We started our day off this morning by getting breakfast at our hotel and preparing for our media visits.
We walked to the French Embassy where we met with Ollie Davis from the Fringe Society, the charity that oversees the operation of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Ollie is the head of marketing for the group and works in a number of areas for the charity, such as all of the public relations and marketing, box office management, and all of their digital content, both on their festival app and on their social media pages. Ollie also works on all the street events that the Fringe coordinates.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival began in 1947, focusing on showcasing various types of music and drama. There are now over 250 Fringe festivals across the world.
This year the festival has 3,800 shows covering over 10 genres, such as dance, music, theatre, and art. The audience that they market these shows to is anyone who wants to take a risk attending a certain genre of show or act.
In most cases for an entertainment based event, you focus on marketing towards a certain age group, geographical demographics, or fans of certain bands, artists, or plays, but in Fringe’s case, they focus on anyone who is wanting to take a risk and making sure that everyone feels welcome and represented.
There are 55 countries represented onstage at the festival, with 32,912 participants at the Fringe festival last year.
The motto of the Fringe festival and the charity is simply, “No matter who you are or where you come from, you are welcome at Fringe.”
I really appreciate the festival focusing on having a welcoming brand and marketing themselves as a place and event for everyone, no matter if you are a local from Edinburgh, or you are traveling across the globe to attend this massive festival. I believe this is a motto that should be adopted amongst many other festivals and entertainment events globally to help spread that message amongst the entertainment industry and beyond.
What really surprised me the most was the fact that they sold tickets for each show they had at the festival. Last year, they sold 2.84 million tickets, which is absolutely crazy to think. With all of the ticket sales, they were able to generate 173 million pounds for the Scottish economy.
I was also really surprised when Ollie said that they only charge 4% on their tickets, versus the 25% you usually pay on Ticketmaster. With such a low rate on tickets, it is so crazy to think just how much money they have made solely on the price of the tickets.
For me, this media visit was the most relevant to my major so you can imagine I thoroughly enjoyed our time spent with Ollie. Throughout the visit, Ollie used certain terms and phrases that I recognized immediately from some of my SAEM classes. That gave me the validation that what I was learning back in Pittsburgh was the same here in Scotland and that information is universal across the world.
After our visit with Ollie, we had some free time to get lunch before our next media visit. Maddy, Mya, and I went to Pret and got sandwiches and coffee, then walked around the area we were in.
Once we finished lunch, we headed to our second media visit of the day at Whitespace. We met with David N. Anderson, a photographer in the Edinburgh area. He has been shooting professionally for 10 years, doing mostly commercial and editorial work, although he did begin his career in fashion.
We also spoke with Chris, Head of Creative at Whitespace. The two professionals often work together on creative briefs and projects.
They most recently worked on a project for Shackleton Whiskey. For this project of branding the drink, they traveled to Norway to shoot photography and video for the brand’s online presence and social media content.
After our day full of media visits, we stopped at a Mexican restaurant close to our hotel for dinner. We also decided to walk to this little Italian restaurant to have dessert! We shared a banana split and it was delicious!
As the day came to an end, Maddy and I walked all the way down the Royal Mile and discovered a beautiful view!
I am very excited to have another free day tomorrow! Although it will be a bittersweet day as this is our last day of the trip before we travel back to the United States.