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Campanie
JM
AGENCY: GOLIN
SUPPORTING AGENCY: MULLENLOWE

For most of the party people, Electric Festival, one of the coolest medium music festivals in Europe, sadly ends sooner than it should. Year after year, people who have jobs to get back to on Monday, spend their Sunday with one eye on the watch. Some even miss all the fun and concerts on Sunday, because they have to be back in Bucharest on Monday morning, after a 500 km drive from the festival.
Electric Castle is all about the people and its strong community and we thought of a creative and usefull way so that as many participants as possible to be able to enjoy every moment of the festival to the fullest. So we urged companies to give the Monday after the festival off to all employees attending. We called it #electricmonday and in return for their favour, we made them Unofficial Partners of the festivals and made sure everybody knew that there are the coolest companies to work for. We created the Unofficial Partners platform and created a guerrilla campaign targeting key influencers in the company (CEOs, HR managers) to offer the #electricmonday off. In return, we promoted them…Unofficially, on our campaign website, in our social media channels and with the help of KOLs. In a month, over 170 companies enrolled as Unofficial Partners and made their employees happy and proud to be part of their team.
General Information:
Strategy:
Strategy: Electric Castle is the first Romanian festival which focused on electronic music and live concerts in the open-air premises of a real castle. Ever since its first edition it has been nominated at the European Festival Awards for the „Best medium sized music festival in Romania”. In 2013, the festival had approximately 10,000 people attending and it rapidly grew to an audience of 97,000 participants in 2015 (9 times growth).
Electric Castle Festival is a unique, mind blowing experience. It shakes up the way people interact with music by combining a visually innovative concept with an eclectic musical line-up, breaking the boundaries between electronic music and reggae, mainstream and subculture.
4 days with over 200 artists across 6 stages on a spectacular castle ground.

What is different about Electric Castle from all the other music festivals in Romania is the strong community of fans gathered since the beginning who have developed a deep sense of belonging. The Electric Castle signature - We are the people became the personal motto of the festival goers.
In the last years, the festival scene in Romania became very competitive, with Untold and Summer Well investing more and more in promotion.

The challenge we received was to create a communication platform for 2016 that would strengthen the emotional bond with the historical target and that would also make the event more visible and relevant to new public categories. And all this in a full cultural context with dozens of concerts and festivals happening in the summer.
The objectives featured – higher participation on Sunday +10%, media awareness with reduced budged, online buzz, involve the corporate target – potential future sponsors.

We started the plan from strong insights: the festival is organized from Thursday to Sunday, in Transylvania; internal surveys show that participants work in corporations and usually take 2days off and on Monday return to work, which meant missing the Sunday headliner.

This Sunday exodus from the Castle showed in numbers: less participants, reduced sales.
We adopted the festival philosophy WE ARE THE PEOPLE and helped them. Looking for real solutions to their problem, we discovered a channel that nobody had used before: THE COMPANY CEOS AND HR MANAGERS & THE PARTICIPANTS, seen as EMPLOYEES.

We communicated this via media to generate emotional attachment and brand awareness in a crowded cultural area. We used a communication mix of earned, shared and owned media: from KOLs blogs, social media, print and outdoor to a campaign website. Also we put to work all media partnerships in the service of #electrimonday.

TARGET:
• Main: festival goes, press, bloggers, KOLs.
• Secondary: CEOs, HR managers, employees.
Communication mix: Earned – blogs, vlogs, Facebook & Instagram accounts of VIPs & KOLs, press // Shared - Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat // Owned – Facebook page, the campaign platform.
Execution:
Images:
Video Link: