How we used guerrilla marketing to help promote a two-day music festival in Lancashire

When you have a modest budget, don't want to rely on just digital marketing, but can't put up posters and banners in the public realm to promote a two-day outdoor music festival, what do you do? Well, we channelled our inner Banksy. 

Our role in promoting The Preston Weekender 

In February 2025, we were appointed by Preston BID (Business Improvement District) to promote its annual two-day outdoor music festival that takes place in the heart of the city on the historic Flag Market.

This year, the organisers had attracted the biggest names ever.

On Saturday, where the focus is on commercial dance and features an array of DJs, global legend Pete Tong was signed up to play an exclusive two-hour classic DJ set in his only northern festival appearance of the season. 

Then, on Sunday, '90s Indie Britpop sensations Embrace were booked to round off a day of performances from live bands.

We had two primary objectives:

Promote the brand. The festival has been around for many years, but was renamed from Prestfest to The Preston Weekender in 2024. Then, in 2025, it was rebranded and given a new-look logo. So, part of our job was to help drive awareness of the festival in its new guise.

Sell tickets. For any event of its kind to be a success, it needs good attendance levels, and so as well as brand marketing, we also had a performance marketing focus.

We had a modest budget (that included our fees and any necessary ad spend) to use in driving ticket sales, and quickly settled on the idea of using Facebook and Instagram ads to reach our target audiences.

These Meta platforms are generally very cost effective, allow you to put visually engaging content in front of people (essential when trying to promote feel-good events and experiences), have extensive reach because so many people use them, and come with some great targeting options.

It wasn't all plain sailing: the challenges we faced

Great though Facebook and Instagram are as ad platforms, they have drawbacks too. 

For instance, despite the large user base, not everyone is active on them every day. Based on the latest reported statistics, you might expect around 46,579 daily active adult Facebook users in Preston and between 30,813 and 36,976 daily active adult Instagram users out of a total of 101,009 adult social media users.

On top of that, research from pollsters at YouGov tells us that only around 11% of Brits pay active attention to ads on social media. So, even if you could reach 100% of daily active users, the number of people actually paying attention to your ads might only be 5,123 on Facebook and between 3,389 and 4,067 on Instagram.

For these reasons, it's helpful to supplement with promotional marketing on other channels, especially out-of-home ads on billboards and in the street scene so people are exposed to them whilst going about their daily lives. With a budget that wouldn't extend to that, and the council unlikely to permit PVC banners being installed on fences, railings, and other structures in the public realm, something else was needed, but what?

Getting physical with guerrilla marketing: doing something bold and different

When you have less than no budget available, but still want to have a phsyical, tangible dimension to your promotional comms, you need to get creative.

'Neccessity is the mother of all invention', after all.

So, that's what we did.

We wanted something that would grab attention, get people talking, and create buzz around the event, but ideally not something that would be immediately linked to the organiser and simply dismissed as a promotional gimmick.

Enter guerrilla marketing, that uses unconventional tactics to get you noticed and talked about. It's powerful because it disrupts expectations and cuts through the noise of traditional advertising. Our brains are naturally wired to notice novelty and surprise, and so when people encounter something unexpected, it grabs their attention more effectively than familiar marketing messages they've become adept at ignoring.

We considered lots of options, such as the use of 'clean graffiti' - also known as reverse graffiti - a form of street art created by cleaning dirt and grime from surfaces to reveal a design or message using stencils and high-pressure cleaning. It's a clever way to deploy temporary advertising, but we were concerned about how we'd achieve it without it very obviously being an event promotion. 

For that same reason, we ruled-out projecting the logo into the night sky like the bat signal, and a host of other options.

Then, we had our 'eureka moment', or at least Fifty2M founder Lee did (not for nothing is he known as the Chief Idea Haver round here) and it was a gem: "why don't we paint a mural on a wall near where the event will take place, in a style that people will immediately associate with Banksy?"

And, just like that, Project Skyban was born.

Executing Project Skyban to bring 'Banksy' to Preston with a mural that would get noticed

"The first rule of Project Skyban is that no-one talks about Project Skyban" was the mantra from the outset. 

For it to work, we needed the artwork to appear mysteriously, and seem totally authentic, which meant keeping our circle tight. 

Only one person at Preston BID was informed, then a handful of external partners who were all sworn to secrecy!

Very quickly we identified the perfect spot: a plain brick wall on the side of one of Preston's best destination eateries, Bar Pinxtos, right next to the Flag Market. 

It was perfect, and the building owner and Bar Pinxtos founder was immediately on board with the idea.

We did extensive research to learn how the real Banksy does it, and soon found that they use stencils to achieve the signature black-and-white look.

