Let’s Get Wild

Generating new audiences and increased attendance for the Louisville Zoo

BACKGROUND

---

In a partnership with Tianyu Art & Culture, the Louisville Zoo presented Wild Lights, a family-friendly Chinese silk lantern event. As guests stroll through the Zoo’s walkways after hours, they experience more than 2,000 hand-crafted, silk-covered lanterns with interactive moving displays.

With the event in its fifth year, attendance had leveled off in recent years and the Zoo needed a new marketing and PR strategy to rejuvenate excitement and increase ticket sales and attendance.

STRATEGIC APPROACH

We designed our campaign to reach new audiences and re-introduce Wild Lights in new channels to existing Zoo audiences. Targeting included our core audiences: parents with children under the age of 14, individuals between the ages of 24-54, and people interested in “edu-tainment.” We expanded and introduced new audiences, including people interested in live events and arts and culture.

We utilized a multichannel awareness campaign that leaned heavier into digital tactics than prior campaigns. Channels included:

• ConnectedTV
• Youtube 
• Display
• Meta
• TikTok
• SEM
• Out-of-Home
• Plus, a new influencer strategy 

Creative executions teased the “glow” of the event with an electric color palette and bold designs, further brought to life with innovative LED outdoor boards.

RESULTS

The combination of compelling creative, new target audiences, a digital forward media strategy, and revamped influencer marketing, the 2024 Wild Lights campaign increased ticket sales by 18% and event revenue by 8% over the previous year. 

Our creative was effective in grabbing the attention of the campaign’s target audience and generating traffic to the Zoo website, far exceeding benchmarks in viewability. For instance, Wild Lights video click throughs on Youtube generated a 42% completion rate, compared to the roughly 10% benchmark. Similarly, social media ads generated a .33% click-through (.07% benchmark) and digital display garnered .17% (.05% benchmark).

Influencer partnerships expanded beyond the Zoo’s general “family” audience to a more social, nightlife style audience and resulted in a total reach of 641,748 people on Instagram. Notably, the influencer campaign netted 12,493 instances where people shared the content with others, and 635 comments, many of which included people tagging friends and family, suggesting they check out Wild Lights.