FESTIVAL FROLICS FESTIVALS ARE BACK AND THEY ARE BACK WITH A BANG. CONSUMERS AND THE TRADE ARE EMBRACING THE RETURN TO NORMALCY. NICOLA YOUNG TAKES A LOOK AT WHAT’SMAKING AN IMPACT THIS YEAR.
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elladrum, Connect, Transmit, ButeFest, Piping Live! and of course the Edinburgh Fringe and Festival – its’ great to see festivals back and the good news is that hospitality benefits all round. And that’s before we count in all the whisky and gin festivals taking place around the country including the Spirit of Speyside and this year we saw the Falkirk Gin Festival. The added support that comes from drinks brands around such events really do add value for audiences and the on-trade alike. Sponsors and brands participating contribute to delivering ‘The Perfect Stage’, a key tenant of how Scotland promotes itself. The work that goes into creating the perfect stage is of course as much to do with the brands that take part and many come up with unique, witty and engaging ways to entertain – as well as delivering the much needed funding that helps these events to take place in the first place. You only have to walk around Edinburgh at the moment to see the brand activations that have taken place. It is not just about the branding I recall, quite a few years ago now, sponsoring the tent on Princes Street for a new brand
launch during the Edinburgh Festival – we also did 48-sheets, bus shelters and digital advertising). Did the sponsorship work? Yes. But the value of meeting and seeing our audience was invaluable in terms of really understanding our positioning and what we were missing. Being able to watch customers experience our brand was insight that no data could provide. And of course, we able to leverage the sponsorship to sell advertising around our online offering too. It was a chunky part of our marketing budget that year and the powers-that-be must have wondered why we picked the Edinburgh Festival rather than, say, a larger music festival. The Edinburgh Festival is somewhat unique – it covers comedy, music, theatre and a range of the arts. It is neither only a food and drink festival nor simply a music festival, and it remains one of the biggest festivals in the world. Consider this: in 2019 the Fringe sold more than three million tickets for 3,841 shows at 323 venues, with over 1m attendees (around 90% from the UK, and over 70% from Scotland). Glastonbury, thought to be the biggest music festival in the world DRAM AUGUST 2022 13
