www.brisbanefestival.com.au
www.winabigweekend.com
www.qberiverfire.com

In 2009 we commenced our relationship with Major Brisbane Festivals (MBF) in a 3-year digital marketing agreement. The main purpose of our engagement has been to develop the online environment for Brisbane Festival 2009 and beyond.

In 2009 the Brisbane Festival and Riverfire were combined to launch the new annual festival. Liquid Interactive won the contract to lead this new brand and business to establish a strong market position, whilst maintaining the brand equity built up by the previous two entities.

The strategy we commenced was to build a website framework and platform in the first year, which could be used over the next three years to market and support the Brisbane Festival. This approach has meant we have developed a robust foundation where we can also ‘reskin’ the site, ensuring a level of creative and content flexibility. This foundation maintains its core navigation to increase user confidence in subsequent years, as well as provide better value for money for MBF.

In order to achieve this, our project objective as commenced in 2009 was to develop a comprehensive website platform for Brisbane Festival. This website achieved:

• Presentation of the Events first and foremost, as they are the most important element of the Brisbane Festival
• Scalability for future growth
• Effective usability, with immediate access to the search tool, event categories and featured events that allowed users to intuitively navigate and have a positive experience with the site
• A design that accommodated for the diverse audience who have different information search and outcome objectives
• A personalised festival experience, with users able to create their own My Festival Calendar where they can add performances they wish to attend
• Usefulness in allowing users to set reminders, send event details to friends and printing their customised calendar
• A robust backend that facilitates a large repository of events, encompassing the entire festival programme with direct links to various ticketing sites
• A bespoke full content management system (CMS) and email template, developed to suit MBF’s need of frequently having to create, update, remove and promote different types of content

Results

During the festival period the website experienced over 210,000 website visitors, who spent an average of 3 minutes on the website. The website was live for the entirety of the festival, never experiencing downtime or delays due to heavy traffic.

Digital Campaigns

Brisbane Festival entered 2009 with a very limited database, so our engagement included the development of two digital campaigns to increase this database, by promoting certain festival aspects and events.

The first campaign was developed to coincide with the festival website and programme launch. It promoted a competition in partnership with Wotif through a banner on the Brisbane Festival website homepage that lead to an animated Flash microsite, which we designed and developed.

The second campaign supported the Riverfire event, specifically for MBF’s major sponsor QBE Insurance. This also promoted a competition and was also designed and developed by Liquid Interactive.

To MBF's delight, these campaigns substantially increased their database to which they can now maintain a relationship with an ongoing email marketing strategy as recommended by Liquid Interactive.

In 2010

Liquid Interactive will be working with Brisbane Festivals to develop their programme iPhone Application, as well as looking to move forward into exciting new online and offline interactive technologies for festival events. We will continue to support the Brisbane Festivals with their website, email communication and digital campaigns.