We took a four pronged approach
1) Shook up the media strategy
2) Made social channels entertaining
3) Build video assets that personified the festival
4) Made the open day the main character

Creative
Our creative team sought to portray the incredible energy and atmosphere of the festival through video assets, as well as a handful of still assets to allow for plenty of testing and to perform at a conversions level.

Media
We mapped out a media strategy that included ads running across Google, Meta and LinkedIn so we could meet prospective corporate and individual paddlers on multiple touchpoints.

We also ran a multi-phased campaign with multiple objectives, starting with top of funnel objectives like video thruplays and traffic, and moving through to native leads forms and conversions.
Messaging for our ads leaned into the element of ‘FOMO’ and ensured that people who didn’t sign up knew what they’d be missing out on. We brought to life the personality of the festival gritty, fun with attitude.

On LinkedIn our creative and messaging was tailored towards bringing in corporate team sign ups.

A key part of our strategy that differed from previous years was leveraging the festival’s Open Day - A day of free dragon boating that allows experienced paddlers to warm up for the season and new paddlers to give it a go before committing. We approached this day as a lead-gathering exercise and recorded a record-breaking Open Day 2024 with 600 people flocking to the Wellington Waterfront to give it a go, and 2025 a further 800 Wellingtonians giving it a go.

Not only did this approach bring widespread awareness of the event, it recruited 100 paddlers that signed up to be part of a festival team and gave us a wide pool of people to retarget for registrations in the aftermath.

In 2025, we introduced the idea of waitlist as soon as the festival ended to capture those that has an awesome experience, generating 70 leads from this intiative.