The project

Formally known as Prestfest and renamed The Preston Weekender in 2024, the event returned to its home on the city's historic Flag Market with a new-look brand in 2025.

A two-day music extravaganza that takes place over the early May Bank Holiday weekend, the event sees an array of DJs entertain crowds on the Saturday, whilst on Sunday the vibe shifts and festivalgoers are treated to an eclectic mix of live bands.

In 2025, the festival featured its biggest ever headline acts, with global superstar DJ Pete Tong wowing audiences on Saturday and '90s Indie Britpop sensations Embrace treating Sunday's revellers to some classic anthems.

But despite big name acts, promoting events like this isn't easy, with event promoters, nationally, facing several challenges:

Cost of living crisis impacting ticket sales: The ongoing cost of living crisis directly affects consumers' disposable income, making them more selective about discretionary spending like festival tickets. Research from late 2024 indicated that a significant percentage of festivalgoers were attending fewer festivals due to rising ticket prices.

Market saturation and competition: The UK festival market can be competitive, and the rise of new events, coupled with audience selectivity, makes it harder for all festivals to sell tickets. Larger festivals often secure exclusivity deals with artists, making it more challenging for independent festivals to book desirable line-ups.

Last-minute ticket reservations: A growing trend is that festivalgoers are reserving tickets closer to the event date, making it harder for organisers to predict sales and manage their finances and logistics in advance.

Weather uncertainty: As seen in previous years, adverse weather can lead to cancellations or reduced attendance, significantly impacting revenue.

In the case of The Preston Weekender, these challenges were exacerbated by the relative newness of the festival name and its entirely new brand look, which meant that selling tickets wasn't the only objective, 'selling' the brand was important too.

What we did

It was clear from the outset that the target audiences for both days of the event were likely to be drawn from an older crowd that had 'grown up' with Pete Tong and Embrace in the '90s.

That being the case, and because of its reach and relative affordability, it was decided that ads on Facebook and Instagram would prove to be the most successful way to get in front of and communicate with potential festivalgoers. We further targeted based on relevant interests, including in the acts themselves, musical genres, and nightlife etc to make sure we were connecting with those most likely to be attracted to the festival.

Three waves of ad campaigns were planned, all designed to promote awareness of The Preston Weekender as a festival brand, as well as selling tickets, starting with the promotion of an early-bird offer intended to kickstart interest and gradually becoming more insistent as the event drew near.

The organisers used the popular Fatsoma ticketing platform to manage ticket sales, with a Wordpress website at the front end.

However, the original version of the main website was perfunctory and we identified quick wins to better 'sell' the festival experience, and so we supplied suggested copy to improve this. It used much more emotive language designed to allow readers to 'see' themselves at the festival enjoying the acts. We also recommended the styling of the website be changed to mirror the look and feel used by bigger festivals like Creamfields, with the addition of a video on the homepage that showcased the acts that would be performing, again in an effort to sell an experience not just tickets.

The Facebook ads included campaigns across all funnel stages, with significant emphasis on awareness and traffic generation to get eyes on brand and on the website. The ad creative ranged from images and videos designed to promote individual performers and bands, showcase the festival experience, and some that sought to leverage humour to grab attention.

For the third wave of campaign activity, we built dedicated, conversion-optimised landing pages at a subdomain, one each for Saturday and Sunday, and sent all ad traffic to these as part of a concerted final push. These gave us more control over the messaging and enabled us to also promote ticket sales with FOMO tactics - highlighting ticket scarcity, for instance. The landing pages were built to be more engaging during the final push, and, being free from the distractions found on websites, more likely to focus vistors on buying tickets.

Then, with less than a week to go, and timed to appear around the last pay day before the event, we installed a Banksy-style mural in the dead of night on the side of a building in Preston close to the festival location. The mural, typical of Banksy's black-and-white stencil style, featured DJ Pete Tong alongside Gromit the dog in a nod to city's connection to the Wallace and Gromit franchise, created by proud Prestonian Nick Park. The appearance of the artwork captured people's attention and spread quickly on social media, whilst we and the festival organiser were careful to maintain an "is it / isn't it" stance designed to allow people to think it could be a real Banksy whilst neither confirming or denying it!

What we achieved

Over the course of the three waves of campaign activity, our ad content was viewed more than 1.1 million times by an audience of more than 338,000, giving the festival and its new brand a huge awareness boost, setting the scene for future iterations.

Traffic to both the website and landing pages exceeded 15,000 views, with a Landing Page View Rate (LPVR) of 68%, helping to build an engaged audience.

The festival organiser reported a spike in ticket sales on the day our Banksy-style mural materialised, and whilst it's impossible to wholly attribute this sales surge to the artwork alone, there is no doubt that it got people talking and gave the festival more exposure in the crucial last few days of ticket sales.

Overall, ticket sales were up 50% year-on-year on the Saturday, and at a slightly higher price point.

What the client says

Mark Whittle, Preston BID manager and the driving force behind the event, said:

"We've worked with Fifty2M several times over the years, and knew we could count on them to bring their unique blend of creative thinking, data-driven strategy, energy, and professionalism to the table, giving us the best chance of making The Preston Weekender a huge success in 2025, and that's exactly what they did.

"They worked hard to make the most of the promotional budget available, constantly generating ideas for new ways we could get the event in front of our selected audiences at the lowest reasonable cost.

"It's fair to say they also went above and beyond for us, even chipping-in with ideas outside their brief to help make sure everything that could be done to boost ticket sales was addressed - like giving advice on how to reduce 'friction' in the ticket checkout process to avoid abandoned carts - and, of course, bringing 'Banksy' to a wall in Preston.

"The Weekender has once again exceeded expectations, coupled with learnings to improve the event in future years. From the talent on stage to the buzzing crowd and friendly vibe, it’s been a phenomenal celebration of what Preston does best - coming together in the heart of the city.

"It also brings increased city centre footfall and spending that benefits our local high streets, and so it's important to us and co-organiser Preston City Council that it becomes a firm fixture in the city's cultural calendar in its new guise, and something that local residents look forward to every year. I'm confident that with the exposure the new brand has had this year with Fifty2M's help, we'll be able to make that happen."