The Challenge
The Biggest Year Yet, Ready or Not.
IDEA Week was preparing for its biggest year yet: four days, 30 speakers, 15-plus workshops, OK Go on stage, and the McCloskey New Venture Competition anchoring the close. The programming was exceptional. What it needed was a marketing effort that could match it.
The festival carried real legacy recognition from its Notre Dame origins, and the ingredients for a strong campaign were all there. The brand just needed refreshing, the channels needed connecting, and email, social, paid ads, and event registration needed to move as one. The date was fixed and the budget was largely donated, which meant six months and a clear sense of urgency.
THE CONTENT WAS ALREADY EXCEPTIONAL. THE OPPORTUNITY WAS BUILDING A MARKETING ENGINE WORTHY OF IT.
Innovation festivals draw a genuinely multi-disciplinary crowd — technologists, designers, founders, students, community leaders — and reaching all of them inside a 90-mile radius required a strategy that was as integrated as the event itself.
What We Did
Sequencing Before Creative.
Innovation festival marketing is a sequencing challenge before it’s a creative one. People don’t register because the ads are pretty, they register because the dates are clear, the speakers are recognizable, and the “know before you go” lands the week before. We worked backwards from April: brand refresh in November, a five-page WordPress site with Whova event-management integration live in February, and a six-month email arc moving from announcement through speaker reveals to urgency to utility.
Every channel pointed at the same registration page: nine email blasts, 32 social posts, $8,000 in paid media across Facebook, Instagram, and Google, a billboard, and print collateral. Paid media was targeted inside a 90-mile radius of South Bend. The creative position held the same line in every placement: IDEA Week is the multidisciplinary meeting of tech, design, and entrepreneurship, and your perspective belongs there.
BRAND Refresh & Creative SYSTEM
Logo refinement, tone-of-voice, and a flexible “Your ___ are wanted here” headline system built to stretch across six months of content.
Website & Event Management
A five-page WordPress build with integrated Whova registration and live content updates, designed so the IDEA Week team could keep it current themselves.
Integrated Marketing Campaign
Nine email blasts, 32 social posts, $8,000 paid media across three platforms, billboard, flyers, and print collateral — all sequenced around a single registration goal.
Paid Media Strategy
Geo-targeted campaigns inside a 90-mile radius of South Bend, optimized weekly against real performance data across Facebook, Instagram, and Google Search.
The Result
1,647 Tickets. Every Channel Pointed in the Same Direction.
Tickets Sold
Four days of programming — the festival’s biggest attendance year yet
Click-Through Rate
Far surpassing industry standards across paid channels. Facebook hit 3.86% against a 0.9% benchmark
Unique Website Users
Driven by a six-month integrated campaign from a standing start over, 22,000 session
1,647 tickets sold. 18,874 unique website users. 22,000 sessions. The paid campaign cleared benchmarks on every platform: Facebook at 3.86% against a 0.9% industry average, Instagram at 1.61% against 0.55%, Google Search around 25%. IDEA Week 2025 came to life with a unified presence the team could actually run, and a marketing foundation ready for next year and many after.
If You're Trying to Tell a Regional Story, We Know This Territory.
Whether you're positioning a place, marketing what makes a community worth investing in, or helping decision-makers see what they've been flying past, that's the kind of work we do and where we tend to do it best.