Lookout Wild Film Festival was established in 2012. During the past decade, LWFF has grown from a small gathering viewing films at the Crash Pad and moving its way to small theaters at The Chattanooga Choo Choo and The Walker Theater. Now the festival has made its home at the Tivoli Theatre, showing films at the largest screen of its type in North America. How did they do this? By implementing an increase in awareness and ticket sales with Spectruss!
Spectruss CEO, Sam Silvey, has been part of the festival’s board of directors since its establishment and has been working with the board on pushing the festival’s growth each year. Since 2012, Spectruss has managed and overseen all of Lookout Wild Film Festival’s creative content from the website design and development to all marketing and promotional collateral, including both digital and print assets for the past ten years.
In 2019, the first year the Lookout Wild Film Festival is being shown at the Tivoli, Spectruss gave the festival a brand new look with an updated festival logo, a brand new website and a complete refresh of the identity of the festival for its premiere at the Tivoli Theatre. Films were coming from all over the world and festival goers have significantly increased from the past years. With the success of the 2019 festival, Spectruss continued to deliver the same energy for the upcoming January 2020 festival.
Right after the 2020 festival, COVID-19 began to spread forcing the festival to remagine the event for the next year. Lookout Wild moved the films outdoors for the 2021 festival to coincide with the Nightfall Summer Concert Series.
For 2022, Andy Johns, Festival Director for LWFF, faced another challenge promoting the attendance for the festival at the current stage of the pandemic. Andy and the board came to the realization that it will require more help in 2022 than ever before when it came to advertising initiatives.
Prior to Spectruss stepping in with a successful advertising campaign in order to increase awareness and ticket sales within a very limited time frame, the festival was in jeopardy of being canceled due to the low volume of ticket purchases. With only two weeks left to boost ticket sales, Spectruss quickly implemented an aggressive push to the strategic marketing and advertising campaign that led to the success of the event.
The campaign included various digital advertising initiatives via social media, email marketing, as well as a highly strategic placement of billboard campaigns, all of which ran for only two weeks to increase ticket sales at a substantial rate. Upon carefully selecting the appropriate targeted audience and applicable platforms, the advertising messaging incorporated a sense-of-urgency campaign strategy to incentivize customers to buy weekend passes before ticket prices went up. We ran multiple price increases in the two weeks leading up to the festival so we could create multiple sense-of-urgency campaigns that included digital social ads and email campaigns for each price increase. The result from this strategy yielded more weekend passes sold in 2022 than before covid.
According to Andy, “I can’t suggest highly enough working with their team. It’s a creative crew, it’s a fun crew, it’s a crew that got the culture that we were after, and took our event and made it their own. It’s been a great partnership over the years, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.”
Increase awareness and ticket sales at your next event by contacting us today: https://spectruss.com/contact/
