Our primary goal for the Quebec City Magic Festival was to boost public participation. So why not go one step further and get people involved in promoting the event? Our campaign did just that: The Quebec City Magic Festival literally asked the public to “use their magic powers” to reveal the promotional poster. Rather than a run-of-the-mill poster that merely provides information, this interactive experience forced the public to participate to make the information appear, maximizing the odds of their retaining the information.

On most posters the public could “conjure up” the Festival dates, an original way to invite them to attend. On other interactive posters the organizers pushed the concept one step further, directly rewarding interaction with the poster (in this case, taking a photograph using a flash) with free tickets to a show. It was a hands-on, original way to get people to engage with the event.

A few weeks before the start of the Festival, mysterious posters were placed throughout Quebec City for one month. You could see an upside-down top hat, and above nothing but white space. When people approached the poster they were instructed to take a picture using a flash. When they did so the photo would show a rabbit or a dove emerging from the hat—just like in the classic trick!—announcing the Festival dates. Certain lucky posters even gave photo-takers free tickets to a Festival show.

The mysterious posters quickly became the “talk of the town” in Quebec City and garnered a lot of media attention. Every Festival show sold out, and attendance broke records with 15,000 people in 2014 (up from 12,000 in 2013 and 7,500 in 2012). A fifth edition has already been confirmed for 2015, and a number of magicians from outside Canada have contacted the organizers via the Festival website to express their interest in being part of next year’s Festival.