Public Relations

Our PR expertise is gained from the inside and grounded in journalism. Nick Garbutt is a former editor of the Irish News and deputy editor of the Belfast Telegraph. Barry Turley’s career spanned broadcasting stints at both BBC and RTE.

Case Study: The Open House Festival

Background

For four years Asitis Consulting have worked with the festival organizers in advance of the launch of the festival in May and throughout Spring and Summer to promote individual events and bands regionally in addition to coordinating and developing PR for the actual festival. We repositioned the festival as a major cultural event, encompassing music, arts, entertainment and food so it could stand alone within the summer calendar of events. It was also an objective to develop the festival to ensure the series of ticketed events were filled to capacity and to set the standard for the following years of the festival, increasing the desire for artists to participate.

Methodology:

As the Festival has now been running for over 10 years, it is imperative that each year we bring fresh, new exciting ideas in order to maximize media opportunities. The diversity and range of people that perform at the festival allow us to maximize these opportunities and enable us to gain awareness of the festival on a regional basis.

ASITIS spend many months pre-planning and drafting new angles in preparation for the launch of the festival, gaining sign-off from the client and selling these into the relevant press. This ensures we are as proactive as possible and also provides us adequate time to research and to brief journalists in a planned and strategic manner. We also ensure that the bands which may be called upon for media, are adequately briefed and prepared for this. We also ensure that the Festival organizers are adequately media prepped so we can utilize them for comments.

As many of the bands come from across Northern Ireland, we continuously work with the local media ensuring that they have information necessary to highlight their links and participation in the festival. The reasoning behind this was to attract people into the city from across Northern Ireland, who may not otherwise have attended. In addition to creative local stories, the festival secured live broadcasts on radio platforms such as BBC Gerry Anderson Show, Ralph McClean’s show on BBC, U105. UTV, BBC and GMTV also cover the story year on year. We ensure that all possible media channels are maximized. We developed recipes to highlight the food element of the festival, ‘Chillifest’, created tourism stories for tourist guides and in-flight magazines and developed comprehensive music features for this market. We also welcomed the opportunity for reviews. Online Media was also explored and maximized to its full potential so podcasts and video broadcasts could be put on key websites such as Belfast Telegraph online, and CultureNorthernIreland. Asitis Consulting co-ordinate this filming so control is maintained at all times, we also control and commission (if applicable) photos for both the launch event and those that may be needed for supplement features.

We ensure that we have continuous and periodic meetings and communication with the festival organizers in the months prior to the festival, in order to keep the client up to date with developments so that progress can be monitored on a continuous basis.

Results:

Last year alone The Open House Festival achieved in excess of 100 media clips. The launch also achieved blanket coverage to include recipes and chilli tips in features pages in the News Letter, Belfast Telegraph, Irish News and Sunday Life.  Local papers ran pieces on local bands which would be performing and this was supplemented by competitions across Northern Ireland. Belfast Telegraph TV recorded a piece from the festival promoting it throughout the world and several journalists from London, Scandinavia and the USA attended the festival and wrote features on the standard of the event.  The festival sold out with 5 weeks still to go until the opening night and faster than ever before. The festival is now recognised as a key element of the music calendar.