The team worked hard to leverage top-tier media coverage, strengthen nationwide visibility and help generate excitement and ticket sales for one of the UK’s most anticipated summer events.
Victorious Festival welcomed thousands of festival goers to the Southsea seafront for a vibrant weekend of music, culture and family entertainment. Led this year by global rock icons Kings of Leon, rock heavyweights Queens of the Stone Age and indie legends Vampire Weekend - this year’s headliners were supported by an eclectic mix of artists, comedians and family-friendly programming.
The Brief
The objective was to position Victorious Festival as the UK’s biggest and best metropolitan festival while engaging existing audiences and tapping into fresh consumer bases via high-impact coverage pre and post-event. We utilised our in-depth knowledge of the media landscape and trusted, long-standing press relationships to deliver an outstanding festival PR campaign.
Our Response
With years of experience delivering music festival and events PR campaigns, the team worked with the ever-changing media landscape to cut through the noise of a highly competitive summer festival season. By activating a bespoke PR strategy, combining proactive and reactive media engagement, Carousel secured a consistent stream of hyper-targeted and high-value coverage.
We planned and launched strategic sell-ins to key media, ensuring festival news and announcements landed with maximum impact across Victorious’ core demographics while also reaching new and desirable audiences. Pitching included but was not limited to: festival guide features, news stories, event previews and artist and festival team interviews.
We also worked with a team of hand-selected content creators to ensure the social influencer space was covered both pre and post event with previews, competitions and on-site digital content. The team also secured and managed a contra media partnership with top tier music title Rolling Stone UK, driving ticket sales via print, social and digital advertising and editorial.
Carousel returned to the festival to manage its on-site press office, securing the attendance of 170 press and influencers. Leveraging multi-platform and widespread coverage via social media, broadcasting, editorial reviews and interviews. Highlight press attendees included Daily Telegraph, The i, BBC News, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Official Charts UK, Rolling Stone UK, CLASH, ITV Meridian, Daily Star and BBC Radio 2.
Client Quote
Kelly Jones, Head of Design, Marketing and PR at Victorious Events:
“Carousel PR have once again been an absolute pleasure to work with. For our 2025 campaign, they helped deliver some of our biggest and most impactful coverage to date, including a feature on Billboard - a huge milestone that generated worldwide exposure for the festival.
Alongside securing standout national coverage, Lauren, James and the wider team have worked tirelessly to build and maintain strong relationships with local press and TV news outlets, something that is incredibly important to us.
On site, the team run the festival press office with outstanding professionalism, adapting to the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of a live event. We absolutely love working with Carousel PR and truly consider them an extension of our core team.”
The Results
Carousel secured 1,045 pieces of coverage across the campaign with a combined reach of over 3.1 billion. The widespread coverage spanned national, music, broadcast, regional, lifestyle and influencer media; communicating key messaging through standalone news stories, announcement features, festival guides, previews, listings, interviews, broadcasting and social media content.
Pre-event highlights included national and cultural hits across outlets including Billboard, NME, CLASH, Rolling Stone UK, The Times, Metro, BBC News, Mail Online, The i and The Independent.
On-site coverage delivered impactful broadcast moments via the likes of ITV Meridian and BBC Radio Solent, plus the festival’s most media interviews to date, with Carousel securing 41 that took place with both artists and event organisers.
