Festivals: The Secret Ingredient

There have been an explosion of new so called 'boutique' festivals in the last few years. Alongside the big money makers such as Glastonbury, Bestival and Latitude there are so many more 'independents' making a name for themselves. Standon Calling, Blissfields, Lounge on the Farm, End of the Road but with one of these happening seemingly every weekend from May through to September, what really makes a festival special?


If you were to ask the Secret Garden Party, the answer would be simple: the people. The team behind this festival have spent years cultivating and maintaining that truly magical vibe that takes a public event from good to amazing. It's all about participation and they hammer it home at every opportunity...


 'The Secret Garden Party is a temporary community that is as free, irreverent, friendly and engaging as it is possible to be. It is conceived as a moment in the year where you can connect to your creative powers, explore your wildest fantasies and meet thousands of people who all want to meet you. It is a gathering that exists for only four days - away from cities and schedules, brands and boundaries – founded on participation and with the potential to change your life. It is a festival of the arts…where everyone is the artist.' Roots & Shoots: What is the Secret Garden Party all about?


And this is where something great happens. You get some of the best artistic, musical, fun loving and creative minds together in one place and you tell them that the only rule is 100% participation... the result? Imagination and creativity on levels you won't ever have experienced before. 


Self styled 'Fun Scientists' Bearded Kitten curate the 'Collisillium', an amphitheatre that houses mud wrestling and mass participation 'Guess Who' games by day and circus acts and general rave ups on the hay bales by night. The almighty Kigu Crew (who are responsible for the tribes of cute Japanese animal costumes seen at UK festivals) hosted a 'Super Kigu Land' where they drove around the site 'poaching' Kigu wearing animals and taking them back to HQ to party. There is nothing as funny in the animal kingdom than watching Pandas dance to Dubstep...

Bearded Kitten's 'Collisillium'

'Super Kigu Land' at this years Secret Garden Party (www.kigu.co.uk)

We even got the chance to go a 'Dirt Banquet' hosted by Guerilla Science which featured a 3 course meal (in a field?!) with speakers during each course exploring the nature of dirt, how we taste and perceive food and even the idea of sexuality as dirty... eye opening and delicious. The meal began with pickled Martinis and ended with the dissection of a jelly brain! During the rest of the weekend they also invited gardeners to...
'Acquire the wisdom of whores, embody the drug, race a cockroach, listen to the sun, smell an orangutan, feast on filth, count to infinity, cradle a maggot, speak to aliens, draw the intestines, dine in space, and come ponder how remarkable it is that you are reading these words at all'

'Chemistry Vs Physics by Guerilla Science at the Secret Garden Party

Of course it helps that Secret Garden is blessed with one of the most stunning festival sites in the UK. A sparkling lake that is fit for swimming in on sunny days (and which also hosts a floating island structure, accessible by boat), rolling green hills and the most beautifully lit trees we've ever seen. 
They don't just stop here though, with knitted tree jumpers, a shoe tree, pianos, tree houses and four poster beds hidden in the woods... the attention to detail is astounding. Paint fights, laughter workshops, dance offs and the most fantastical fancy dress you ever saw... you could almost forget that Blondie, Andy C, Alex Metric, Yasmin, Mylo and the Mystery Jets were playing!

http://www.secretgardenparty.com

SGP claims to be 100% independent of corporate partnerships and refuses to cover the site in banner sponsorship (they feel that 'sitting in the countryside under a giant Pepsi logo can be a little disconcerting'). Instead the presence (if any) of brands involved with the festival goes seemingly unnoticed. 


An amazing giant pedal powered punch machine (see below) from the clever folks at Courvoisier sat atop a hill like it had no other more natural home in all the world, just as last year the fabulous 'Hendrick's Carriage of Curiosities' brought electrocuting cucumbers and bedtime stories on red velvet blankets to a crowd who come to the garden each year to indulge in jelly wrestling, laughing workshops, bands hanging from tree tops and discovering hidden worlds inside fireplaces in the woods...

