In 2024, Romanian Design Week, the festival dedicated to the creative industries, took an important step, being an edition where participation was conditional on the purchase of a ticket. The project was managed by Mavericks. The Agency, which coordinated all stages of the campaign. For this edition, a total reach of over 2.5 million users was obtained through performance media campaigns through a mix in 3 different advertising platforms in which the program and the reasons for being present at RDW 2024 were amplified, and in in the end there were over 80,000 participants.
About strategy and implementation
The performance media campaign had to fulfill several roles – to inform and increase the notoriety of the festival beyond its social media core (fans, followers, people who participated in previous editions), but also with the objective of selling tickets. Starting from these two main objectives, the promotional campaigns also had a greater impact and visibility among the target audience. In this context, the goal set to have a similar number of participants as in the 2023 edition, where participation was only based on a free invitation, represented quite a challenge.
Regarding the strategy, we developed a mix of three advertising platforms: Google Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok Ads. In addition to these three main advertising platforms, we also included campaigns in Pinterest, due to the majority female audience and in accordance with the RDW target audience, but also Teads, to reach users also through programmatic media. For each individual platform, we had different types of promotion campaigns with different messages and especially different exhibitions and actions related to the entire Romanian Design Week festival.
We launched the first promotional campaigns at the beginning of May with targeted reach campaigns in both Meta and TikTok. Also in this first stage, we also had a generic reach and traffic campaign to the site. At this stage we focused on new, cold audiences based on psycho-socio-demographic targeting. We reached 5 different audiences with a volume of no more than 7-800K users, in order not to lose the homogeneity of targeting. After reaching a sufficiently large number of unique users, we developed new audiences in the warm audience area (participants of previous editions, those who entered the website or interacted with the social media pages of the first campaigns) to which we came with the same informative message about the new RDW 2024 edition.
The next message was a sales oriented one, with the objective of selling tickets. In this case, we had dedicated visuals with a clear call to action, not just in the copy accompanying the ads. Here we had two distinct stages; in the first stage, before the opening of the festival, we had a visual focusing on the visual identity of this edition and, after the opening, we humanized the visuals more and kept the same messages, but in the background there were exhibits and participants from the opening of the festival. In order to increase the notoriety and interest regarding the festival, we intensively promoted a video with the opening of the festival and in this way we managed with a low budget to reach as many users as possible who we were then able to retarget for the remaining 9 days of festival. In this way, we were also able to reach the goal of participants at RDW 2024. And because it was a festival with international content, but also because it is a suitable target audience for our campaigns, we also had a specific campaign dedicated to tourists visiting in those days Bucharest. We kept this campaign only during the festival, and the message was in English.
In Google Ads we also developed Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns, even though we promoted a festival. We used these two types of campaigns based on Google’s machine learning to reach the most suitable users who can purchase tickets. Thus, these campaigns worked on the basis of signals received including from users who have already purchased tickets and based on which the AI in Google Ads projected the campaign to other users equally suitable to make the purchase.
After the festival ended, we didn’t stop promoting the content; we stopped the campaigns talking about participating in the event and buying tickets, but then we promoted the aftermovie to everyone we interacted with digitally (organically and paid) during the promotional campaign. In this way, we made sure that we reached both those who participated, but also those who maybe wanted to come but, for various reasons, could no longer do it. So it started Preparation for RDW 2025 started from the first day after the closing of the 2024 edition, so we will have warm audiences with which to start the promotion campaigns for next year’s edition. Also to keep the channel warm with the target audience we promoted the RDW Talks format to the best performing audiences.
Challenges we encountered
The main challenge related to the fact that in this edition, participation was conditional on the purchase of a ticket. We also enabled the audience that attended previous editions, where you could only attend by reserving an invitation in exchange for contact details, and there was this variable that could indicate that a significant portion of those who attended the previous edition would no longer attend and this year, when there was ticket conditioning. However, the 2024 edition of RDW achieved its business and visibility goals.
Campaign results
Within this promotion campaign we managed to achieve the set objective, namely the participation of a similar number to the 2023 edition, to which entry was free. Conformable the press release80,000 people participated in RDW 2024, similar to the number of 84,000 people in 2023. We first presented the business performance achieved, based on the very good results obtained through the digital campaign.
With a media budget of around EUR 20,000, we had a total reach of over 2.8 million people and brought over 120K visitors to the site from performance media campaigns alone. An important contribution to the achievement of the business objectives was also the total interactions we obtained, which were more than 473K on all social platforms and a number of more than 730K video views. These interactions then translated into increased organic traffic on RDW-related searches and further direct traffic that converted and led to ticket purchases for the 2024 edition.
Team:
Mavericks:
Gabriela Dumitrașcu, Team Leader & Senior Performance Media Specialist
The Institute:
Mădălina Mezdrea – Head of Digital, Romanian Design Week
Cristiana Iordache – Social Media Manager, Romanian Design Week
Raluca Mirel – Project Director Romanian Design Week, Romanian Design Week
Mavericks. The Agency is a digital marketing agency specialized in performance media and web analytics with 8 years of experience, with a portfolio of over 100 clients, with offices in Bucharest and Brașov. Starting from 2023, Mavericks expanded its range of services by adding social media and email marketing to its portfolio. The team consists of 22 colleagues, 15 of whom are certified specialists who have managed a 25+ million euro budget invested in performance media campaigns. The agency offers strategies and campaigns integrated in performance media, expertise in the field, personalized trainings and consulting both on the Romanian and international market. Among the top clients with which the agency has close collaboration are Cărturesți, Mobexpert, L’Oreal, Ceresit or Autonom.
Source: www.iqads.ro
