After a successful rebrand and publicity campaign last year, it was music to our ears when we were asked to continue working on the award-winning music festival, Head For The Hills in Ramsbottom for a second year running.
With beautiful panoramic views of rolling Lancashire hills, amazing food, arts and world-class headliners as your soundtrack to the weekend, Head For The Hills offers something for everyone and we were extremely excited to get started on our 2018 press campaign.
To kick the campaign off in style, we announced the Head For The Hills 2018 lineup in March with a launch party and gig at Blueprint Studios in Manchester.
Nestled away in one of Blueprint’s most famous studio spaces, the launch night was buzzing with press, musicians and industry professionals, coming together to hear who would be gracing the stages at this year’s festival.
We surprised the audience with a preview of this year’s lineup with live performances from much-loved Liverpool pop trio Stealing Sheep, upcoming post-punk three piece LIINES and singer songwriter Mano McLaughlin.
In between acts, artistic director of Head For The Hills, David Agnew delivered the final line up news with which included The Bluetones, The Boomtown Rats, Emily Cappel, The Selecter and The Lovely Eggs all on the bill.
The official line up was revealed to all via our good friends at BBC Radio 6 Music, which went down a storm alongside an interview with Stealing Sheep about their planned Suffragette Tribute, developed with the brilliant Brighter Sound for a festival tour culminating with Head for the Hills.
The 2018 lineup was also incredibly well received by regional press, including BBC Radio Manchester, Manchester Evening News, Manchester’s Finest, Bury Times, NowThen magazine, Bolton News and Rossendale Free Press.
As the festival approached, we looked to the nationals, family and arts press achieving a wide spread of pre-event coverage in the i newspaper, Big Issue North, Raring2Go, Families Online, Family Go Live, Entertain The Kids and Creative Tourist, and it was clear that the festival was one of the ‘top things to do with the kids’ in September and everyone want to hear about it.
In the final lead up to the festival, we had the pleasure of announcing The Slow Readers Club as the Friday night headliner, which piqued the interest of the broadcast media, from an exclusive interview with The Slow Readers Club on the opening episode of BBC Radio Manchester’s brand new weekend programme, ‘The Dead Good Show,’ to our festival management team being interviewed on BBC Introducing Manchester and ‘The Drift’ on BBC Radio Lancashire.
We also secured a number of great previews including Manchester’s Finest, Bury Times, Louder Than War, NowThen , Bolton News and the Lancashire Telegraph, however our ultimate highlight was reaching the front page of Manchester Evening News’ what’s on magazine City Life accompanied by a full page preview. This was a first for Head For The Hills and a great testament to how the festival has grown over the past eight years.
Over the weekend, thousands of festival-goers dressed for showers and hoped for sunshine, heading down to Ramsbottom Cricket Club for the festival season’s final fling which didn’t disappoint. It was a busy but smooth-running few days for Sundae as we managed all of the bands’ press interviews, which took place in our very own buntified press tent! We even managed to catch some bands ourselves and sample some of the delicious food on offer from Tampopo.
Since the weekend, the festival has received some superb coverage across the board including a 4 star review from the Manchester Evening News and many more from Bury Times, Family Life Bury, Bolton News, Louder Than War and Raring2Go Bury – and there is still more to come!
With nearly 100 pieces of coverage in our rain coat pockets and having reached over 120 million people with our campaign, it has been a glorious six months working on one of the most fruitful, family friendly and eclectic festivals that Manchester has to offer….here’s to many more! 🙂
MC x
(Images: Chris Payne / Andrew Allcock)
Our ultimate highlight was securing the front page of Manchester Evening News’ City Life accompanied by a full page preview.
