This must be the season of food festivals for the Blueprint Creative Group team. For the second time this month we’ve been secured to lead the marketing and promotions for another major food festival. This time it’s the original Grace Jamaican Jerk Festival in Ft. Lauderdale, which also hosts a festival in Washington, DC and New York City. Earlier in the month we announced that we were secured as the producer and marketing agency for the 3rd annual Miami Gardens Wine & Food Experience.
While food festivals appear to be fun to work with, they’re also intense productions with a lot of moving parts that requires a sharp focus on project management and budget control. It’s easy to start with one budget and quickly multiply the budget by the end of the production if the team loosely manages all of the moving parts. It’s also easy to get comfortable and assume that previous years’ marketing efforts and brand awareness will carry over into a well attended festival each year. While that may be true, each year also requires new marketing approaches, a creative media strategy, and testing new channels that can possibly expand audience reach. Food festivals are increasingly becoming popular and a major metro market can easily have several dozens of festivals in any given year, which means that attendees have choices. So unless the marketing is effective, you may be fighting for the same audience.
We welcome clients that challenge us and our creative thinking. For this year’s Jerk Festival, our focus will be on growing attendance from an average of 15,000 festival goers and also strengthening digital promotions.
