Case study · Sport & leisure

House of Mirrors: bringing a fairground sensation to Adelaide.

This mirror maze of optical illusions needed a strong marketing campaign not only to publicise the attraction itself, but draw visitors to the entire festival. We launched a social media marketing campaign to spread the word.

Sector: Sport & leisure
Service: Social media advertising
Channels: Facebook · Instagram

Digital marketingCampaign delivery

People walking through a mirrored event installation.

The challenge

What needed to change.

House of Mirrors is a global fairground sensation, a mirror maze of optical illusions that has drawn crowds around the world. In 2019 it was set to appear at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and the organisers needed people in Adelaide to know it was coming, to understand what it was and to buy tickets in time.

The campaign had a double job. It had to publicise the attraction itself, and it had to draw visitors to the entire festival, because House of Mirrors was expected to be one of the reasons people came to the Fringe at all.

A festival season is short and crowded with things to see, so awareness had to be built quickly and turned into ticket sales just as fast. The attraction’s appeal is almost entirely visual, which made the choice of channel an easy one but raised the bar for the creative.

The brief was a social media marketing campaign that would spread the word across Adelaide, reach the audiences most likely to buy and make every part of the spend return in tickets.

Approach

How the work took shape.

Social media was the ideal platform to build both awareness and engagement for House of Mirrors. The attraction is unusual, it photographs and films well, and it invites people to share, so social gave us the reach to publicise the whole festival and the immediacy to sell tickets while the campaign was running.

We planned the campaign around Facebook ads and Instagram posts and Stories, choosing those formats because they are visual first and because they let us reach niche audiences precisely rather than broadcasting to the whole city.

Ad targeting was where the campaign was won. Rather than advertise to everyone in Adelaide, we built niche audiences of the people most likely to come to the Fringe and most likely to be drawn to something strange and beautiful, and reached them through Facebook ads and Instagram posts and Stories.

These visual mediums were ideal for showcasing the distorted allure of House of Mirrors. The imagery did the persuading, so the ads could stay simple: show the maze, tell people where and when, and make it easy to buy. That combination of tight targeting and striking creative is what kept the cost of every ticket sale low and the return high.

House of Mirrors adelaide fringe award winner 2019 house of mirrors ads.

The shift

An attraction built on visual distortion only needed the right people to see it once.

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The work

The work, up close.

The campaign led to thousands of ticket sales and generated significant media exposure, with Eventalaide stating that House of Mirrors is a must do at the Fringe. House of Mirrors became one of the most highly acclaimed attractions of the festival and kept its status as a global phenomenon, and the publicity carried across to the Adelaide Fringe Festival as a whole.