The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival. With over 3,000 shows, 60,000 performances, and a global reputation for launching cultural icons.
Each year, the Festival needs a standout campaign that signals its return to the city and flexes across every touchpoint: programme cover, advertising, merchandise, social, and genre-specific communications.
The opportunity is to capture the scale and spirit of the Fringe in a way that speaks to both its breadth and its vibrancy.
Audience data revealed a gap: only 20% of attendees in 2023 were aged 18–34. The Festival wanted to grow this younger segment without alienating its loyal 45+ audience. At the same time, the campaign needed to be truly omnipresent and adaptable.
In past years, creative had often over-indexed on the programme cover, limiting flexibility across digital and targeted media. The challenge was to create something bold, memorable, and modular. A campaign that could live everywhere, not just on the front page.
For 2024, we developed Unleash Your Fringe, a digital-first, modular campaign designed to scale effortlessly across platforms and audiences. The creative toolkit centred on playful 3D objects that could be mixed, matched, and repurposed for different contexts; from social posts aimed at young theatre-goers to broader city-wide activations.
Crafted with a clay-like finish, the visuals brought warmth and artistic authenticity, grounding the campaign in the festival’s creative spirit. Together, the line and the look gave the Fringe a flexible yet cohesive identity: modern, memorable, and inclusive of every audience.
Our modular, digital-first campaign didn’t just flex across media, it shifted audience dynamics. YouTube alone increased Fringe’s reach to 18–24-year-olds almost tenfold, delivering 2.2m impressions versus just 237k the year before. Meta Reels and Stories helped convert this attention into action, with 11% of sales in those placements coming from 18–24s. While Quantcast generated a 6,105% ROAS. Together, these results proved the creative toolkit could resonate with younger audiences, drive measurable sales, and outperform what we expected.
