Boosted ticket sales through performance marketing ads

The Small Business Project promoted three editions of Kommune’s Spoken Fest – Asia's Largest Spoken Word Festival – achieving an attendance of more than 10,000 at each event.   

The Small Business Project was associated with Kommune – an organisation that showcases the best of performing arts through poets, storytellers, and musicians – long before we actually worked on its flagship event Spoken Fest – Asia's Largest Spoken Word Festival.


Setting the stage

Our first association with Kommune was through Beatmap, promoting their curated house party experiences across Indian cities – starting in December 2017. Because of our success with Beatmap, the Kommune team entrusted us with online marketing for Mehfil, a three-hour long event in celebration of Hindustani and Urdu poetry, music, and storytelling in April 2018.  Following the success of Mehfil, Kommune founder Roshan Abbas tasked us with achieving Amazon bestseller status for his book Speechless, which we went on to bag across several relevant Amazon book categories. We continued to associate with Kommune in various capacities, including marketing several of their smaller events and workshops. 

It was later in 2018 that Amishi Patel, who was festival coordinator for Spoken Fest at that time, got in touch with us for the promotion of Spoken 2019, to be held in January 2020 in Mumbai. Amishi felt that we’d be a good fit for the job given our familiarity and experience with Kommune’s audience and past event data.  We worked closely with the Kommune team, running paid campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google. This included managing some 50 paid ad collaborations with various artists across platforms. Together we achieved a footfall of 10,000 at the event.  It had been an exciting journey, and we were delighted to be asked to work on online promotions for the next two editions of Spoken Fest, to be held in Delhi and Mumbai. 

First up was the Delhi edition in December 2019. Phase one of our ad strategy involved introducing the festival to different audiences, while also testing different creatives and messaging routes. Phase two was conversion-focused, with an artist-first approach. Spoken Delhi also featured multiple workshops, such as Ankur Tewari’s songwriting. We marketed and targeted for each workshop individually to gain traction. The event was a roaring success, seeing attendance of some 15,000 people. The Mumbai 2020 edition was scheduled for January 2020, about a month later. December can be a challenging month for digital campaigns, with increased digital costs and changing user behavior.

However, with our diligent ad monitoring, we were able to optimise the budget for maximum impact. We made the most of our experience with existing audiences, sentiment analysis, and creative messaging to maximise our outreach and conversion for the Mumbai edition. Our hard work paid off when over 15,000 people attended Spoken Fest 2020 in Mumbai.