Big Daddy Weave

Oct. 25, 2015

Meg Short, Fall 2015 Intern

Introduction
Big Daddy Weave, a contemporary Christian band, brought their My Story Tour,
featuring Jason Gray and Citizen Way, to the Civic Center as one of our Town Square
Live shows. The sponsorship with Tom Ahl is what brought them here to us. As seen
on our press release, The tour is launching in conjunction with the September 18,
2015 release of Beautiful Offerings, Big Daddy Weave's highly-anticipated seventh
studio album, available for pre-order now. The albums first single, "My Story,"
sparked the title for the tour and has resonated with listeners everywhere, breaking
into the top 20 on both the Hot Christian Songs and Christian AC charts.

Marketing Tactics
1. Ticket Trade
YesFm, WBCL (the media sponsor), Childers Media, WTGN, and WTTP were
contacted. We offered tickets for them to give away in exchange for airtime. We also
offered two meet and greet add-ons to YesFm, as well as 3 BDW cds for giveaway, 1
Jason Gray cd, and 1 Citizen Way cd. The same cds were given to WTGN. WBCL
received 10 meet and greets and 10 tickets. Childers received 20 tickets.
2. Street Team promotion
I went out into the downtown area armed with flyers for local businesses to
place in their windows. Several business owners or their employees recognized me
from the two other poster promotion campaigns I had done prior (for The Beach
Boys and The Mersey Beatles), so I was able to use this relationship building to my

advantage. Not as many were as excited for/had heard of BDW (in comparison to
Beach Boys), so this helped me unload some that may not have otherwise taken
them. Many of the restaurants were very willing to take my materials because they
know that means business for them on show night. I did not go as far around Lima
as I did with the other two flyers, because of time constraints, but I have seen many
in windows of downtown businesses, and we actually got rid of all but a couple of
these larger flyers through other means.
3. Local Youth
We reached out to Tyler Sutton, who is in charge of the Lima area Teens for
Christ, and got him to organize and produce a promotional video for us, and paid
them $125. The leaders of the local Fellowship for Christian Athletes were contacted
as well to help us put flyers in their churches and schools.
4. Social Media
I wrote two Facebook posts that were published Oct. 10 and 20th,
respectively. The first was the flyer picture with a simple call to action to bring the
family to see BDW and the ticket info. We boosted the post for $100 spread out over
five days. It is currently at 174 likes, 15 comments, and 49 shares. 11,480 people
were reached. This is more popular than the Beach Boys posts, which was
surprising. The second was supposed to be a video we paid Tyler Sutton and Teens
for Christ to produce, but we could not get it to upload, so we used the picture
instead. It prompted people to like, tag a friend in the comments, and share the
post to be entered in a drawing to win a pair of tickets, which we announced on
Facebook on Oct. 24. 6,409 people were reached, there were 134 shares, 124 likes,
and has 97 comments (Meaning that around 97 were entered in the drawing,
because they needed to do all three to be entered).
We did not do much on Twitter besides retweeting the419 article about the
show. We tweeted a last-minute discount in prices for students (the $28 tickets for
$20) to local FCA groups. I wrote a proposal for creating a VMCCC Instagram
account to promote the show, but unfortunately, that fell through. For future events,
we should utilize these avenues more as a free add-on to our marketing plan.
5. E-Blasts
iTickets did 3 e-mail blasts that reached around 125,000. There was an
average oepn rate of about 20%. For the second blast, there were 125 clickthroughs for BDW and 66 for Dailey and Vincent, who are coming to VMCCC in
December. We paid them $850.
6. E-mails from Meg
I sent out three sets of emails, after several days of compiling addresses. The
first was to the local colleges and their campus pastors or FCA leaders. I attached
the promotional video we were sent and encouraged them to show it to students at
some point - at chapel, a prayer meeting, whatever. The intent was to tell them that
we cannot continue to bring good Christian acts to the civic center without their
help in filling the seats, and to thank them for nurturing the local people through
their ministry. The next two emails I sent out were sent to 62 local churches. Much

of the copy was the same, but I included an announcement they could place in their
bulletin if they desired. I did not hear back from any of these persons, except one
who asked if we could provide him with some free tickets, which we did. I think the
success of this measure cannot be determined by ticket sales, necessarily. In my
opinion, a worthwhile way to spend time making sure the target audience has been
exposed to the message multiple times.
7. Mailers
While I was finding emails for the offices of local churches, I took down
mailing addresses as well. We used this list to send small mailers, along with a letter
I wrote encouraging the churches to inform their patrons of the show. For bigger
churches that had emails and we had already sent the information to, we included
five cards. For smaller churches that didnt appear to have a website or email, we
included three. The churches may or may not have already received one of the full
size flyers from a Teens for Christ youth.
8. News
I sent out a press release (Michelle wrote) about the show to local media in
late September, for immediate release on Oct. 1. I was also in contact with the Lima
News and the419 about setting up an interview with the lead singer of BDW, Mike
Weaver. Both had already done an article on the show at this point, so neither took
me up on that offer. We put ads in the Wapakoneta Daily News/Evening Leader for
$93.50 each. We spent $360
9. Radio
In addition to the ticket giveaways and free airtime, we did purchase 56 spots
for $200 with YesFm. We spent 12 tickets for trade and $620 for iHeart Media. 20
Ticket trade with Childers Media. Mike Weaver (lead singer) was able to call in and
do an interview for the419 and on-air interviews for four local radio stations.
10.Television
We spent $2090 in WLIO ads; they played the Teens for Christ video. Some were on
the morning or evening news, or during Friday night football recaps.

Conclusion

Overall, I think our marketing efforts were a success. The ticket sales were pretty
slow right after the official announcement, but we really drove them in the last few
weeks. We increased from 433 tickets sold on Oct. 15, to a total of 950 on the show
date (Oct. 25). We received many positive comments about the facility and the
show from patrons exiting the building afterwards.