To some these words mean that Summer period over Christmas and New Years, though to others like ourselves (festival organizers that is) it literally lasts from the beginning of September right up until March. Once the launch campaign begins, whoa Nelly, it’s a rollercoaster ride – and then once you think its over, along comes planning next year!Picking the line up is not as easy as you’d think. Imagine planning your dream show, with all your favorite artists. Sounds simple right? Wrong! More on this to come later…
If I had to compare the launch process to something, it would probably be getting the Earth’s shadow and Moon in line for a Lunar Eclipse. If it was just one city that would be easy (well, easier) though four cities is an interesting process.
Planning a national simultaneous announcement means lining up media and online properties.
The line up announcement is the big bang in festival world and the biggest spike of interest we get other than the show it self, so it’s a critical time to get everyone excited about the event and a great chance for us to see if everyone shares the belief that we have secured a great line-up. It is also newsworthy information, so people always try to get the drop early and we have to try and manage a simultaneous release...
So our email goes out at the same time Nova announce, at the same time as Channel V announce and InTheMix announce and making sure that all web properties go live at the same time too!
In this age of 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?) we’re all now looking after more sites than we’d ever thought we’d need so the official site itself needs to go live with the lineup, as do the facebook pages/groups/events, as does the MySpace page (you can call us old school, but it’s still clicking like crazy) as do the three ticketing sites and the list grows
It’s likely that no one else really notices this synchronicity, but it’s an important part of making a good clean launch for us and literally a ‘synchronize your watches moment’!
To add to this fun, it seems that somehow we lucked upon the worst week we could have chosen to announce - coming out at the same time as about 3 other Festival announcements! Best laid plans etc...
Anyway, we won’t go into too much detail, but now that our line up is finally out in the open (thank God, the secrecy was killing us) we’ll be updating the Good Vibrations Festival blog regularly with artist spotlights, gossip, interviews, giveaways and some insight as to what goes into these events from the back end (so to speak).
Don’t be a stranger.
F & J