Marketplace Communications was engaged by Arts Queensland, a division of the Department of Education Training and the Arts, to develop, manage and implement a fully integrated marketing campaign incorporating both traditional and non-traditional initiatives to promote the 2009 Ideas Festival.

The 2009 Ideas Festival took place over five days from 25-29 March 2009. The festival is run every three years and this is its fourth time in Brisbane.  On February 5 the Festival organisers staged a launch of the official program to the public. Marketplace Communications where retained to gain publicity for the event. Speakers included The Honourable Rod Welford Minister for Education and Training and Minister for the Arts, Festival Director Michael Peterson, and author and philosopher Peter Singer.

Marketplace Communications worked with ABC Radio in Brisbane and The Courier Mail to achieve greater than expected publicity for the event, this included:

• Four full pages in The Courier Mail;
• Two half pages in The Courier Mail;
• One 16th Page in The Courier Mail; and
• Two radio interviews on the ABC -Brisbane.

Peter Singer was conducting a lecture after the launch that MPC were retained to provide publicity for with the goal of generating ticket sales.  To achieve this MPC developed and delivered a mass email campaign that distributed a targeted message to recipients on the Arts Queensland mailing list. A competition was used as an incentive to encourage recipients to purchase tickets to the lecture.

Prior to the email campaign approximately 12 tickets had been sold for the launch and lecture event. Over the 5 day period following the execution of the email and publicity campaign, the event sold out.

In the lead up to the start of the festival in March, we will continue to use other non-traditional marketing techniques and channels including management of the official 2009 Ideas Festival blog which now as over 600 independent readers since it was first posted a month ago. We also manage their facebook group and their twitter feed which updates subscribers on events, blog postings, interesting media coverage in short, sharp, focused bursts.

The cornerstone of the e-marketing component of this campaign however is the highly targeted, email marketing strategy which drives database segmentation and provides extremely valuable user profile information that is then used to further inform and direct our marketing efforts.