royal queensland show / the ekka
“Meet a Farmer” Campaign
delivered
Integrated Strategy
Billboard Campaign
Digital Campaign
TVC Direction
Social Assets
Broader Visual Language
Product Brands
Campaign Photography
Event Photography
sector
Tourism / Events / Agriculture
website
overview
The Ekka is Queensland’s largest annual event, yet in recent years you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Creature were brought onboard in 2018 and tasked to help turn things around.
Strategy
The team sentiment was that the Ekka had lost its way. To us, there had been too much attention given to frivolous items like showbags, and not enough focus on their core charter – agriculture. With recent drought and ongoing dollar milk wars, community sentiment to help our farmers was at an all time high. The time was right to “Meet a Farmer.” Yeehaw!
creative mechanic
Behind the simplicity of the “Meet a Farmer” proposition lay a creative mechanic that would allow us to communicate the depth and breadth of the Ekka’s offering. From “Meet a Chef” to “Meet a Monster Truck”, it allowed us to have a little fun at the same time as being smart and fragmenting our message to target various audience interests.
production
Together with film partner Pixelframe, Creature set about capturing the stories of two Queensland farming families as they worked tirelessly to not only put food on our plates, but also prep for the Ekka itself.
rollout
Our goal was to pre-sell more tickets in order to mitigate some of the traditional risks (such as having a bad flu season or just bad weather). We achieved this with pricing mechanisms as well as by engaging the audience much earlier than usual and with many more layers of content than usual. For instance, your average billboard campaign might feature just 1 concept… but our creative mechanic allowed us to produce over 40 finished billboard concepts! This meant the message could not only spread far and wide but also in a sustained manner. Equally, a smorgasbord of video shorts were put to work on social, enabling us to target very specific interests and remind people that there’s something for everyone at the Ekka. Finally, the “Meet a Farmer” concept was extended into the event app, enabling users to scan barcodes around the showgrounds to view tailored content.
“The appetite for this years Ekka shows no sign of easing”
Seven News
results
With some 82,000 tickets pre-sold (an all-time high) it was clear the campaign was resonating, but to smash the all-time attendance record as well as the record for the Ekka public holiday was truly humbling. Given this success, our scope was broadened in 2019, and we worked to bring some much needed consistency to their many sub-brands, delivering greater brand synergy for the event itself. And again, despite a killer flu season, we were again able to virtually match the attendance records set in the previous year, with 410,000+ attendees just short of the 414,000 in 2018.
2018
414,000 through the gates
New attendance record set for Ekka public holiday
$50M+ in PR generated
190,000 Ekka Email Subscribers
117% increase in family ticket sales
51% of attendees spent over 7 hours at the Ekka
2019
410,000 through the gates
3.5M page views on ekka.com.au
810,000 unique website users
100K Facebook followers with engagement up 100%
104K posts tagged #Ekka on Instagram