Outbreak Festival – Driving Ticket Sales Through Targeted Artist-Led Google Ad Campaigns
Outbreak is a pioneering music and culture festival renowned for its programming on punk, hardcore, hip-hop, skate culture, and underground visual arts.
It is now an unmissable event among fans of the alternative scene - showcasing genre-defining headliners and up-and-coming talent.
With its extremely committed fan base and rapidly expanding profile, Outbreak Festival required a digital marketing partner that could match its ambitions - to reach the ideal fans, at the ideal moment, and convert interest into ticket sales.
The Challenge
The challenge was straightforward: place the festival in front of fans of particular artists, develop awareness in critical campaign windows, and convert consideration into ticket sales.
Generic advertising would never fly in a live events market that's this saturated. Outbreak required a strategy that:
Closely tracked the lineup year in and year out
Reached music fans who already had a vested interest in particular artists or genres
Generated actual commercial outcomes, not traffic or buzz
The Solution
The Solution
Year after year, ExecuteConsult collaborates with the Outbreak Festival team to organize and implement a Google Ads campaign with the help of the supplied lineup, artist fanbases, and audience behaviors.
Artist-Focused Targeting Strategy
Instead of generic music or festival content, we created campaigns that connected with fans of a particular artist on the bill. Whether it was an emerging hardcore band, a global hip-hop celebrity, or a cult act headlining a one-off UK show, every ad was designed to address those fans directly.
This meant:
Adaptive keyword targeting by artist name, tour search terms, and associated interests
Dynamic search ads reminding fans of ads when they typed artist-named content
Display campaigns reaching fans with similar affinities and web behavior on the Google Display Network
We aimed to reach fans with messaging that was directly related to their preferred artists.
Performance-Driven Campaign Structure
We executed an integrated campaign structure with:
Search ads for festival-themed and artist-named high-intent searches
Responsive Display Ads to drive impressions and retargeting touchpoints
All elements of the campaign were tracked in real-time and optimized based on performance, allowing us to dynamically adjust budget to top-performing artists and audience segments.
Optimized bidding strategies to reach lower-funnel, high-converting audiences
Utilised search term reports to expand or constrain targeting based on true user behavior
Trusted ad copy on various artists, ticket pricing, and scarcity messages (e.g. "limited availability" or "just added to the lineup")
The Results
Through many years of collaboration, our campaigns have accumulated:
Thousands of ultra-targeted impressions via Google Display campaigns—completely maximizing awareness within artist-specific groups
Mass quantities of qualified, high-intent traffic to the Outbreak Festival website
Direct conversions through to ticket sales, with ROI traced back to Google Ads spend.
A tested, replicable campaign model that can change each year based on the individual roster