Data integrations to improve campaign performance

Before COVID, the Toronto International Film Festival was an in-person festival complete with red carpets, street activations, celebrity sightings, and more. COVID-19 forced the festival online for two years, making it more difficult to engage with new and existing film lovers in Toronto. For its first year back in 2022, TIFF engaged Rebel & Thorn to help bring the new festival to life through its media plan.

TIFF faced the following challenges in preparing for the 2022 festival:

• Two years of online festivals was perceived to have weakened awareness of the in-person festival, making mass awareness a greater challenge.

• Rebel & Thorn had worked with TIFF on the prior two festivals, but were not engaged early enough in the process to make actionable recommendations on integrating sources of data to optimize the campaign in-flight.

• Teams at TIFF were siloed and there had been turnover in the marketing team since the last in-person festival, so connecting the dots between systems was difficult.

The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival exceeded expectations in terms of ticket sales and attendance, a great result for the first year back in-person. Traditionally under-sold films like foreign films and documentaries also had better attendance rates than prior years.

Close communication between R&T and TIFF allowed us to identify a problem with conversion tracking and optimization once ticket packages switched over to single ticket sales. We also monitored tickets sales daily and added in new creatives to promote under-sold films.

Across the entire campaign, the campaign drove a 3x ROAS. This was the first time that a TIFF Festival campaign could demonstrate positive ROAS, creating a strong benchmark for future campaigns to build on.