Drawing a new generation to the world's first dance festival

Client

Dance Valley was the world's first festival to bring electronic dance music to a daytime event in 1995. It has since been an industry icon with 40.000 visitors per edition. Visit site: dancevalley.com

Challenge

As the fanbase of Dance Valley aged with the event, our challenge was to attract the younger generation to secure the festival’s relevance and succes for the future.

Work

Inspired by the exceptional marketing performance of online ambassadors at Neonsplash, we decided to implement this same strategy for Dance Valley. We recruited a community of 400 online ambassadors from our target group, amplifying the reach of Dance Valley’s social media campaign amongst their friends; right amidst our selected target group.

Offering a free festival ticket in return for amplifying our social media campaign on their own profiles and channels; sharing each post and inviting all online friends to our facebook event-pages, resulting in price-less exposure right within our target groups from the voice of those who they trusted most; their own friends. The fact that we offered no financial rewards to our ambassadors - only a festival ticket - ensured two things; that each ambassador was our target audience ánd was intrinsically motivated and authentic when hyping our festival with their friends.

The online community of the ambassadors meets up at Dance Valley festival getting a special treatment and program, providing them a sense of ownership of the festival and a feeling of community amongst each other. Combined, this ensured the ambassadorship’s popularity, which made it grow organically to include new generations each year.

Impact

The ambassador system was introduced to Dance Valley in 2014 and is still an essential contribution to the festival’s fanbase. The effectivity and ROI of the ambassador program still surpasses that of any other (traditional) campaign element until today.