Choose Skiddle: The planning behind our 2022 New Year’s Eve campaign

‘Choose Skiddle’ is our biggest New Year’s Eve campaign to date. The festive period is a crucial time for the business, and New Year’s Eve is a buzzword on the lips of all departments, from Customer Service to Account Support and beyond. With it being the first time in a while that the festive period would resemble something similar to the pre-pandemic era, we wanted to deliver a knockout campaign. 

This meant casting an analytical eye over our target audience, figuring out where they’d likely consume the ads we serve and the type of physical media they like to read. We’ll cover this in detail later, but a larger campaign requires a more granular analysis. In this article, we’ll dive into the moving parts of ‘Choose Skiddle’ to give an insight into our process.

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The idea

In 1996, Irvine Welsh’s novel ‘Trainspotting’ became a cult film. Directed by Danny Boyle, the film depicted the lives of four friends — Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie — and their way of life in Edinburgh, Scotland. 

Twenty-six years ago, the state of the United Kingdom wasn’t all too dissimilar to today. In many parts of the U.K, life is lived against the backdrop of a crumbling welfare state, a fast-rising climate and a news cycle that throws curveballs every day. 

However, towards the end of the film, the main character Renton delivers a monologue that manifests a brighter future for himself. Away from his woes and troubles, he promises to ‘Choose Life’. It’s since become an iconic scene, and it’s this quote that’s the jump of point for our Choose Skiddle campaign. 

Our New Year’s Campaign is made up of an open letter, ads across various channels, a video shot by our creative team and a range of content across multiple channels. Read about the process below. 

The open letter

‘Choose Skiddle’ launched on the 25th of November. Arriving first was our open letter, where we set the campaign’s tone of voice and detailed the overarching themes of the operation. The letter presents the cultural shifts experienced by the population in a year that many in power promised would be a return to normalcy. 

We looked at the social and economic climate of 1996 — when the film was released — and found that the present and past have many similarities. But it’s not all doom and gloom. As this is our biggest New Year’s Campaign to date, we wanted to ensure that the runway to 2023 is a positive one, encouraging our customers to make everlasting memories, visit the best live events and most importantly: Choose Skiddle. 

Inclusivity, friends and transformative memories are the subject matter, while our take on Renton’s now-famous quote rounded out the open letter. 

The ads

We’re expecting a combined total of one hundred million people to see our ads for the ‘Choose Skiddle’ campaign. The ads will feature in publications like Crack Magazine and The Skinny, as well as The Metro’s New Year’s Eve feature in London and the South East. 

In addition, we’ll be beaming our ads onto the London Underground, where people who travel to and from the heart of the city will see billboards and advertisements encouraging them to Choose Skiddle this New Year’s Eve.

 

As mentioned earlier, this is our biggest NYE campaign to date, so it required the team to cast an analytical eye over our audience. We asked ourselves about the type of publications our audience like to read, and as Crack and The Skinny are contemporary music and culture magazines, this felt like the perfect place to target regular customers and new people who may not have engaged with our brand before. 

Up to five million people travel every day on The London Underground, so ad space in the area is a hot commodity. It’s no secret that people in the capital like to party, so a memorable New Year’s period will be on their minds. We felt that a lot of people, no matter their age, would see our ads and be driven to buy tickets to an event through Skiddle. 

The video

Video plays a huge role here at Skiddle. The team are always hard at work covering exciting events and people, aiming to deliver insightful and entertaining content to our audience. A Skiddle New Year’s Eve campaign wouldn’t be complete without a promotional video. 

Several members of the team hit the city across two days, filming in record stores, vintage shops, food spots and drag brunches, with the shoot eventually culminating at The Warehouse Project in Manchester. 

Speaking about the video, our Digital Content Manager and the man behind the camera, Liam Eshghi, said: “The idea behind the Choose Skiddle film is to tap into the current zeitgeist of the times we are living in. We wanted our audience to think about the choices they have made this year, the choices that have been made around them and how we can all move forward into a better 2023.

The Choose Skiddle campaign pulls together both the current social affairs while communicating the message that with all the choices they are to make, Skiddle offers a huge choice to different people, from different walks of life.”

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B2C, B2B blogs & the NYE Promoter Guide

Both the B2C and B2B content teams contributed to Skiddle’s New Year’s Eve campaign. Our customer blog featured a range of ‘Inspire Me’ pages, our dedicated series of landing pages that direct customers to the best events across different areas of the U.K. 

Included in the ‘Choose…’ landing pages were brunches, raves and gigs, with separate ‘Choose…’ pages for events in cities across the country. This ties in with our aim to deliver the best choices to our customers, ensuring that when they come to Skiddle, there is a range of great nights to get involved in.

Over on the B2B blog, the team published a range of content focused on New Year’s Eve. From guides on hosting the best New Year’s events to tips on making festive events stand out, we used the expertise of the team to deliver data-backed articles and blog posts with actionable tips for the big day. 

Our B2B team collaborated with our graphic designer to put together the New Year’s Eve promoter guide. The guide featured actionable ways to promote NYE events, including pointers on ticket types, marketing and discounts, a three thousand word document aimed at new and existing promoters to Skiddle. 

The guide can be found on LinkedIn alongside some top-notch ad copy from our Paid Media specialist. Research was at the heart of this process again, with our BDM’s looking at the promoters they connected with and the types of skills they had listed on their LinkedIn page. This ensures that our Promoter Guide will reach the promoters who could benefit the most from the guide. 

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Social media and Email content

The social media team at Skiddle supported the ‘Choose…’ campaign by running specific New Year’s content alongside our regular posts. Our Social Media Executive, Olivia Murphy, said: We’ve run polls on our Instagram story, asking people to ‘Choose…’ what’s most important to them on a variety of relevant topics such as NYE night out, Christmas dinner and more. 

This was to drive engagement. To promote NYE events, we categorised our most popular events by genre and created a variety of promotional TikTok posts targeted towards those who would “Choose…” that genre for NYE.”

Earlier in the piece, we mentioned that analysing the wants and needs of our customers was crucial when devising the ‘Choose…’ campaign. With our Instagram polls, this analytical approach was also in our minds. We wanted to gauge what our customers thought, giving us a clearer idea of future content and how we can deliver the things our audience would like to see. 

Our weekly Skiddle Update, aimed at the promoters who have accounts on the website, featured links to the content published on the B2B blog and shared information on remittance times. 

Regional customer emails across areas such as Scotland, South East and South West England, Northern England, London and the Midlands gave customers the lowdown on events in their area, another way that Skiddle delivered valuable content to our audience. 

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Got a question you need an answer to? Give us a call on 03333010301 or ask us a question over on the Skiddle Promoter Twitter account by clicking or tapping on the button below. Alternatively, you can also find a list of our most frequently asked questions over at https://help.promotioncentre.co.uk/