Carousel recently launched a brand new open-air live music venue in the heart of Manchester, which forms the central hub to Manchester City Council’s MCR Live 25 city-wide summer festival of music.
The venue is hosted in Piccadilly Gardens - an open green space in the heart of the city that has strong potential but has struggled with reputational challenges due to crime in the area. This meant it was Carousel’s task to help the MCR Live Hub team overcome this stigma and create a positive, welcoming space to celebrate the city’s musical heritage and future talent.
We rose to the challenge through a concerted strategy combining traditional PR, influencer marketing and social media with timely eye-catching stunt moments to capture the attention of local press and tastemakers.
First, we paved the way pre-opening by launching new social media channels for the event space, combining bold, colourful branding, stock lifestyle imagery and behind-the-scenes build timelapses to create a sense of what the venue would offer. This was combined with strategic ad spend to build followers and visibility for the new channels.
Next, we created speculation through flyering the venue hoardings with tear-off sheets to claim a free drink on the grand opening day, capitalising on the venue’s high-footfall location, and invited premier Manchester digital press title The Manc to spread the word through Stories content promoting the posters. We also invited The Manc to share an exclusive first-glimpse of the venue, leveraging their extensive social media reach to rapidly build awareness.
To build on this success, we hosted a press and influencer launch event, treating guests to delicious cocktails, street food, live music and DJs in the sunshine, generating a strong burst of digital coverage that drove a rapid spike in follower growth. On social media, we coordinated collabs with high-reach accounts like Visit Manchester and live-posted to the venue channels throughout the event to capitalise on the new attention.
Immediately following launch, we grabbed the opportunity to tap into city-wide conversation around the Oasis gigs in Heaton Park by offering free drinks to anyone named Noel, Liam or Gallagher. Throughout the run of the gigs, we shared video content and story tags showing fans enjoying singer-songwriters covering Oasis tracks on MCR Live Hub’s outdoor stage to position the venue as the perfect pre-gig drink spot, maximising footfall for the venue and leading to bar takings that doubled the predicted rate.
This approach allowed us to deliver over 462k owned-channel social media video views and a total press and influencer reach of 128.8M over the duration of the launch campaign, attracting over 1.9k new fans and followers for MCR Live Hub.
To build on this success, we hosted a press and influencer launch event, treating guests to delicious cocktails, street food, live music and DJs in the sunshine, generating a strong burst of digital coverage that drove a rapid spike in follower growth. On social media, we coordinated collabs with high-reach accounts like Visit Manchester and live-posted to the venue channels throughout the event to capitalise on the new attention.
Immediately following launch, we grabbed the opportunity to tap into city-wide conversation around the Oasis gigs in Heaton Park by offering free drinks to anyone named Noel, Liam or Gallagher. Throughout the run of the gigs, we shared video content and story tags showing fans enjoying singer-songwriters covering Oasis tracks on MCR Live Hub’s outdoor stage to position the venue as the perfect pre-gig drink spot, maximising footfall for the venue and leading to bar takings that doubled the predicted rate.
This approach allowed us to deliver over 462k owned-channel social media video views and a total press and influencer reach of 128.8M over the duration of the launch campaign, attracting over 1.9k new fans and followers for MCR Live Hub.
