How did we grow a literary festival in Dallas from 400 attendees to over 2000 in one year? By making fun of small talk. Oh, and we did it with $0.
Step one: Get people excited to talk about books by getting them to talk to books. Introducing TalkBIG, a first of it's kind chatbot trained on hundreds of public domain classic novels, designed to talk to you using only quotes from books. This link will surely die some day, but if it's live try it for yourself here (you'll have to scroll down the page a little).
We also turned the chat bot into an instagram bot and asked users to talk to it in the comments. People went crazy.
Step two: posters. Physical and digital. Life is too big for small talk.
Step three: announce the line up. Carousels on social.
Step four: go to the streets and prove that small talk is unnecessary. Sort of.
Step 5: profit. But actually this was a wild success by the numbers:
7x more engagement than previous year, 10x more page views, 5.5x more attendance.
No budget, just a lot of help and favors.
ACD/CW: Me; CD/AD: Andres De La Casa Huertas; AI Bot Magic: Christen Jacquottet, Rolf Ruiz; Director: Lan Freedman