Hot on the heels of our Roses Awards nomination, we’re very chuffed to find out that our website for Manchester International Festival has been shortlisted for Best Not for Profit Project in this year’s Big Chip Awards. Winners will be announced on June 18 at the Palace Hotel, Manchester.
As part of our ongoing work with Manchester International Festival, we have helped them to produce regular newsletter campaigns including this one – announcing their programme for 2009.
Online marketing is a vital component in the build up to the festival, helping to increase awareness and generate all important ticket sales. It was therefore essential that we created a reliable and flexible newsletter that could be easily updated in-house. Equally important was that the email campaign system could handle in excess of 15,000 subscribers with regular mailouts.
We chose MailChimp for its excellent track record, ease of use and in-depth campaign reporting. Whatever system you choose, carefully targeted email marketing can have an impressive impact, even for a modest budget. MIF’s latest campaign contributed to a ten-fold increase in traffic!
The Titan Outdoors competition gave us an ideal opportunity to work with top illustrators Stanley & Barney whose unique style lent itself perfectly to the prestigious Euston Broadside billboard site. The location was the ideal spot for our client Manchester International Festival as it is highly visible to commuters traveling between London and Manchester. Hats off must go to giants AMV BBDO for their winning concept for Dulux PaintPod. You can see our entry in all its glory here.
Our redesign of the Manchester International Festival website launched last Thursday, 9 October with the announcement of the first three events from their 2009 programme. Our approach was definitely “less is more”. With world-class acts such as Rufus Wainwright and Zaha Hadid, we really didn’t need the design to shout. We hope it provides a great online presence for all the brilliant shows and events taking place next summer.
MIF Marketing Director, Cathy Gallagher said:
“We chose Stiff Rowlands for their range of experience but also for their attitude and approach. They had an intuitive understanding of what we wanted and an appreciation of the particular challenges that an artist-led, commissioning Festival is likely to present. They’re particularly good at keeping calm and coming up with appropriate solutions. It’s been a great experience working with them.”
The Festival runs from 2 – 19 July 2009 at various venues across Manchester.
We’re very excited to announce our involvement with Manchester International Festival for whom we are currently designing and building a brand-spanking-new website. If you were hibernating last year, you could be forgiven for not knowing that Manchester International Festival is the world’s first biennial festival of original, new work and special events. Without wanting to sound like their PR Agency: the Festival launched in 2007 as an artist-led, commissioning festival presenting new works from across the spectrum of performing arts, visual arts and popular culture.
Monkey: Journey to the West – photo Joel Fildes
You’ll also be gutted to learn that you missed some class acts. Among the 25 world premieres in the 2007 Festival were Monkey: Journey to the West, a new opera directed by Chen Shi Zheng composed by Damon Albarn and designed by Jamie Hewlett and Il Tempo del Postino, a group show by 15 of the world’s leading contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Philippe Parreno and Olafur Eliasson; plus new theatre productions including a site-specific work by Stewart Lee and Johnny Vegas, debates, food inventions by Heston Blumenthal and an international music series featuring PJ Harvey, Lou Reed, Happy Mondays, Kanye West and The Gossip.
Interiors – photo Joel Fildes
The Festival’s Marketing Director, Cathy Gallagher said of our appointment:
“We are delighted to be working with Stiff Rowlands on the new Festival website and I’m looking forward to the launch of phase one in early October which coincides with the announcement of the first three commissions for the 2009 Festival.”
The next Festival will take place Thursday 2 – Sunday 19 July 2009. See you there.
