Big Daddy Weave

Oct. 25, 2015

Meg Short, Fall 2015 Intern

Introduction
Big Daddy Weave, a contemporary Christian band, brought their My Story Tour, featuring
Jason Gray and Citizen Way, to the Civic Center as one of our Town Square Live shows. The
sponsorship with Tom Ahl is what brought them here. As seen on our press release, The
tour is launching in conjunction with the September 18, 2015 release of Beautiful Offerings,
Big Daddy Weave's highly-anticipated seventh studio album, available for pre-order now.
The albums first single, "My Story," sparked the title for the tour and has resonated with
listeners everywhere, breaking into the top 20 on both the Hot Christian Songs and
Christian AC charts.

Marketing Tactics
1) Ticket Trade
YesFm, WBCL (the media sponsor), Childers Media, WTGN, and WTTP were
contacted. We offered tickets for them to give away in exchange for airtime. We also
offered two meet and greet add-ons to YesFm, as well as 3 BDW cds for giveaway, 1 Jason
Gray cd, and 1 Citizen Way cd. The same cds were given to WTGN. WBCL received 10 meet
and greets and 10 tickets. Childers received 20 tickets.

2) Street Team promotion

I went out into the downtown area armed with flyers for local businesses to place in
their windows. Several business owners or their employees recognized me from the two
other poster promotion campaigns I had done prior (for The Beach Boys and The Mersey
Beatles), so I was able to use this relationship building to my advantage. Not as many were
as excited for/had heard of BDW (in comparison to Beach Boys), so this helped me unload
some that may not have otherwise taken them. Many of the restaurants were very willing
to take my materials because they know that means business for them on show night. I did
not go as far around Lima as I did with the other two flyers, because of time constraints,
but I have seen many in windows of downtown businesses, and we actually got rid of all
but a couple of these larger flyers through other means.
3) Local Youth
We reached out to Tyler Sutton, who is in charge of the Lima area Teens for Christ,
and got him to organize and produce a promotional video for us, and paid them $125. The
leaders of the local Fellowship for Christian Athletes were contacted as well to help us put
flyers in their churches and schools.
4) Social Media
I wrote two Facebook posts that were published Oct. 10 and 20th, respectively. The
first was the flyer picture with a simple call to action to bring the family to see BDW and the
ticket info. We boosted the post for $100 spread out over five days. It is currently at 174
likes, 15 comments, and 49 shares. 11,480 people were reached. This is more popular than
the Beach Boys posts, which was surprising. The second was supposed to be a video we
paid Tyler Sutton and Teens for Christ to produce, but we could not get it to upload, so we
used the picture instead. It prompted people to like, tag a friend in the comments, and
share the post to be entered in a drawing to win a pair of tickets, which we announced on
Facebook on Oct. 24. 6,409 people were reached, there were 134 shares, 124 likes, and has
97 comments (Meaning that around 97 were entered in the drawing, because they needed
to do all three to be entered).
We did not do much on Twitter besides retweeting the419 article about the show.
We tweeted a last-minute discount in prices for students (the $28 tickets for $20) to local
FCA groups. I wrote a proposal for creating a VMCCC Instagram account to promote the
show, but unfortunately, that fell through. For future events, we should utilize these
avenues more as a free add-on to our marketing plan.

5) E-Blasts
iTickets did 3 e-mail blasts that reached around 125,000. There was an average oepn
rate of about 20%. For the second blast, there were 125 click-throughs for BDW and 66 for
Dailey and Vincent, who are coming to VMCCC in December. We paid them $850.
6) E-mails from Meg
I sent out three sets of emails, after several days of compiling addresses. The first
was to the local colleges and their campus pastors or FCA leaders. I attached the
promotional video we were sent and encouraged them to show it to students at some
point - at chapel, a prayer meeting, whatever. The intent was to tell them that we cannot
continue to bring good Christian acts to the civic center without their help in filling the
seats, and to thank them for nurturing the local people through their ministry. The next
two emails I sent out were to 62 local churches. Much of the copy was the same, but I
included an announcement they could place in their bulletin if they desired. I did not hear
back from any of these persons, except one who asked if we could provide him with some
free tickets, which we did. I think the success of this measure cannot be determined by
ticket sales, necessarily. In my opinion, a worthwhile way to spend time making sure the
target audience has been exposed to the message multiple times.
7) Mailers
While I was finding emails for the offices of local churches, I took down mailing
addresses as well. We used this list to send small mailers, along with a letter I wrote
encouraging the churches to inform their patrons of the show. For bigger churches that
had emails and we had already sent the information to, we included five cards. For smaller
churches that didnt appear to have a website or email, we included three. The churches
may or may not have already received one of the full size flyers from a Teens for Christ
youth.
8) News
I sent out a press release (Michelle wrote) about the show to local media in late
September, for immediate release on Oct. 1. I was also in contact with the Lima News and
the419 about setting up an interview with the lead singer of BDW, Mike Weaver. Both had
already done an article on the show at this point, so neither took me up on that offer. We
put ads in the Wapakoneta Daily News/Evening Leader for $93.50 each. We spent $360
9) Radio
In addition to the ticket giveaways and free airtime, we did purchase 56 spots for
$200 with YesFm. We spent 12 tickets for trade aND $620 for iHeart Media. 20 Ticket trade

with Childers Media. Mike Weaver (lead singer) was able to call in and do on-air interviews
for the419 and four local radio stations.
10) Television
We spent $2090 in WLIO ads, where they played the Teens for Christ video. Some were on
the morning or evening news, or during Friday night football recaps.

Conclusion
Overall, I think our marketing efforts were a success. The ticket sales were pretty slow right
after the official announcement, but we really drove them in the last few weeks. We
increased from 433 tickets sold on Oct. 15, to a total of 950 on the show date (Oct. 25). We
received many positive comments about the facility and the show from patrons exiting the
building afterwards.