Festival marketing that drove a record 13,000+ attendees and 655,925 video views on essentially zero paid spend.
I joined Tune-Up Events in January 2025 to run the media team. By the festival's close on July 13, attendance reached 13,000-plus, an all-time record, with 655,925 video views, 12,010 content interactions at 100% year-over-year growth, and 1,787 new followers, on essentially zero paid spend.
Tight budgets, a small in-house media team, and a mandate to grow attendance year over year without spending into it. Paid media could do some of the work, but the budget could not carry the campaign. The organic side had to do the heavy lifting.
I leaned into two formats hard: sponsor-co-promoted ticket giveaways built around an action, and true Instagram collaboration posts that rendered in both feeds at once. I ran the marquee Rainier giveaway and collab end to end, an on-grounds scavenger hunt for specially-marked cans that produced real-time UGC. A network of nine volunteer shooters and twenty-plus outside creators drove 150,000-plus organic impressions with zero paid spend.
This recap was shot during day one of the festival, edited in the on-site media room inside a vendor tent, and published that same night. Posting while the festival was still live kept the feed moving in real time and helped peak content days clear 60,000 views.
Co-promoted VIP ticket giveaways put Rainier's audience and ours in the same feed. The giveaway ran from Rainier's own account as a true Instagram collab and drew 283 tag-to-enter comments, more than four times the 62 entries on the festival's biggest giveaway the previous summer. On the ground, costumed Rainier cans roamed the festival between headline sets, and attendees who found them and posted to their story were entered to win, feeding real-time UGC into the festival's channels all weekend. The series closed at 980 unique campaign-reported interactions, the festival's highest for a single partnership campaign, beating the previous year's Freehub collab at 635.
The premise held: brand-only posts were the floor, giveaways and collabs cleared it, festival weekend cleared everything. The campaign produced its record by leaning into formats that compounded. The audience I helped build still carries those gains.
