The client 

Nesta is the UK’s innovation agency for social good. They design, test and scale new solutions to society’s biggest problems, changing millions of lives for the better.

The brief

FutureFest is Nesta’s flagship event which welcomes curious minds and future gazers to imagine a better, fairer and more innovative world. After four in-person editions, the festival was to switch to an alternative, virtual setting branded FuturePlayer.

Leading the marketing on the project our task was to launch the event’s online future with the objective to welcome a greater volume of visitors than any previous event. The campaign needed to re-engage FutureFest’s advocates and attract a curious new audience to explore sessions from leading thinkers and celebrity brainboxes such as Louis Theroux and Richard Ayoade.

The main event

To achieve the client’s objectives, we developed and managed a 6-month campaign covering teaser, launch and post-event marketing. The carefully coordinated plan was designed to drive excitement for registrations and encourage the audience to explore multiple pieces of content.

The project included writing engaging copy for the entire campaign - from the overarching concept all the way through to social media posts about individual sessions.

Segmenting the existing FutureFest mailing list, we sent tailored messages based on the recipient’s registration status and highlighted the different elements of FuturePlayer - from experiences to debates. 

For the social media campaign, we created boldly branded assets using emotive imagery to build awareness and anticipation pre-launch, and speaker images to drive views once the content was live.

Display and social ads played an important role within the campaign too. We targeted the audience by interests and engagement, and continuously modified the adverts to achieve the best ROI. 

Bespoke outreach work was carried out to research relevant organisations that would help spread the word about FuturePlayer. Initial work was completed encouraging social sharing and a follow-up was conducted for listing opportunities to continue the legacy. 

All results were monitored throughout the campaign and a detailed report and presentation were given as part of the post-event review, providing a knowledge bank for future campaigns.

The results

The campaign smashed all targets with the following results:

• By launch day we had already reached the target number of registrations for the entire campaign

• The total number of registrations at campaign end was 81% above target

• The number of people registering who were new to Nesta was 13% above target

• Quotes such as "The content is really interesting, thanks for making it!" highlighted how engaged previous FutureFest attendees were in FuturePlayer

Working on this high-profile event which was so important to the client, and held so fondly in the hearts of previous attendees, was an honour. We are grateful to the wonderful team at Nesta for giving us the opportunity to deliver results that exceeded expectations and for welcoming us to work on other projects since including the Nesta Talks to… sessions and the Making the switch to cleaner, greener homes series.

You can explore FuturePlayer for free here and browse upcoming events from Nesta here.