We decided that our artwork was going to feature DJ Pete Tong, and then it was suggested we tie it to Preston by adding Gromit the dog - created by proud Prestonian Nick Park.

Images selected, it was over to Lisa at Geminus Design to create print ready artwork for two separate stencils, one that would allow us to paint a white base and another to add the black detail and outlines.

Then we needed someone to produce the stencils, and so we enlisted the help of PNG Digital in Blackpool.

They were just as excited about the project as us, and were able to advise on and then produce the stencils we'd need - self-adhesive cut vinyl that could stick to the brickwork and the wall's contours in a way that would give us clean lines and none of the underspray risk that would come with rigid stencils.

Stencils cut and collected, it was time to install our mural, and we decided to do so around the last pay day before the event in the hope that the buzz would feed into ticket sales.

Despite having permission from the building owner, there was still a risk of arrest and so Lee insisted on doing the installation. He roped-in some help from fellow Pete Tong fan, friend and colleague Steve Balfe from Halo Consultancy, and together they set out in the dead of night on Sunday 27th April, working through the early hours of Monday. 

Although it was expected to be quiet, we hired a van for them to work from, which was drawn across the location to try and obscure what was going on.

It didn't work well enough, and at around 2am the police arrived on the scene after receiving a report of vandalism. It was a tense moment to begin with, but they were soon satisfied with things and even posed for a quick photo!

Getting the stencils on the wall was an art in itself, which is why the whole escapade took over five hours to complete! 

As daybreak arrived, the finished* artwork looked enough like a Banksy to pass most people's sniff test.

Leaving nothing to chance: making sure it got noticed

The whole endeavour would have proven pointless if nobody spotted it, so from around 8am on Monday 28th April, we sent some people to the location to pose as ordinary passersby taking photos of the artwork.

Questions like "do you think it really is a Banksy?" were loudly asked as other people walked by, inviting curiosity. 

Before too long, the entire staff of nearby Specsavers were out posing with the artwork and we were off! 

We spent 30 minutes unobtrusively taking photos of people from across the street with a long lens, capturing them as they spotted the mural and either just paid it attention or stopped to grab photos and selfies.

We then started sharing photos to Facebook groups from our individual user accounts, asking if people had seen it and speculating on whether it might be an authentic Banksy artwork - careful always to use suggestive language and not assert it as fact.

This approach was enough to get people discussing it and heading to the location to see it for themselves.

What did we achieve with our guerrilla marketing stunt?

We succeeded in creating exactly the kind of interest and chatter we hoped would result from our stunt.

It got picked-up by local independent news websites that carried stories about it, and thanks to our work seeding it, it took hold on social media organically too.

Not everyone was taken in, and lots of people questionned the provenence of the artwork, but that helped because every comment and interaction fed the social media algorithms to make the content more visible.

The inclusion of Pete Tong and connection to the festival event did not go unnoticed, and so The Preston Weekender was associated with the artwork, but we found no suggestion from anyone that it had been staged by the organisers.

Did it move the dial when it came to selling tickets? According to Preston BID, there was a noticeable spike in ticket sales on the day our Banksy style artwork appeared compared to the three months prior and the days after, contributing to giving this year's event the biggest attendance yet. You can read what they had to say in this case study.

Whilst it's not possible to attribute this entirely to our guerrilla marketing stunt, we're satisfied that it played a part!

Mission accomplished: extra Preston Weekender buzz created with a form of physical, tangible promotional marketing in the city centre, at low cost, but executed in a way that didn't link it to the festival or organisers directly and that helped boost ticket sales.

But that's not all that was achieved...Lee had some teeshirts made featuring the artwork and the slogan "Cracking tunes, Gromit" which he wore to the dance music night of the event, capturing the attention of fellow festivalgoers, many of whom had seen the artwork on the side of Bar Pinxtos and found it amusing that someone had turned it into a teeshirt. He wore it when he got to meet Pete Tong backstage, who took one look and said "wow, that's some teeshirt!"

Typically, Lee 'if-you-don't-ask-you-don't-get' Petts cheekily invited him to sign the teeshirt, which he did. We are reliably informed that it's never going in the wash!

*A slight error on the night with the stencil meant that a bit of the walrus design was missing from Pete Tong's teeshirt in the mural, so PNG Digital cut a separate stencil just for this element and Lee sneaked back to add it a few days later 😆 Here's how it looks in all its glory. 

Although it started out as a guerrilla marketing stunt, we're hopeful it will now remain as an enduring reminder of the time DJ Pete Tong played to massive crowds just yards away on the Flag Market. Who knows, it may now become part of the city's cultural heritage too?

Like this blog? Interested in exploring how we could deliver a guerrilla marketing campaign or publicity stunt for you? Get in touch via the chat function.