The Context
U105 is a Belfast-based radio station, providing a mix of music and speech as well as hourly news bulletins.
Young at Art is one of Northern Ireland's leading children's arts not-for-profit companies and home of the Belfast Children's Festival. From its base in Belfast's city centre, Young at Art coordinates not only an international festival, but also a wide variety of educational engagement projects for children and young people under 18 to enjoy the arts.
As a result of COVID restrictions, all Belfast Children’s Festival (BCF) 2021 programming was set to take place online, and the festival faced the added complication of their previously successful outdoor advertising becoming ineffective because potential audiences were confined to their homes and wouldn’t be exposed to the ads. BCF needed a new way to get the word out about their popular festival, which usually attracted 20,000 adults and children from across Northern Ireland…
U105 wanted to increase their engagement with the 35-55 year old demographic, and also wanted to be associated with events which positively portrayed the best of Northern Ireland, as safe, family friendly, professional and memorable.
The Solution
The respective needs of these two organisations made their partnership a clear ‘no-brainer’, with U105 signing up as the media partner for Belfast Children’s Festival 2021.
U105 was perfectly positioned to help BCF reach their province-wide target audiences, during a period of widespread cancellation and disruption, to help communicate the programming of the 2021 festival.
Engaging with a family audience across Northern Ireland and promoting a high quality, safe, online festival for whole families to enjoy together was a very positive step for U105 in their aim to be a trusted media brand for NI families. Indeed, Young at Art is uniquely placed as a trusted brand with direct and ongoing engagement with the family market across Northern Ireland, so BCF21 fitted the bill perfectly to harness the power of the arts to support and amplify U105 brand values.
U105 worked with Young at Art to ensure BCF21 positioning across its key listener touchpoints, including breakfast and drivetime shows and social media, reinforcing both partners’ brand stories, by:
· Launching BCF21 online on U105’s website and social media channels and featuring the bespoke festival highlights video
· Broadcasting three artist interviews on the Frank Mitchell phone-in, lifestyle and current affairs morning show
· Scripting lively 20 second stings to be broadcast on U105 to promote the partnership. All stings featured the festival strapline ‘Come and play in a new way’. Bespoke family performance bundles were crafted, aimed at parents and grandparents during breakfast and drive time slots, to encourage quality, shared family time
· Offering an added-value opportunity for listeners to win a selection of books, as read by Cherrie Ontop as part of BCF21 Dragtime Bedtime Stories
· Communicating the U105 media partnership to YAA audiences, reinforcing their safe, reputable brand message
As a new partnership operating within a new festival structure, the U105 and BCF teams worked closely together to maximise impact with regular check-ins to ensure brand messaging and tactics were consistent across all audience touchpoints.
The successful partnership between U105 and BCF21 helped deliver on both their goals, including:
· Allowing U105 to target a family listenership across NI, as their recent move to digital/DAB now broadcasts them province-wide, providing added-value for U105’s commercial advertisers and an opportunity for them to target new advertisers interested in reaching a family-orientated market.
· Strong U105 branding featured on the BCF special edition storybook which was sent to key stakeholders and also read online by Cherrie Ontop, featuring in the online festival brochure and highlights video.
· Between 10 February and 17 March there were 10,008 visits to Young at Art’s website. The highlights video post on YAA’s Facebook account reached an organic audience of over 7000 viewers and the festival advertising campaign video reached almost 100,000 viewers on Facebook and Instagram.
· U105 profiled BCF21 in 100 x 20 second spots on breakfast and drivetime radio slots in the fortnight prior to the festival, securing exposure to U105’s family audiences.
· BCF21 audience figures exceeded 12,000 over the festival’s 10 days, which is extremely successful for an online children’s festival* (*The established and popular Spark Festival in Leicester also shifted online for 2021 attracting an audience of just over 6,000 over 13 days).
“The U105 team were really engaged with the partnership from the beginning. We already knew our audiences complemented each other, however they enhanced this by offering suggestions for creative ways to ensure the BCF21 message resonated - for example the BCF sting was originally due to be voiced by a U105 presenter, but they used a child’s voice to engage audiences.
The U105 team responded positively to our suggestions for promotions that were targeted at different age groups and the Cherrie Ontop book prize bundle as an added-value Facebook competition, all of which promoted our strapline, ‘come and play in a new way’.
With Belfast Children’s Festival operating in a brand-new space (completely online for the first time in its 22 year history) the Young at Art team was hugely encouraged by the willingness and flexible approach of the U105 team to ensure that the objectives of both partners were met.”
Eibhlin de Barra, Director, Young at Art
“This partnership was a superb tie-up for U105, delivering on the brand objectives we had identified in this most unusual of times. The creativity of the team at the Festival is renowned but their ability to marry that innate understanding of their audience with our own audience meant that this project achieved more and sounded even better on-air than we initially hoped. The team decision flagged by Eibhlin to use a child’s voice on the airtime proved an inspired one as it created audio stand-out from the advertising around it, ensuring memorable delivery and recall for the Festival in a competitive market. Our involvement also gave the Festival increased awareness across a number of platforms that, rather than being curtailed because of COVID, the fun would be online and could accommodate an even wider and larger audience. Our desire to reinforce U105 as a friendly, trusted family-focused brand to audiences right across Northern Ireland was significantly added to by this partnership and we look forward to building on this in the years to come.”
Peter McVerry, Station Director, U105
