How do you help a festival completely change its identity and business model to meet the limitations of a global pandemic?

About Shoko Festival

Shoko Festival is Zimbabwe’s most popular and longest-running urban culture festival. Shoko is all about promoting urban culture, free expression and new ideas. Over the years the festival has provided a platform for hundreds of young Zimbabwean rappers, comedians, musicians and spoken word artists to perform, collaborate and express themselves. Shoko also curates cutting edge collaborations between local and international acts and builds international tours for young Zimbabwean artists.

 This case study highlights how Point Black helped Shoko Festival transition from an in-person event to a fully digital festival during a pandemic.

Objectives

The objectives for Shoko Festival 2020 were; 

• Increase social media following by 10%

• Help rebrand the festival to a digital-first offering

• Help identify artists for the program

• Handle all design work for festival assets

• Handle all Public Relations for the festival

How We Helped 

This was Point Black’s third consecutive year working closely with Shoko Festival to help put together their program and handle all their agency work. Shoko has a long-established brand known for delivering a unique festival that is as much about the experiential offering as the art on display. Scheduled to be held in September 2020, the festival fell right in the middle of the global COVID 19 pandemic where Zimbabwe was in a lockdown that restricted movement and banned the gathering of any crowds. 

Shoko’s team at Magamba Network out together a plan to host a fully digital festival with a difference and recruited Point Black to help bring this vision to life.  

Implementation

With limited time Point Black devised an audience awareness campaign that focused on generating conversation and interest via original content, media partners and influencers. However instead of simply talking at potential “attendees”, Point Black and its team generated original content and conversations that revolved around the festival to drive interest and awareness.

This was coupled with a comprehensive 3 tier paid media campaign and a massive Public Relations drive.

 Along with all this Point Black worked with Magamba to adapt their festival assets and design their promotional assets. In total the following was produced

• 5 Event Specific Logos

• 280 Different Posters

• 39 articles and interviews in major press publications

Numbers

• 4045480 Total Impressions

• 10,450 % increase in engagements

• 5,213 % Increase in audience

Assets