Creating a hybrid city festival
Learn how Kiel Week festival reached 1.5 million online views per day and 8.5 million contacts using doWow.
Use Case:
The Kiel Week
Each year, the city of Kiel (Germany) hosts the world’s largest sailing event where 4,000 yachtsmen and sailors from over 65 nations deliver exciting boating competition on the Kieler Fjord. During the sailing competition, Kiel hosts the largest summer festival in northern Europe with over 1500 cultural highlights, including more than 280 national and international pop, rock and classical music performances.
- Date: June 22-30, 2019
- Type: City Festival
- Size: 2.5 million attendees
- Industry: City event | Hybrid format
Main sponsors:
The challenge:
Produce an interactive digital event highlighting the sailing regatta & festival activities while promoting the city of Kiel and its sponsors
- With the participation of the German President Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble and over 2.5 million visitors, the Kiel Week festival's digital infrastructure had to be 100% fail-proof, and able to serve millions of user requests simultaneously;
- Live content needed to be integrated and managed on 16 square meters double-sided LED billboards, Digital-out-of-home screens as well as playback to sponsor and partner pages, creating a 360-degree on-site, in-app, digital experience.
- Enhance Kiel Week's outreach and media coverage on-site and online, create value for sponsors while reducing marketing costs.
Outcome:
Custom, secure and interactive hybrid event with live moderation, interchangeable functionality, and technical support.
Marketing Strategy
Using our proprietary media wall system, we designed a custom marketing strategy for the Kiel Week festival. We have integrated:
- Multiple live streams covering the competition and city activities
- Instagram and Twitter feeds with user-generated content, sponsored posts, and Kiel Week’s official channels
- Event agendas
- Calls-to-action, ads, and native sponsor content
Our media walls were placed on multiple DooH screens throughout the city of Kiel, acting as a central point for the attendees to watch the sailing competition, event schedule, and participate in the event by submitting their own impressions via social media.
Digital-out-of-Home (DooH) screens
We worked with the local city internet provider to set up a WiFi infrastructure with free hotspots for event visitors. These hotspots also served as connection points, serving live content to the screens via the doWow system.
City’s police and fire service departments had a direct hotline to deliver emergency alerts via doWow infrastructure.
Event partner pages: AIDA Cruises
We worked with Kiel Week’s partner, AIDA Cruises, on an individual marketing concept. We fully integrated their fan pages into doWow playout system and relayed all traffic in a tightly controlled environment to ensure a seamless connection for the event’s main clients.
Live Moderation
doWow content moderation system allows to switch, update, add or delete content or even change the layout in a matter of seconds on all digital screens. Viewers can consume the event content without page or browser refresh.
A team of 15 live reporters generated content throughout the Kiel Week – this continuous live coverage was integrated into doWow moderation system, making it easy for the social media team to show content to the audience.
During the Kiel Week festival, we controlled the live content narrative with low latency, moderating and swapping content according to the agenda, live streams, or even last-minute partner requests.
Engagement & interaction
We integrated multiple media walls into venue screens, TVs and websites, providing Kiel Week with an infrastructure for live reporting about the competition, event navigation, cultural activities, food courts, security, and aggregating user-generated content.
With the help of doWow media wall structure, all this content was played out to DooH screens, official website and an app during specific times without overwhelming or confusing the visitors.