Seedhead Arts and Dillon Bass Ltd. 2023
Context
Seedhead Arts is a small arts based business in Belfast that runs Hit the North, Ireland’s largest Street Art Festival which has just celebrated its tenth birthday.
Local distributor Dillon Bass have an extensive portfolio of premium wine and spirits, including Hennessy.
Challenge
Moet Hennessy have a global strategy to align the Hennessy brand with the arts- supporting the artist is very important to Hennessy.
Dillon Bass want to align the Hennessy brand with the creative sector in Belfast to raise brand awareness, build brand positioning through associative imagery and increase market exposure to key demographics, particularly with the younger target customer.
“From new large-scale murals and street art walking tours to urban sports and sketching sessions, this year’s Hit the North Street Art Festival was the biggest and best yet! Northern Ireland is well regarded on the world stage as a leading destination for graffiti art and at Hennessy we are proud to champion the creativity, innovation and passion of these artists.”
Jamie Jamison, Spirits Ambassador, Hennessy
Solution
Hit The North is a major NI event. Attracted by the vibrancy of Belfast’s street art scene, Dillon Bass sees a natural fit between the Hennessy identity and the Hit the North festival as a perfect blend of urban art and the distiller's craft. Now in its fourth year, the partnership is going from strength to strength.
The collaboration generates substantial amount of positive social media content which resonates hugely with Hennessy’s target consumers.
Hennessy’s investment elevated the global profile of the festival and brand by programming additional headline artists, an even bigger block party in Kent Street and Union Street during the festival, and included headline DJ sets from David Holmes and urban sports demos.
Results
Hit the North Fringe events began with an exhibition launch on Thursday 20th April. In the following nine days, artists created large scale murals across the city with fringe events running in parallel including walking tours, film screenings, lectures, drawing events and networking events.
The festival climaxed on Sunday 30th April with a large scale street art jam/block party in Union Street and Kent Street. Roads were closed and over 75 artists transformed Belfast’s streets with old school legends of the scene like R.O.A. and Shok-1 painting alongside more modern day superstars like Studio Giftig and Aches.
The free event incorporated lots of seating for people to hang out on for the day while they ate from local vendors and had a drink. The block party, featuring Urban Sports, music from David Holmes and performances from Festival of Fools, welcomed thousands of visitors. Seedhead’s relationship with the Belfast Stories team enabled HTN to create an additional village area for vendors and artists at their site.
Coverage in the press and online was unparalleled, as was the quality of the artistic work.
“Hennessy remaining our biggest sponsors since 2020 bring so much more than just cash to the table as we work closely with their team to make Hit the North with Hennessy the amazing event we’ve just had.”
Adam Turkington, Partner, Seedhead Arts
Photography by Neal Campbell
