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Key partnerships, massive online campaigns and strategic use of sponsorship helped Manchester International Festival (MIF) to reach its international market, say Helen Palmer and Andrew Palmer.

Cultural tourism works. Ask London, Edinburgh, Barcelona. So why has the relationship between the arts and tourism been so hit and miss for most of us? Cities often conjure up partial, out-of-date images: Manchester’s might be guitar bands, football and the Industrial Revolution. That’s all fine, but not the real picture. The city is reinventing itself, following the success of the 2002 Common-wealth Games, which demanded a cultural legacy of its own. The city settled on staging an international arts festival. The City Council had a clear vision, shared by the tourist board Marketing Manchester, the regional development agency and the private sector. This led to the ‘original modern’ brand concept developed by Peter Saville, design legend and Creative Director for Manchester. As Peter says, “original modern addresses what the city has to realise: it is a challenge to Manchester to raise its expectations and perhaps even rediscover some lost ambitions”.

Alex Poots, the Festival Director, sums it up, “I was impressed by the city’s view of culture as an asset and willingness to back that up with substantial funding.” The result? A city of world firsts inspired a festival of world firsts. Cultural, tourism and development partnerships were forged across the region. Without being an integral part of the city’s tourism ‘destination offer’, the 18-day festival couldn’t have met its ambitious targets: 160,000 attenders, £19m worth of economic impact in Manchester and ten world premières. This meant bringing the Festival’s marketing planning in line with tourism’s long lead-times. In return, commercially driven tourism partners had to learn how to articulate effectively and promote arts that were ‘new’ (no track record), ‘innovative’ (scary), even ‘challenging’ (very scary)!

The travel trade marketplace is both a more commercial and a more conservative one than the arts, populated as it is by tour operators, hoteliers and transport providers servicing leisure visitors, who often come to a city to eat and shop first then see some ‘culture’. The relationship with Marketing Manchester was pivotal in creating targeted international campaigns and also working with VisitBritain to target priority overseas markets. Such strategic partnerships helped to put the festival on the national and international map.

The Festival targeted tourism markets through a variety of marketing channels. Online campaigns reached millions of people in USA, Europe and even China. Targets included youth markets in Spain for music, and lesbian and gay markets in Germany. The Festival also ran competitions across European and airline media. Manchester International Airports Group and Virgin were secured as sponsors. International press trips led up to the event from two years out, and the Festival held media launches as far away as New York. The international art world discovered MIF at events like Art Basel and the Venice Biennale. The objective of creating awareness with a complicated message – ‘the world’s first international festival of original, new work’ – was boosted through three pre-festival commissions. The first was 20 months before the festival – five sell-out nights of ‘Gorillaz: Demon Days Live,’ one-off live music performances at the Manchester Opera House that recreated the ‘Demon Days’ studio album.

Plans for 2009 are well under way. Marketing Manchester now has a cultural tourism officer, and the city’s Marketing Co-ordination Unit, based in Marketing Manchester, places culture at the heart of its strategy. Why? Partly because the Festival was a success, thanks in large part to its cross-sector partnerships. Remember those targets? The Festival attracted 40,000 more people than expected, achieved 50% more economic impact than forecast and generated over £12m worth of media coverage.

Palmer Squared delivered the role of Marketing Director at Manchester International Festival 2007 and provides the role of Director of Strategic Marketing, Marketing Manchester.
t: 07913 397541 or 07957 544290;
e: andrew@palmersquared.co.uk or helen@palmersquared.co.uk