During the three-month lead-up and throughout the 23-day festival, we unleashed a torrent of content through online, broadcast, print and social media including a souvenir lift-out in 3.5 million newspapers across Australia and New Zealand, video news releases, 360 content footage, drone and time-lapse videos bringing the lights and specific installations to life, photographs, infographics and artwork renders. This included issuing content galleries every three days throughout the festival.

We created a staged approach to ensure maximum exposure:

1) Get the news out there and locked in people’s diaries (Feb – Mar): Pitched calendar notes and promoted 452 international and domestic travel packages

2) Program launch and securing mass media coverage leading up to ‘lights on’ (Mar – May): Implemented program launch and media house briefings. Planned and pitched a comprehensive story matrix around audience passion points, all the while engaging with more 3,000 individual media.

3) Build hype with preview week (May): Created and managed four preview events specifically for media including coordinating a series of live TV broadcasts from each one.

4) High impact ‘lights on’ and festival optimisation (May – June and beyond): Hosted 120 international and local media on opening night.

EVALUATION OF SUCCESS/MANAGEMENT

• More than 2.31 million visitors attended Vivid Sydney, a phenomenal increase of 35%

• Visitor spend during Vivid Sydney increased a huge 75% to $110 million

• 88,300 international and domestic travel packages sold, up 104%

• Hotel group Accor reported a 34% increase in hotel rooms sold

• More than 15,880 media clips were generated reaching a massive 15,018,249,820 pairs of eyes, up 287% on 2015, with international coverage up 203%

• Secured more than 2000 broadcast segments, equating to 62 hours of TV time

• 96% of media coverage included Vivid Sydney key messages

• 92% of coverage included an image or multimedia content provided by Vivid Sydney

Supporting film: https://vimeo.com/209856839

We created hundreds of stories involving sneak-peaks, behind-the-scenes stories and access to talent like never before.

Even a major storm that closed the Festival for two nights for the first-time ever requiring a whole-of-government issues management response couldn’t put a dampener on our campaign

Pumping millions of dollars into the NSW economy

Resulting in the best year Vivid Sydney has ever had