INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL
PROJECT OVERVIEW:
The design and implementation of an OOH (Out-of-home) marketing and brand awareness campaign for the Cape Town International Comedy Festival.
PROJECT TIMELINE:
4 Weeks
BRAND:
Cape Town International Comedy Festival
PROJECT TYPE:
OOH Campaign
PROJECT SCOPE:
Campaign Design, Art Direction
TEAM:
Creative Director (Lindie Gerber), Marketing Director (Blackbird Studios), Event Director (Cape Town International Comedy Festival)
. . .
THE CHALLENGE
Develop an OOH marketing and brand awareness campaign to promote the upcoming International Comedy Festival that would stand out in the crowded landscape of event promotion.
OUR APPROACH
THE MAIN CAMPAIGN
Our strategy was to develop the OOH campaign by considering not only the campaign objective (driving ticket sales) but also the potential blockers a crowded event landscape offers, such as limited real estate, limited opportunities to create exposure and awareness, and limited attention span.
As a result, we developed a campaign primarily driven by high impact visuals to overcome the potential blockers by relying on large blocks of black ink with a single subject matter to differentiate the campaign from everything else in the market at the time.
Since we were working with limited attention-span of our potential target audience, we decided to rely on resonance. We used visuals that the majority of people would attribute to comedy, such as the banana peel.
As a result, the campaign was developed around visuals of bananas in several states to relate to event segments such as The Late Show is paired with visuals of an over-ripe banana. Where the Main Show is paired with a perfectly ripe banana.
THE GUERRILLA MARKETING CAMPAIGN
In support of the original campaign and to further promote brand exposure, we decided to introduce a guerilla marketing campaign with visuals that would compliment the banana theme. A series of branded banana peel vinyl stickers would be produced and distributed throughout the city in the lead-up to the event.
THE OUTCOME
The visual impact of the campaign proved to be highly successful as it resulted in a sold-out event with the largest attendance to date.
. . .
CHALLENGES & LEARNS
Executing the Guerilla Marketing Campaign proved to be quite a challenge due to advertising restrictions in public spaces. We tried to overcome this by getting permission from shopping centers and stores before executing the campaign, which also assured its success as space had been predetermined, which overcomes the potential risk of having advertising removed before reaching its audience or wasting funding on ‘unseen’ promotion.
