• 12,000 attendees, 50% from out of region
• 80.6% LGA occupancy, up 6% year-on-year
• +6% tasting-package spend year-on-year
• $10k total budget, 2.07M impressions

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Mid-Western Regional Council set us maintain-or-increase targets across attendance, engagement, visitor spend and visitation for Flavours of Mudgee - on a tight $10k total budget. The brief's floor was 6,000 out-of-region attendees, in a market where every dollar had to earn its place.

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Channel budget would follow evidence, not habit - test then concentrate, not spray. Audiences would be split in-region versus out-of-region with warm and cold funnels inside each, and the tracking gap with the ticketing provider was treated as a problem to solve rather than a reason to fly blind. The result: every stated objective hit, on one of the leanest budgets in our portfolio.

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We tested Meta, Google and TikTok against each other, then concentrated 88% of spend on Meta once it proved the strongest channel, returning a 3.42% CTR at a $0.14 average CPC. When the ticketing provider didn't support server-side tracking natively, we engineered a workaround so the data held up under scrutiny.

Audiences were split in-region versus out-of-region, each with its own warm and cold funnel, and every decision was made against what the festival was actually funded to deliver - visitation, occupancy and local spend - not ad-account conversions alone.

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Flavours of Mudgee delivered on every stated objective: 12,000 attendees with half travelling from outside the region - double the brief's 6,000 floor - LGA accommodation occupancy up 6% to 80.6%, and a 6% lift in tasting-package spend. All of this came off a $10k total budget that generated 2.07 million impressions.

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