the team to interject into Sarah’s life in the moments when she needed an escape and to find herself.
This included finding her on the couch during guilty pleasures of reality TV and catch-up binging.
Disrupting her morning commute with targeted messaging and physically disrupting her commute with a taste of Fringe in the middle of Martin Place.
What followed was a creative campaign with every detail finely constructed to meet an audience opportunity, defined by data, that they had not reached before.
Martin Place Activation
We brought the Fringe to the heartbeat of Sydney and challenged the East Coast to get to Adelaide.
The numbers;
- 14 artists – Including Kween Kong
- 2 hours of live performance
- National TV exposure
- Live radio crosses
- 3 lucky winners coming to SA for Fringe
- 2 very happy Adelaide Fringe Partners
- 1 national airline partner
- Huge national exposure for South Australia
- And a truckload of sparkles
Foundation – Giving Day
As well as boosting national awareness and driving record ticket sales, the Adelaide Fringe are also committed to making the event the most inclusive festival in the world. This mission is championed by the Adelaide Fringe Foundation, giving opportunities to artists and access to more people in the community. We helped reposition the foundation under the proposition Arts Unlimited and worked with the team on the first ‘Donation Day’.
The campaign helped drive $40,000 in donations on the day helping to earn its place in the Fringe’s calendar for years to come.
The Results
In 2023, it attracted over 45,000 visitors to the state (29% on the previous record) staying for over 230,000 bed nights.
In short, Fringe has sold more tickets than ever and in doing so delivered record numbers of high value audiences to the state which provides significant benefit to the state's economy.
