Innovation, engagement and audience development

Festivals Edinburgh came from wondering how [the Edinburgh Festivals] could work collaboratively. The collaborative work tends to happen in four areas, one of which is the marketing area and we have working groups between all the festivals to help us develop that programme of work. The concept is that we, as collaborators, add value to the existing work of individual festivals. I'm going to speak today about the Festivals Edinburgh Innovation Lab, a project we undertook.

The idea behind the Lab was – if each festival is doing its own marketing operation, how can we add value to that operation? We decided we would create a laboratory for experimentation in marketing. The experimentation was built on the idea voiced inSamuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ because the festivals felt comfortable with creating an arena that was separate to their own businesses where they could try things and potentially fail without risking their own business.