About the campaign
For the festival’s 75th edition, we made two campaigns to shape the anniversary and show the audience that, also after the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival remains alive and kicking. Ticket sales started with a festive campaign that incorporated the names of all the different makers. It was designed by the design studio thonik and helped generate early enthusiasm among audiences in March and April for the coming performances. The first campaign’s design was further developed for the later May-June campaign, now with an image that reflected many of the festival programme’s themes.
Free publicity and media partners
The written press once again covered this year’s Holland Festival extensively. Het Parool, De Groene Amsterdammer, Scenes, Cultureel Persbureau and VPRO Gids had independent editorials. Apart from this, the festival published a special anniversary supplement in NRC Handelsblad and NRC online that chronicled the Holland Festival’s rich history.
The VPRO public broadcaster once again had a Holland Festival news bulletin on TV and did a broadcast of Mother Nature from Angélique Kidjo, while the NTR did the same for the concert When Paths Meet from Sami Yusuf. The NTR also presented a series based on the work that photographer Erwin Olaf made of the Dutch National Ballet in connection with the Hans van Manen Festival. This programme was part of the Holland Festival.
New collaborations
The Holland Festival set up a number of collaborations to reach a wider, more diverse target audience and successfully worked with a number of magazines, podcasts, radio programmes and influencers like One World, Omek, Dipsaus, Glamcult, Titti Mag and Shot of Culture, Radio Mart.
New website
In March 2022, the Holland Festival launched a new website in three phases. Thonik handled the look and feel, while web design studio Fabrique handled the technical execution. The website will be further expanded with a web shop in autumn, and we are currently adding to the large online Holland Festival archive, which will be re-launched this new website in autumn of 2022.
Social media
The festival managed to reach a huge, largely new audience through its social media channels, with 8994 visits on Instagram and 41739 on Facebook.
Parels
The Holland Festival attaches great importance to its rich history. To celebrate the 75th edition, another 75 historic video and television excerpts of about five minutes each will be unshelved and published through the joint VPRO and Holland Festival YouTube channel. This project was made possible by a host of partners: firstly, VPRO, who was making the excerpts available together with us. The NTR, who hold the rights to a large number of Pearls, had made it possible for us to publish these. The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision made video materials available. And all the rights holders appearing in the footage who gave permission to publish this.
City dressing
In order to give added visibility to the Holland Festival’s 75th anniversary, the city was lavishly dressed with flags and decorations on buildings. An instantly recognisable, festively dressed tram ran through the city streets all month, while the festival was also impossible to miss at many train stations outside Amsterdam and along the motorways with advertising masts and video screens from Ocean Outdoor.
CJP card and students
Drawing new and younger audiences is always an important consideration for the festival. In order to introduce the festival to young people, prices for students and CJP card holders were sizeably lowered, and the 2022 discount was also made to apply for secondary school students for all performances. Lowering the prices had a good effect. The number of visitors using these discounts doubled with respect to previous years.
