The challenge

Visit Wales wanted to promote the country’s wide range of unusual festivals to multiple audiences.

The solution

There are upwards of 40 festivals in Wales each year covering themes as varied as food, music, sci-fi, comedy and storytelling. How could they talk to the right audiences about the right festivals? We needed a way to help people find the right festival for them.

The creative

Working with the research team at iCrossing, I used a simple online questionnaire to ask a sample group of people about festivals. We discovered some fascinating facts about how the four main Visit Wales audiences view festivals and what they look for from them.  Younger people went to meet new friends as much as to see the acts and older festival-goers are really interested to know more about the accommodation options.

We decided we needed some kind of tool for people to work out which was the right festival in Wales for them. So I came up with the idea of the Visit Wales Festivaliser.

The Festivalizer asked five simple questions with quirky answers for people to choose from. Depending on their answers, they were told what kind of festival-goer they were and which were the best festivals in Wales for them to try.

I created the festival-goer personas based on our research and commissioned an artist to draw them. I then set up the databases for the answers, worked out how to pair the right questions with the right personas and worked with the developer to make the user journey engaging and easy. We did fun things like adding quirky messages of encouragement after each answer. We also built in the functionality for people to tell their friends what kind of festival-goer they were on Facebook.

Once it was live, we created social media ads too. The iCrossing paid media team then set up a highly targetted campaign driving huge volumes of traffic to the Festivalizer.

It worked really well. The completion rate for the Festivalizer was huge. Nearly 80% of people completed all five questions.