Art In The Park
22x
Return on ad spend from ticket and art sales
+180%
Tickets sold over and above the original target. 12,000+ tickets sold for 2024
+97%
Increase in revenue against original target
Maximising small budgets to sell out 10,000+ tickets for a one-of-a-kind art exhibition within New Zealand’s most iconic venue, Eden Park.
The problem
New Zealand’s art shows typically rely on traditional advertising and existing audience lists for sales but this was an expensive and dated approach.
Art In The Park wanted to challenge this, with a digital approach that heroed the art, the venue, and approachability.
With small budgets, limited time, and very little organic awareness or ticket sales, our ad for Meta & YouTube had to be extremely potent.
My Roles
Developed and led the overarching creative strategy to maximise ticket sales.
Conceptualised, directed, and photographed both video and photo shoots.
Designed high-performance static and video creatives, optimised for social and digital channels.
Guided the creative team workflow and decisions, ensuring timely, on-budget execution.
Established repeatable processes that steadily improved ticket sales year over year.
Key Decisions
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We refined our key messaging, used our event artists as the talent in video shoots, created ads in hours not weeks, and established a set of repeatable ad frameworks backed by real CTR and purchase data.
All of this meant we could confidently scale our ad creation and media buying, knowing we were spending our client’s limited budget wisely.
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We decided to film and photograph the event ourselves, which set us up with a bank of fantastic raw content to use in ads the following year.
We repeated this for the two years I was involved, refining an efficient process for getting exactly what we knew we’d need for ads the following year.
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Knowing that awareness of what Art In The Park is was low, I knew our ads had to clearly convey our biggest selling points. This was one of the reasons for leaning into video - it allowed us to more convincingly communicate what we needed to, within a single ad. For example, I wanted the the majority of our TOF video ads to directly or indirectly achieve all of these:
Show Eden Park:
Aucklanders have either been there, or know what it looks like. This could immediately create familiarity, as well as hook people in with a chance to enjoy the stadium in a way they never have.Show A Range Of Art:
As such a highly subjective medium, I built the assumption that a variety of art within one ad would increase the chances that someone believed there would be art there that they’d love. It also helps inform the scale of the event.Feel Premium
This was to help justify a ticket price, as well as to intrigue higher-end buyers that were more likely to purchase the most expensive artworks available, therefore generating more revenue.Build Energy & Urgency
Creating more social hype and incentive to purchase tickets sooner.Show Artist Interactions:
Having people know they’d be able to actually mix and mingle with the artists themselves would make the event seem more fun and approachable.Cheap & Repeatable:
We needed to make a small budget go a long way and move quickly based on what ad formulas were performing well.
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We used a series of rapid tests to optimise our approach:
Audience Quality: Identified the most receptive targeting within both YouTube and Meta.
Messaging: Experimented with different angles to see what resonated most.
Creative Formats: Determined the ad styles (video, static, UGC) that drove the highest click-through or ticket sale volumes.
