Take your festival fan base from 0 to 1.5 million.
In 2022 we were excited to be asked to help brand and build Gwyl Wal Goch Festival for Football Lovers, the first ever global festival of all things football related (as far as we know!).
Our organic content reached an audience of nearly 1,500,000 with an engagement of 7.06%. The festival featured on ITV GMB and BBC News with Adrian Chiles’ Friday morning show going out live on Radio 5 from the festival site. The festival is now an established part of the festival landscape in the UK and takes place annually in Wrexham with satellite events across Wales.
The challenge was not just to create a brand from scratch but to find an audience for the festival in a crowded market. The client wanted visuals and messaging to be both nostalgic, tapping into the magic of football legends and lore, at the same time as looking forward and not shying away from controversy around the game.
Without giving away too many trade secrets (you’ll have to come and talk to us for those!), there are a few pointers we can share that might help you kick start your own festival.
1. Define the Festival's Identity & Messaging
We started working from day one with the client to identify and clarify the festival’s tone and purpose: Is it progressive, traditional, interdisciplinary, youth-focused, local, or international?
Once we’d got that clarity and steer from the clients, our team got together to define a standout slogan and visual identity that was both culturally rooted and forward-thinking. In the case of Wal Goch, the core messaging was always about appealing to a core audience that was both nostalgic and forward thinking at the same time.
Creating a tagline that captures the emotion or experience — e.g., "Festival for Football Lovers” was vital to building a campaign. For us, and more importantly the clients! It encapsulated the feeling of the event. Wal Goch is above all a festival that appeals to the emotions, the lore and legends of the game in Wales and beyond. Both local and internationalist in outlook, proud of its heritage but progressive of spirit.
2. Audience Segmentation & Targeting
There are lots of really useful audience segmentation tools and research that you can find online to help you break down your target audience; find out where they hang out, where they get their news, who they look to for advice, what channels of communication they trust. And our clients, as an organisation deeply embedded and connected in football culture, we’re a great source for information about our audience.
Once our visuals and messaging was signed off we could out our strategic communication plan into action. We created films for social media, posts and graphics, a press pack for relevant media, and helped the clients with an engagement startegy.
Our key audiences were local: We reached out to Football clubs, fan groups near Wrexham engaging direct invites, partnerships, and screenings. And international, and this had to be reflected in the content and messaging.
And at the heart of Wal Goch was the idea that football could be a force for positive social change. We started to construct a programme that could appeal not just to the football community but anyone who was interested in progressive change, including NGOs and charities. We levered contacts with those NGOs and social action sectors interested in positive social change — speaking to them through themes (e.g., women in football, football and social inclusion, football and community building).
We were able to work in tandem with the clients to suggest a rich and diverse content to bring in a wider cultural crowd: Film, theatre, music lovers with a sprinkling of star names (Gruff Rhys, Neville Southall, Adrian Chiles, Ani Glas, Chroma) to gain some traction with audience and media alike.
3. PR & Press
Above all, we were able to leverage bak’s creative network to land mass coverage of the festival on national radio and TV.
We hope this is helpful to you? If you want some more detail on building audiences for sport and art, come and have a chat with us at ….