Yorkshire Balloon Fiesta
Marking Yorkshire Balloon Fiesta’s move to Castle Howard!
The challenge
This year marked a huge change for the Yorkshire Balloon Fiesta as it officially moved out of York to its brand-new venue, the stunning Castle Howard.
With a new location came new challenge of encouraging new and existing customers to attend this year’s Fiesta over the busy Bank Holiday weekend at a venue which was harder to access via public transport. Following the success and reputation of the previous venue, the organisers wanted to encourage as many people as possible to see what Castle Howard had to offer!
Our solution
We developed a PR campaign in the run-up to the Fiesta to generate excitement around the new location, highlighting its unique nature and stunning scenery and positioning the Fiesta as a must-see event for local, regional and national audiences.
Following the excitement of the initial launch, we released a series of announcements of the event’s schedule including musical performances and family activities to further position the event as the perfect family weekend.
Using our connections from managing the event’s media relations for several years, we invited select journalists, photographers and TV producers to go onboard the weekend’s first hot air balloon flight to secure exclusive coverage at the start of the Fiesta.
The outcome
As result of our strategic PR & media relations, we secured pre-event coverage and a live broadcast from BBC Live North which was shown across all their Yorkshire & North-East shows on the first day of the Fiesta.
We secured global, national and regional coverage in digital and print media including BBC, front page of Yorkshire Post, York Press and The Sydney Morning Herald, which also included high-authority back-links linking directly to the Balloon Fiesta website.
Photographs taken from a balloon by a journalist, was featured on Saturday morning’s front page of The Yorkshire Post newspaper.
