FreezeFest is one of RIT's 3 major festivals, the longest and coldest of them all.
Facing the lowest turnout among the 3 festivals, FreezeFest holds its own unique challenges when marketing to the student body.
FreezeFest 2024 Creative Team: Tom Catalano, Tia Wilson, Alyssa Ly, Yichen Wu, Remy Wikins, Mariam Elashri, Troy Ramiscal, