Atlanta Jazz Festival – Media Coverage
Challenge
The Atlanta Jazz Festival, one of the country’s largest free jazz festivals, was heading into its 41st year with a first-in-its-history lineup of all-female headliners. The Festival weekend had also been reduced by one day. The City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs (OCA) wanted to spread the word about the unique lineup and the reduction in Festival days, but needed to do so with a reduced budget.
Solution
c21 used a combination of media relations tactics to gain as much earned media coverage as possible about Atlanta Jazz Festival 2018, including:
- Posting event information to online calendars to promote the Atlanta Jazz Festival and its ancillary 31 Days of Jazz events
- Sending media alerts and pitches to draw media to cover the Festival itself
- Sending multiple press releases over four months’ time to alert the media about the all-female headliner line-up, an International Jazz Day event at the Plaza Theatre, a new social media app sponsoring the Festival called Spoke Hub, event sponsors and more
c21 also assigned credentials to media attending and covering the event. We managed media check-in and were on-site to answer questions or provide help to nearly 40 reporters and photographers.
Results
The 2018 Atlanta Jazz Festival media relations effort earned more than 124 million media impressions across print, TV, radio, online clips and calendar postings. Media impressions more than doubled from the previous 40th anniversary year due to some fantastic national coverage. The Festival was covered on TravelChannel.com, Time.com,TravelAndLeisure.com, InSite Atlanta magazine, Atlanta Now magazine, AJC.com, Atlanta Parent magazine, WSB-TV’s People2People, WABE-FM, WCLK-FM, WJZA-FM, CreativeLoafing.com and more.