Our last professional visits of our journey today did not disappoint in the least. We started out learning about the world’s largest arts festival held here in Edinburgh and an amazing campaign for a whisky brand that took its creators to Norway for a signature photography and video shoot.
Oliver Davies has been head of marketing and development for the Fringe Festival of Scotland, which began in 1947. He has a wide variety of responsibilities – all the marketing and public relations effort, the digital box office, development and fundraising and street festival planning. He emphasized that he works for the charity, The Fringe Society, that oversees the festivals.
The August festival takes over the streets here, and it all takes planning and coordination for the 3,800 shows to be performed this year from Aug. 2-26. The shows will span 10 different genres, from dance to choral to theater enough to fill a 450-page brochure. It’s mischievous, daring, intriguing and creative, and Oliver has to tell that story in his work.
He showed us a photography gallery of famous actors who have appeared in Fringe Festivals in that time. Maggie Smith appeared when she was just 6. Others included Robin Williams, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacoby, Eddie Izzard, Rowan Atkinson, Trevor Noah and Rachel Weisz.
Unlike other festivals, there are no overall festival juries or a director. Rather the venues help select the performances and artists, he said, with some curation, mainly to ensure “the law is not broken.”
The festival began in 1947, Oliver said, in an effort “to bring color back” after the devastation World War II wrought on Europe. Eight companies, six from Scotland and two from England, showed up that year unscheduled to perform. They were rejected, but Oliver said they performed anyway “out of on the fringe,” and that is how it all started.
Today there are 250 Fringe Festivals around the world, including Pittsburgh, and World Fringe Day is celebrated on July 11 with performances spanning 46 hours. There is a World Fringe Congress, and the global network also includes journalists, television and movie industry professionals, and content purchasers. The overriding theme? Freedom of expression.
Venues in this city have ranged from traditional theaters and performance spaces to a cab, a hut, a rabbit warrant and a phone booth. Oliver said research has showed that the audience “wants the festival to take risks,” and they come back to the festival to see performances at a different venue or space as much as possible.
Audiences this year will see performances from artists from 55 countries. That audience will include officials who want to book shows and specific artists. That group is an important audience component for the festival.
Oliver works with a business plan based on numbers and research. Every performance is a separate ticket, although Friends of the Fringe get discounts on multiple purchases. Eleven Fringe Festivals are held in Scotland. Last year 2.84 million tickets were sold for those performances, representing 157 countries. It would take eight years to watch all of those back to back, Oliver said. These festivals contributed 173 million pounds to the Scottish economy annually and have resulted in 300,000 jobs. The festivals generated 1.3 billion Twitter messages.
Why does it run the box office? The charge on each ticket is then just 4 percent, way below the Ticketmaster charge of 25 percent, for example. The festival needs to ensure that it considers its other main portion of the audience, Edinburgh residents, who live with this for three weeks and patronize it. In fact, Edinburgh residents make up 36 percent of the festival’s audience.
Oliver says the Fringe Society is working on making the festival more accessible and supportive of a wide range of artists, including those with disabilities and anyone in the LBGTQ+ sector. The first part of that is difficult with the hilly, cobblestone streets of Edinburgh. Last year the festival handed out 100 sensory backpacks to help people on the spectrum – children and adults – cope with the performance. Those packs included ear defenders, or ear plugs as we’d call them in the U.S., fidget spinners and warnings about loud or possibly offensive performances.
On its 70th anniversary, Oliver said the charity listened to its audience segments and asked what they thought the festival should look like in five years. The result is a Fringe Blueprint, a business plan that will lead Oliver’s and others’ work.
One of the results will please performers: a guarantee that their accommodations will cost no more than 250 pounds for a week, compared to some of the hotels charging them 150 pounds per day. “They needed to realize they can’t overcharge,” Oliver said. “It will hurt the festival.”
Accessibility is not just physical barriers. It’s financial as well. Oliver said that 50,000 pounds worth of tickets have been set aside for 31 charities. It will help reach new audiences, too. He hopes that number will grow to 100,000 pounds by the 75th anniversary.
Another objective is to create a new building. Right now the festival is spread over three buildings. This building will provide not just performance space but also work space and studios for podcasts among other media.
Oliver said the festival has held a poster competition with schools for years, but that partnership needs to be expanded. The other important part is to make sure the carbon footprint the festival leaves behind gets better and better.
Two major target audiences are 18- to 35-year-olds and those 55 plus. The Baby Boomers and millennials, Oliver said, are sharing music, TV and program choices. So it’s no surprise to him they are coming to the performances together.
The first tickets for this year’s festival went on sale in January. The marketing campaign, though, will be unveiled on June 5.
After a lunch break, we headed down the hill from our hotel to Whitespace, a creative agency to meet photographer David N. Anderson and Chris, the agency’s creative director. David had been one of the first media visits Jan secured, and he offered to have us visit the agency he has worked with and see the space and principals there.
David has been shooting photography professionally for 10 years after finishing a degree in media and cultural studies. He had been sort of drifting, he said, as his degree had little practical skill instruction. He had started photography at 16, mainly to meet a girl. That, he said, didn’t work out, but the photography did.
Most of the shooting he does is freelance for all types of clients and agencies, small and large. Whitespace is the largest creative agency in Scotland and has 70 employees working both Edinburgh and London.
David started working for Whitespace on a Visit Scotland account. He said he enjoys working with Whitespace because it gets him out to locations and not just working in the studio. You could tell from his interaction with Chris that they have a connection and collegiality, so important in this business.
