Why Quintain and Found in Music created the world’s largest celebration of busking
Found in Music was highly commended at The Drum Experience Awards 2019 with its ‘International Busking Day’ campaign for Quintain Ltd and GLA. Here, the experiential agency reveals the challenges faced and the strategies used to deliver this successful project.
The challenge
Quintain own and operate Wembley Park, an 85-acre development in North West London.
Purchased in 2002 the site has outline planning consent for 8.8 million sq ft of mixed-use development. The area has a solid entertainment heritage through Wembley Arena and Wembley Stadium. There has been a £1bn investment to date, bringing 7,000 new homes, a 7-acre park and creating 8,640 new jobs (in addition to the construction jobs).
As Quintain’s business model is now aligned towards Build to Rent, the requirement to make Wembley Park feel like a great place to live is paramount. Community engagement is key to the success of Wembley Park’s vision.
The brief for this event was to deliver an exciting and engaging free experience for the local community and to promote Wembley Park as a great destination to visit, live and work.
The strategy
Found in Music also manages the world’s largest busking programme (Busk in London) for the Mayor of London / Greater London Authority. We decided to bring these two clients together to create a large-scale celebration of street performance at Wembley Park on International Busking Day.
The International Busking Day campaign is an annual celebration of street performance that we created for the Mayor of London in 2015 as a promotional vehicle to highlight the importance and value of busking – which has been under increasing pressure over recent years due to gentrification. International Busking Day is the world’s largest celebration of street performance and street art.
The campaign
On Saturday 20 July 2019 (International Busking Day) we delivered a 13-hour event at Wembley Park featuring:
- • 5 stages across Wembley Park.
- A talks programme in The Corner.
- 50 performances by a range of street performance acts (e.g. magic, dance, music).
- A guest appearance from Noisettes and headline slot by KT Tunstall.
The results
From 1 June to 20 July, we had 100,000 web visitors to the official website which led to over 12,000 visits to the event (a conversion rate of around 11%). The largest portion of website traffic came from ‘Paid Search Ads’ (Google Ads) which equated to 23% of all traffic. Next was ‘Direct Traffic’ which was 19%, followed by ‘Organic Traffic’ at 13%.
8 million impressions were generated from the marketing campaign. 11,420 signed up online for free tickets, 7,620 people reserved free tickets on Eventbrite and 3,800 people marked as Interested or Going on Facebook 12K people attended on the day.
Feedback cards were used throughout the event. 94% rated the event good or very good. 100% would recommend a visit to Wembley Park.
Quintain Limited and the Wembley Park team were extremely happy with this experiential activation and will be repeating the event in 2020.
“The aim was to showcase and inspire new performers as well as entertain the community. Bringing both our clients together seemed a natural fit and delivered mutual benefits as well as a great festival. The Mayor of London / GLA had the opportunity to promote important messaging regarding the importance and value of street performance and Quintain benefited from the additional profile of having the Mayor of London’s Busk in London brand as an authentic street performance initiative.” - Dr Julia Jones, chief executive, Found in Music.
“Wembley Park’s grassroots performance and busking partnerships such as this event are pivotal in fostering a sense of community, providing platforms for young people in Wembley and the wider Brent Council to feel involved.” - Claudio Giambrone, head of marketing, Wembley Park.
“Music has always been a part of Wembley’s heritage. A key part of our regeneration strategy is to respect and broaden this by making music accessible at all levels of audience and talent. Busking is the perfect grassroots element of that strategy of making music available and the entry point. Olympic Way and Arena Square are natural places for busking – it’s not just a tube station thing, but an outdoor thing.” - James Saunders, chief operations officer, Quintain.
This project was highly commended at The Drum Experience Awards. Click here to register your interest in 2020’s event.