What photos and videos does a festival need for its marketing?

You don’t need to make anything new. A folder of photos and videos you’re happy to have online, with credits for the photographers, is plenty, and from there I’ll work out the content pillars so there’s always something fresh going out.

I start by going through the archive you’ve already got, so there’s a list of the assets we need this year, what we can reuse and what’s new, and then get someone to edit the existing footage into a searchable library you can pull a clip from year after year, so we’re not creating the same new content each year.

The ads are all built around the offer, the branding for the festival with the colourway and the logo, made up as tiles in 1:1, 9:16, 16:9 and 4:5, each with a call to action like buy now, sign up or register interest. If it’s a brand new event, the artwork will get you through the first round before we scale up :)

If you’ve got your own photographers and videographers, give them a solid brief so they know what we’re trying to achieve, because it’s not always the obvious stuff. A photographer will go straight for the artists and the crowd, and we want those, but we might also want the sponsors, the landscape, the venue, the staff and the branding, so there’s material for next year as well as this one. I’m big on briefing to set people up for success rather than telling them to go for it.

Mixing the professional footage with the rest works too, like a tour video with the live footage of the band playing and the photographer in the pit taking photos of the audience, because showing full perspectives in a video is good.