Scottish Ballet
Scottish Ballet
- Media
By early 2022, the Scottish events sector was emerging from multiple lockdowns, cancelled performances and empty venues — but the path to recovery was far from certain.
Capacity restrictions, a cost-of-living crisis and shifting audience behaviour left major questions hanging over live performance.
For Scottish Ballet, the challenge was stark: reignite demand, rebuild visibility and return ticket revenue to pre-pandemic levels — all with the same media budget and fewer opportunities to make noise.
After several cautious post-pandemic campaigns, Scottish Ballet needed fresh thinking and a re-energised media strategy.
With productions returning after long gaps, awareness had dropped and booking behaviour had changed, with audiences purchasing much later than historically.
The objective was ambitious: deliver media campaigns across the 2022 season that would restore commercial performance.
And, while rebuilding brand presence, driving more reach, more impact and better value from every pound spent. We delivered a full-funnel media strategy built for a new reality.
Recognising shorter booking windows, we focused activity around key moments of intent, while ensuring brand and conversion worked together within the same channels and creative. Each production became a connected campaign, compounding recognition and increasing the likelihood of repeat bookings across the season.
Rather than spreading budget too thin, we prioritised fewer, higher-impact channels to maximise cultural imprinting. High-footfall OOH built emotional connection and brand salience, while rich digital video and programmatic formats nurtured demand. Highly optimised paid social and search activity secured bookings at moments of peak intent.
An agile, test-and-learn approach allowed creative and media to evolve together in flight, continuously improving performance and eliminating guesswork.
The result
The result was a genuine post-pandemic recovery story — restoring confidence, rebuilding audiences and delivering record-breaking commercial results.367%
increase in unique users reached
42%
uplift in click-through rate
278%
increase in conversion goals
38%
increase in Google Grants impressions
7yr
High in Autumn tour income
£2M+
Christmas income, Second-highest ever
