“Partnering with Kwasi has empowered us to provide better insights for all our artists and venues, giving us the ability to strategise with stakeholders to ensure we are growing year-on-year and continuing to attract the world’s best artists. We look forward to partnering with Kwasi again in 2023.”
Ella Husiman, Head of Ticketing, Digital and Marketing
About Adelaide Fringe
Adelaide Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the Southern Hemisphere. The well-loved festival stretches from Whyalla all the way across the state to Naracoorte, with eclectic and vibrant events that include cabaret, theatre, comedy, circus, music, visual arts, workshops and much more.
The Challenge
This year Adelaide Fringe introduced two new events to its ever-impressive lineup: Sky Song, which was at the centrepiece of the 2022 Fringe; and Electric Dreams, four unique VR events merging technology, gaming and art.
Both had unique challenges that required specific strategies to ensure specific goals were met. Following our successful set-up of conversion tracking for Adelaide Fringe, Kwasi was asked to run paid digital campaigns for both events.
For Sky Song, Kwasi was tasked to help attract and generate ticket sales from interstate customers. With the event originally set to take place in Adelaide CBD it was changed with limited notice to Mclaren Vale approximately 40km from Adelaide CBD. This required us to formulate a strategic change to the campaign to ensure that we reached the greatest number of potential audience members within the set budget.
Electric Dreams on the other hand presented a different set of challenges. As a festival within a festival, creative messaging would need to be just right. And with some of the Electric Dreams events focusing on provocative issues, there were important audience targeting considerations to take into account.
The Solution
Sky Song
With multiple stakeholders involved, and with COVID still destabilising our way of life, it was important to Adelaide Fringe to be able to showcase that events, especially indigenous events, had the star power to attract interstate travellers and contribute to the SA economy at large.
To attract key interstate audiences, we homed in on specific cities for our Google Ads campaign. They were: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. Perth was excluded due to lockdowns at the time. These cities were chosen due to their proximity to airports (rather than regional towns) to maximise the budget.
Our data also showed that interstate travellers were only booking airfare tickets 9 days out, so budgets were increased from late February to early March to align with peak demand.
Electric Dreams
We built five Facebook ad campaigns to showcase Electric Dreams’ various events: Electric Dreams conference, Volo VR Swings, Anthropocene in C Major, Goliath, and SAM x Electric Dreams.
With short one-off events like these, it was imperative that copy was continuously updated to reflect urgency and the awards won in order to generate ticket sales.
$19.7M
Box Office Revenue
727,567
Tickets Sold
$50.1M
New Money Generated
$74.9M
Expenditure Generated
The Results
Sky Song
Sky Song attracted in total 38,000 audiences both interstate and locally, even after a change of venue from the CBD to McLaren Vale, approximately 25km out of the city.
Overall, Adelaide Fringe saw audiences flock from far and wide to embrace the creativity of the festival, with 32,000 interstate tourists buying over 86,400 tickets.
Sky Song was awarded the BankSA Best Event, Workshops & Talks Award for 2022 and has been greenlit to showcase once again in 2023, with State funding backing the event.
Electric Dreams
Our ad campaign generated over 189,000 impressions for Electric Dreams, with Volvo VR Swings attracting the most.
With its provocative subject matter, the Electric Dream events garnered significant engagement and attraction, and ultimately received the BankSA Best Film & Digital, Interactive Award for Goliath: Playing with Reality and the John Chataway Innovation Award for VR Swings Volo: Dreams of Flight.
We look forward to partnering with Adelaide Fringe again for 2023.
