Festival

Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) 2019

Creating a hybrid city festival

Kiel Week, the renowned sailing regatta and festival in Kiel, Germany, achieved a remarkable milestone of 1.5 million daily online views. Through a robust digital infrastructure, the event seamlessly integrated live content across various platforms, enhancing its visibility and captivating a wide audience. This digital transformation showcased the vibrant sailing regatta and festival activities while expanding Kiel Week’s reach and engaging a diverse audience.

Kieler Woche
Views
1 M+
Contacts
1 M+
Hours Of Watch Time
1 K+

Project

Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) 2019

Each year, the city of Kiel (Germany) hosts the “Kieler Woche” – 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
Format: Hybrid City Festival
Location: Kiel, Germany
Size: 2.5 million attendees
Focus: Festival
Industry: City event | Hybrid format
Kieler Woche / Kiel Week
Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) 2019

Brands involved

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.

Kieler Woche

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.

Kiel Digital out of Home

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.

Kiel Digital out of Home
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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.

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Features used for Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) 2019