Creating splendid digital experiences for Australia’s largest music festival

Bolster has played a key role in the digital advertising for Splendour in the Grass over the past seven years.

As part of the festival’s overarching marketing efforts, Bolster’s digital advertising has helped sell out the 35k to 50k capacity festival each year.

We’ve helped Splendour maintain its consistent sold-out status by:

• Ensuring every announce is a ‘moment’ in Aussie culture, reaching millions of Australians with every announce;
• Futureproofing the festival via introducing the event to newer generations through appropriate content, placements and targeting;
• Helping the festival stay relevant and finding new unduplicated audiences by launching Splendour’s digital ads across platforms such as Spotify, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch and AdRoll; and
• Leveraging cultural equity from all parties such as performing artists, sister events and promoters.

While the 2020 event sadly didn’t go ahead due to COVID-19, our 2020 campaign ticked off some impressive goals:

In 2019, Bolster’s digital partnership with Splendour went one step further.

We worked with Secret Sounds to design and develop the festival’s new website. The aim of the project was to bring the artwork of Lucy Dyson to life, creating a unique digital experience for users.

A central aim of the project was to refine the design ethos for the Splendour brand and to improve the user journey.

To improve the usability of the site, we redesigned the navigation and developed a horizontal mega-menu. This simplified the user’s browsing experience by grouping the large amount of content and information pages within sections. We worked on improving the integration and flow of the subscribe modals and functionality to drive more customers to sign up to Secret Sound’s database to keep them up to date with relevant festival updates.

To cater to Splendour’s massive audience we created a custom set up, including a stable hosting environment, a carefully selected web framework, and a caching setup.

It all came together to offer the client security, stability and flexibility. This meant that huge traffic spikes on announce day – a concern in the past – was not an issue for this new robust site.

We also simplified the homepage’s ticketing module to hide extraneous details behind a click. It  saved on page real-estate and encouraged users to purchase tickets without directing them to the ticketing page.

By simplifying festival website design and cutting through the noise, Bolster created a cohesive, easy-to-follow experience that aimed to engage and convert Splendour’s audience.

The end result was a highly engaging, aesthetically pleasing, and uniquely Splendour online experience.

Splendour event photography by Aimee Catt, Charlie Hardy, Bianca Holderness, Claudia Ciapocha & Katy Pendergast