Case Study: From One City to a National Attraction

How we scaled a brand-new seasonal event into a multi-market success story — driving ticket sales, adapting through COVID, and achieving sell-outs across multiple cities.

The Challenge

In 2019, we partnered with a completely new seasonal attraction launching in a single Canadian city. With zero brand awareness and no established audience, our mandate was ambitious: drive ticket sales while building a recognizable event brand from scratch.

Over the next six years, the event grew from one city to a multi-market attraction, selling hundreds of thousands of tickets annually and regularly achieving advance sell-outs.

Obstacles We Overcame

  • Zero awareness (2019): new event, new market, no existing audience.
  • COVID-19 disruption (2020): pivoted from a walk-through to a drive-through event — which became the best year in the event’s history.
  • Rising competition (2021–2023): seasonal attractions surged, requiring sharper targeting and differentiation.
  • Global economic slowdown (2024): a sputtering economy created less disposable income and made sales harder to achieve.
  • Conversion bottlenecks: a client-managed website limited performance, requiring our campaigns to work harder to deliver ROI.

Our Approach

Paid Media

Multi-channel campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, programmatic, radio, outdoor, and influencer, evolving yearly as "what worked" shifted. Our audience targeting methods included full-journey and cross-channel, not just geo-fencing, interest groups, and advanced lookalike modeling.

Organic Social

Consistent content designed to build anticipation. Creative strategy adjusted annually to reflect changing audience behavior and platform trends. At the same time, put customer service first and leveraged social platforms to reach and connect with communities in each market and turn engagement into sales.

Email (Final Year)

Activated CRM audiences to reduce reliance on paid channels, driving repeat purchases and lowering acquisition costs.

Results

  • Year 1: Achieved a sell-out for a brand-new event.
  • Year 2 (COVID pivot): Delivered a record-breaking year with a 300% increase in ticket sales over 2019's sell out.
  • 2019–2024 Growth: Expanded from 1 city to 7, growing audience and revenue at scale over six years.
  • Organic Audience: Created an engaged social following of almost 100,000 people starting at zero.
  • Paid Media Performance: Achieved an average 5x ROAS, even after scaling budgets up 8X over the six years.
  • Sell-outs: Sold out the first two years, with regular timeslot sellouts in future years as the events grew.
  • Earned Media Value: Rose from almost $23 million EMV in 2022 to over $91 million in EMV in 2023, quantified as impressions X CPM X engagement rate.

Key Takeaways for Event Organizers

  • Even under challenging conditions (COVID pivots, competition, conversion bottlenecks), digital-first marketing can profitably scale ticketed events.
  • Adapting creative and targeting strategies annually was critical to sustained growth.
  • Full-funnel campaign structures — awareness → engagement → retargeting — proved most effective in driving consistent ticket sales.

Ready to Scale Your Event?

Our six-year track record shows how we build awareness, drive conversions, and deliver profitable growth for ticketed experiences. Let’s talk about how we can do the same for yours.

Work With Us