This type of agency work has “become my bread and butter,” he said, especially in days when people are shooting their own photographs and posting them on social media. He’s done some work for Hollyrood Magazine, which focuses on politics. He told use about a fun shoot he had with five main political figures in Scotland and a tight time schedule on the shoot – five minutes. It turned out great, David said, as he got them out of the political PR stances and smiles. He later repeated the same pose with children for a special edition focusing on youth for that magazine.
Chris Davey joined Whitespace 12 years ago after working “a lot of different projects for a lot of different people.” He told us he had been academically challenged and couldn’t read by the time he was 12. He dropped out of school at 16 but after becoming interested in Dungeon and Dragons and becoming a master at it, he taught himself to read and later graduated from a university.
He heads a creative team of 25 people – designers, illustrators and motion graphics staff. The agency overall works on brand identify, digital mobile, campaigns, and content marketing. It also does measurements and researches the effectiveness of its efforts.
We watched a reel of the agency’s current work and staff, and then the two focused on their efforts for Shackleton whisky, a product of then Mackinlay, now Whyte and Mackay. It commemorated the 100th anniversary of legendary explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who ordered a ton of his favorite Mackinlay whiskey as he embarked on a journey to the Antarctic. Trouble is the ship and his 28-member crew were stranded when the boat became trapped in the ice. They lived for 18 months at a base camp at Cape Royds – drinking quite a bit of that whisky, hunting and fishing to survive after building a wooden structure. To save themselves, Shackleton and several of his men took one of two lifeboats and rowed 750 miles to South Georgia Island, although once they got there, they had to hike another 50 miles to reach help. At the end everyone was rescued.
And Chris noted, the hut left behind was covered in ice and preserved, and when a crew unearthed it, it found the remaining bottles of whisky. But so few people knew this story, so the agency decided to tell it to commemorate the launch of the brand and developed a marketing strategy and competed for the business. Once that was secured, David had to compete for his part of the business as well. The company approved him. The target audience? Men who liked adventure and challenge.
So what was the idea? Tell the story via the whisky’s global brand ambassador Tim Jarvis, a current day explorer who re-created the rescue mission 10 years earlier for the Antarctica Heritage Trust. The setting was to be Finse, Norway, where Shackleton had prepared for his journey.
It was to be done with what Chris called a brand film, and a five-member Whitespace team headed to Norway to shoot it in five days. First, though, they had to plan, plot and budget out everything they would need to do to create this film. Chris showed us a detailed spreadsheet that was incredibly detailed.
They sent 40 varnished bottles of the whisky ahead of them to the location, found a physical map of Antarctica to visualize what they would be mimicking, and ordered special camera equipment that could withstand the weather. Oh, and they needed appropriate clothing and outdoor gear.
Everything had to be able to work in temperatures that would dip to 10 degrees below zero. Finse, Norway, was as close to Antarctica as possible without being there, David said.
They were met there by brand ambassadors and a few journalists that the whisky company had invited, as well as company personnel. Twenty of them stayed in a hostel for part of it – awful conditions, Chris said – then moved to a hotel.
They took us through the five days there, 14-hour days for the most part. They had to learn to use snowshoes and ski, lugged equipment up via snowmobiles and dog sleds. They had been worried about a white out when shooting. But the real issue was all the snow. You had to do something different or adjust if anything went awry, David said.
The brand ambassadors who were selected because of the number of followers on their blogs were an issue, and Chris said several of them had no idea how to promote the shoot or the brand on Twitter. He said they preferred to enjoy being on the company’s dime, and few “were complete dicks.” One stunt had them sleeping outside in a tent, although Tim Jarvis supervised them.
Regardless, the shoots worked. They staged a number of photographs of the product in various ways, re-creating what Shackleton and his crew would have had with them, including ropes, vintage skis and other items. They shot photographs The New York Times wanted to accompany a freelancer’s story. David said they worked in some panoramic shots and used hotel employees holding Shackleton mugs, all artwork for ads and mobile device sites.
“You just sometimes have to have a bit of luck to get these [great photographs],” David said.
The crew brought two drones as well to help with the work.
Despite all the pre-work and endurance needed for those five days, Chris said it would have cost even more to try to do this in a studio.
In the end, David and the crew took 7,000 photographs. That was whittled down to 1,000 to bring back to the company and finish the work. In the end, the campaign used 100 photographs for all its work.
Both have seen major changes in their professions. David only uses digital, occasionally shooting in film when he has time to do that and develop it, mostly for his own pursuits. Chris recalled getting his first email account in 2009 and how everything has shifted from traditional media work to so much digital and mobile and social platforms. “It hurts m y head sometimes,” he said.
What’s next for Whitespace? Chris said they are already done augmented reality and virtual reality for clients, Lego for example. “It’s exciting,” he said.
Hard to believe the media visits are done, and we have just one more full day left in this journey. Jan, Robin and I all wandered about town and shopped for a bit before heading to the Deacon’s House Café for a pick-me-up snack. I finally had my scone and tea – just delicious! We ended the evening with a dinner at the Last Drop pub, so named for that last drink a prisoner would have before facing his hanging. The two connected as the namesake deacon was hanged after robbing the people he made locks for to fund his affairs and drinking. Regardless, Cheryl joined us for a great meal on our own and, of course, a drink. I had Thistle Elderberry Cider tonight. Refreshing!