Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival

The Client:

The Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival is a popular music festival held each September in downtown Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Founded in 1991, Harvest has grown to an annual event with more than 150 performances on 20 stages across 6 city blocks.

This massive event unites the music community with maritime hospitality, internationally recognized headline acts, outdoor music, street performers and buskers. Harvest has earned a shining reputation for recruiting the best international musical talent, as well as up-and-coming artists from the East Coast and beyond.

The Challenge:

Harvest needed help communicating its amazing experience across digital channels. Over the nearly 30 year span of the festival, marketing channels had evolved significantly. Harvest has a history of punching above its weight and was looking to market itself on par with much larger events outside of Atlantic Canada.

The Solution:

Ginger specializes in intelligent marketing solutions that garner insights from actionable data. Given the popularity and media exposure of the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival, we have a very large audience already coming to the website.

Our task was to devise a strategy to increase ticket sales. Harvest has a track record of attracting world class musicians such as Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters, which sell out based on the popularity and media around the event. However, there are many more tickets and passes available, which is where we come in.

We studied the website audience over the last two years and used this information to create audience segments based on user activity on the website. Armed with this information, we are able to help Harvest respond to business challenges in near real time. As ticket sales unfold, we are able to effectively leverage Harvest’s digital media budget by investing it into shows which have yet to sell out. In this way, we multiply the impact of Harvest’s media spend rather than promoting the overall festival in a general way.

As part of this effort, our team developed a series of creative, motion graphic pieces highlighting a choice selection of acts during the festival. 

This video, released to announce that Robert Plant was attending the festival, was viewed 44,000 times on Facebook with 1,600 likes, shares and comments.

The Results:

The digital strategy that we created for Harvest helped the festival speak to a whole new audience in a new way, and helped future Harvest lovers nurture a relationship with the festival all across Atlantic Canada.

Our series of promotional videos have been seen nearly 300,000 times by highly targeted music lovers during the six weeks leading up to the festival. We are able to attribute sales of passes and tickets to our marketing activities. We are also hard at work studying this year’s data while we formulate a plan for the next festival. 

The supporting creative our team developed for Harvest was very well received. Thanks to a team effort, along with an amazing artist lineup, many tickets and passes immediately sold out on the first day of sales.

“Ginger has been a valuable partner to Harvest for many years now. Their job is to stay on the forefront of digital marketing strategy. This allows us to rest easy knowing that our strategy is in good hands, while we focus on what we do best, which is delivering the premier festival experience in Atlantic Canada,” says Jeff Richardson, Executive Director of the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival.

Ginger is proud of the work we’ve done for Harvest, and we look forward to a long-lasting partnership. Come check out The Ginger Agency Hoodoo House with incredible musical performances Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights during Harvest!

Want to build a confident brand for your company or organization? We’d love to chat!
You can reach us at info@gingeragency.ca or at 51 York Street in Fredericton, N.B.