Telecoms brand Orange has sponsored Europe’s trend setting music festival Glastonbury for a decade now and been relentlessly innovative in activating around the event.
Of course, being creative is something of a prerequisite when backing a festival that will not link a backer’s name or brand to the venue or event and has strict sponsorship rules that include a basic band on corporate branding, on product launches
In the last couple of years Orange’s festival campaign’s have included a major emphasis on tagging.
In 20111 is festival mobile app – which included useful functions such as schedules, information guides, maps and even Guardian critic comments – included the addition of a set of ‘smiley’ symbols through which mobile users could communicate and geo-tag their current mood.
This individual data was aggregated to build a live collective festival mood map – plotting and promoting the upbeat, buzziest and most positive area of the site at any time (or, alternatively, the most depressing, downbeat, muddy and cold zones too).
The app was downloaded 100,000 times in the month of the festival – equivalent to an impressive 70% of the festival audience (which Orange claimed represented a 75% increase on previous year). Proving that applying a bit of imagination and taking time to understand a tech trend and a consumer needs can see small sponsorship investments lead to a genuinely useful tools that can generate loyalty and boost event-related engagement.
Further evidence of the brand’s heritage of Glastonbury activation innovation in 2011 included offering its customers a sound-powered T-Shirt that can recharge your phone while you watch bands perform.
The noise-responsive shirt is equipped with several adaptor options enabling the festival going wearer to simply top-up the charge on their handset while enjoying the music. In a vibrant festival environment, sound seems a perfect medium and a natural fit for this kind of experimental branded utility. Added to which is the fact that flat mobile phone batteries are a perennial problem for festival goers.
Of course, back in 2010 Orange also used tagging at Glastonbury. Orange took a 1.3 gigapixel photo of the 70,000 people at the Pyramid Stage on the second day of the festival and posted it on a flash-based website where those in the audience could zoom in and tag themselves (declaring ‘I was there’) using Facebook Connect, Users were incentivised to genuinely connect with other festival goers, to reminisce and even brag.
Facebook integration ensured each and every interaction was visible across hundreds of feeds and enabled the GlastoTag experience to dovetail with existing Glastonbury web chatter. There was even an associated game called ‘Where’s Welly’, which saw winners try to locate a lone Orange boot in the chaos of the crowd. The winner got tickets to the next festival.
Not only did this initiative set a Guinness World Record for most people tagged in an online photo, but it saw 7,000 people tag themselves, received 284,000 site visits (with a further million visits for the welly competition), made 1,000 new Orange Friends on Facebook and racked up two million plus page impressions of GlastoTag new coverage.
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