Category: Best Low Budget Campaign
Advertiser: NORTHERN RIVERS WRITERS' CENTRE
Product/Service: BYRON BAY WRITER'S FESTIVAL
Agency: GEORGE PATTERSON Y&R
Executive Creative Director: Julian Watt (George Patterson Y&R)
Creative Director: David Joubert (George Patterson Y&R)
Copywriter: Kate Burt (George Patterson Y&R)
Art Director: Dean Mortensen (George Patterson Y&R)
Digital Art Director: David Jackson (George Patterson Y&R)
Media placement: EDM - N/A - 4 July 2011
Describe the brief/objective of the direct campaign.
The Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, one of Australia’s largest writers’ festival, needed to drive online traffic to their webpage prior to the festival to promote ticket sales. But being a modest Writer’s Festival, they didn’t have an advertising budget. They needed a cost-effective idea that captured the festival’s passion for words and people’s inspiration for writing.
Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective with reference to the projected response rates and desired outcome.
A simple demonstration of the power of writing. We turned the least literary of things – hyperlinks – into rich prose. All hyperlinks relating to the festival were transformed into ‘ads’, each written to excite and invite passionate readers.
The links were sent out by the festival to their extensive database. They were also posted on Facebook and adapted for Twitter. From there they went viral with writers and readers sending them on to their own networks as you would with an ordinary link, but it wasn’t an ordinary link… it was poetry in motion.
Explain why the creative execution was relevant to the product or service.
What happened? The festival got what they wanted. The festival’s website received a 32% increase in click-through traffic that lead to Candida Baker, the festival director saying, “The 2011 Festival smashed all previous records” and “Friday broke all sales records for any single day”.
Describe the results in as much detail as possible with particular reference to the RESPONSE of the target audience including deliverability statistics, response rates, click throughs, sales cost per response, relationships built and overall return on investment.
In demonstrating this year’s festival theme of ‘a passion for words’ on a $3,000 budget, the idea of turning cold, unreadable hyperlinks into a place for words to come to life became the perfect vehicle to reflect the festival’s commitment of embracing the new digital age of literature