The Hendricks 'Carriage of Curiosities'

When it comes to magic, Secret Garden is off the scale. Such thought, love, imagination and downright insanity goes into the production of this festival each year that no two experiences are ever the same. With it's love of community creation and arts based spectacles such as 'Burning Man', the Secret Garden Party has earned itself a fiercely loyal following and the word is spreading fast. 
This year tickets sold out in record time, all the way back at the start of June. The audience asked for the festival not to get any bigger and rare as it may seem, the powers that be listened. The Secret Garden party will remain how it is; of the people, for the people and by the people and because of this you can guarantee that this festival won't be losing it's magic any time soon. 

http://www.secretgardenparty.com

Making Experiential Social

Increasingly when we are designing Experiential activities for clients, there is a growing need for the brand to be able to use the activity to engage their online audience. Less and less do brands want to simply sample products or have brand ambassadors verbalise key messages. They want to create interactive physical and emotional experiences that also translate online.

There are some Brands out there doing this in really innovative and exciting ways. These are just a few of our favourites...

Tiger Beer ‘Know the Not Known’
Don’t just go with the ordinary. Discover More. Get switched on to what’s on. Find the place where the Tiger Beer flows. tigerbeer.co.uk

Tiger Beer has launched a campaign that features up and coming contemporary talents from the four fields of art, music, design and film and will provide access to the best parties in London.

Using ‘connection symbols’ users are granted access to underground, invite only, Vice magazine and Tiger supported events. Other channels utilised are Twitter and You Tube and Flickr- encouraging consumer generated content and a multi way flow of conversation between Tiger, the Artists and the consumer.

The Tiger’s series of ‘Not Known’ events reached number five this May with a collaboration between two of London’s best promoters, Dirty Canvas and Deadly Rhythm. Dirty Canvas and Deadly Rhythm have been pioneering UK bass music for years across London – between them pushing the most forward-thinking sounds in grime, dubstep, house, funky and techno and all areas in between.

Dulux ‘Let’s Colour Project’

This award winning campaign by paint manufacturer Dulux saw them take their mission statement – ‘Let’s Colour’ – quite literally, by completely rejuvenating grey, graffiti covered corners of some of the world’s major cities.

Dulux has big global ambitions. Its highest margins are delivered in sales of colour paint, yet only a minority of global homes are decorated in colour. Creative agency Euro RSCG were asked to create a strong, shared global communications platform to demonstrate how Dulux could ‘add colour to people’s lives’.

It began working on a global integrated campaign, with social media at its heart – the internet being seen as the primary channel for being able to communicate simultaneously with its local brands all around the world.

To get local communities interested in taking part, momentum was built around a social media campaign. A ‘Lets Colour’ project blog was launched as an open and direct way to start sharing the project with the public.

Visiting four cities – London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Jodhpur they invited members of the local community to help paint streets, squares, schools and buildings that were in need of a colour makeover.

Real time content was uploaded to the blog and to You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and Orkut, whilst a documentary entitled ‘Walls’ was filmed at each location (later being used in the Brands ATL activities). This documentary was viewed online more than 400,000 times in four weeks, and was YouTube’s 12th most tweeted video in its film category within two days of going live. The film received more than half a million views within four weeks of debuting, putting it in the top 2% of YouTube’s films and making it film of the week in the UK. Now, dozens of future events are being prepared by the brand.

The campaign was awarded a Gold Watch at the Golden Drum Awards in 2010.

For Euro RSCG the campaign has been a winner too. The Documentary won it a prestigious TED award for the best 'Ad worth spreading'.

Volkswagen ‘Fox’ at Planeta Terra Festival

A car brand wants to promote a new car to a whole host of fashion conscious early adopters... take it to Festival right?

Well that is almost exactly what Volkswagen Brazil did recently when they sponsored the biggest music festival in Sao Paulo, the (sold out) Planeta Terra Festival. They decided to promote the ‘Fox’ through an ingenious mashup of Twitter, Google maps and real world prize locations.

Volkswagen hid secret tickets across the entire city, and then displayed them on a microsite using Google Maps. The catch was that the only way to zoom in on the wide angle of the map was to have the community band together using the #foxatplanetaterra hash tag. The more tweets made, the more you could zoom in on the map, ultimately revealing the pinpoint location of each ticket. Then it became a foot race in the real world to find them, day and night for 4 days.

In less than 2 hours, the campaign #hastag became the #1 trending topic in Brazil, where it stayed for the length of the campaign. This brilliant promotion technique was devised by BBDO Brazil.