Toronto’s Luminato Festival is maximizing brand integration in the digital space by embracing one of its themes this year – exploring communication in today’s wired world – and launching a bundle of new interactive digital features as part of its 2009 marketing strategy. My Luminato is the fest’s new social networking platform, and Creative City is a new online contest designed to spark more content in the Fest’s digital realm via user-generated video.
The rebranded festival website, Luminato.com, hosts the The Creative City and is the hub for My Luminato. With media buys handled through Toronto-based Endeavour Marketing, and in partnership with Onestop Media Group (OMG) and A4C (Art for Commuters), The Creative City encourages visitors to upload one-minute videos in the hopes of garnering votes from the viewing public. The videos with the most weekly votes will be featured on The Creative City’s ‘feature window,’ and will appear on TTC subway platform screens. Submissions with the most pre-festival votes will also be eligible for a grand prize.
To help create a deeper Luminato experience, a Facebook-style My Luminato platform launches May 1, where users can sign up to create their own profile pages – complete with a personalized URL web address – and upload personal pics, select and share Luminato event info, and comment on other My Luminato user pages. Every week, the page with the most viewer hits is awarded a prize, and will be featured on the festival site. A special grand prize is being offered to the page with the highest total viewership following the wrap of the festival.
Visitors to the festival site can also peruse live event footage and artist/performer interviews on Luminato TV. There too, users can upload video clips from My Luminato to third-party social media websites, to help make festival footage even more sharable.
Back this year, the Luminato Lens features daily blog posts throughout the festival, while micro-blogging through Twitter will also deliver timely brand info to all users following Luminato’s account, with tweets viewable on an embedded feed at Luminato.com.
Presence on social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr will continue to help target audiences. A mobile alert initiative designed to provide users with festival info as it happens, and a mobile-based viral contest are also in the works.
Luminato sponsors this year include L’Oréal, Telus, OLG, National Bank Financial Group, Manulife Financial, Scotiabank, The Weather Network, President’s Choice and Aeroplan. Media partners include CTV and the Globe and Mail; marketing partners include Cineplex, the Toronto Star, Tourism Toronto, St. Joseph Communications, Telelatino, Metro, Asian Television Network and Toronto Life.
