Festival Audiences: The stories data tell us

About the event

The workshop was targeted at festival professionals and explored data and its application in understanding festival audiences. The session emphasised the importance of data and its efficient use for building and expanding a dynamic events market. A panel of four leaders in the sector helped participants collect relevant data and understand their audience better. The panel included Jonathan Goodacre, Senior Consultant, The Audience Agency; Abhinav Budhiraja, Managing Partner, TagBag; and Anu George, Head of Growth, Paytm Insider, and was moderated by Tulika Yadav, Ex-CMO, Paytm Insider.

The session started with Jonathon introducing types of data, collection methods, and uses of this data to understand the audience’s motivations, needs and hesitations. He highlighted the importance of recognising the aims and objectives of the said research/data collection for efficient implementation. The first part ended with an interactive exercise for the participants where they worked in groups to identify their potential audiences and barriers in data collection.

Next, Abhinav Bundhiraja, taking from his political and creative background, referred to politics as a festival-based ecosystem where every rally and press conference are new events. Presenting a case study on the political board game ‘SHASN’, he demonstrated the importance of custom data, growth strategies, and content creation in response to a specific market. He elaborated on how customer data can help understand what a market likes and demonstrated how to gauge their interest through audio-visual marketing strategies.

Anu George spoke about interpreting data and using it for structured programming and marketing. She pointed out the power of trends and their use for executing a successful campaign/ festival. The session ended with a question and answer round with the participants.

The digital workshop was held as part of the British Council’s Festival Connections, in partnership with Arts and Culture Resources India (an Art X Company initiative), an annual programme of expertise, knowledge and networking between India and the UK