Facebook ads for a festival
A one-day festival dropped billboards, radio and print entirely and ran social only. Attendance went from 1,100 to four times that, and the crowd got younger.
Nancy, Festival. Recorded June 2023.
Nancy runs an outdoor festival. The first year drew about 1,100 people using billboards, radio and print advertising — the channels that have always been used for events like this, bought the way they have always been bought.
The second year she cut all of it. No billboards, no radio, no print. The entire budget went to social advertising, which for a single-day event is a genuinely nervous decision: there is one date, and if the marketing does not work there is no recovering the year.
Attendance came in at four times the previous year. Enough that keeping up with the crowds was a problem, which for a festival is the good version of trouble.
The more consequential result was demographic. The crowd got younger. For a traditional festival that is survival rather than a nice statistic — the existing audience ages out, and if nobody younger arrives the event has a fixed number of years left.
Her explanation of why is the whole argument for the switch: younger attendees are not reading newspaper classifieds. They are on their phones. Continuing to advertise where the current audience already is guarantees the same audience, one year older.
The event is expanding to two days on the strength of it. She was nervous, describes herself as less than technically savvy, and did it anyway.
In Nancy’s words
“The first year we had about 1,100 people show up. We used nothing but billboard, radio and print ads. This year we eliminated all of that and only went with social media, and we got four times the number of people.”
“Not only did we have really good numbers, but our demographic shifted a little to get a younger group — and that’s the only way this kind of festival is going to survive.”
“Take the leap and do it, because I was really nervous about it, to be honest with you. I’m a 63 year old grandmother and I’d never done it before.”
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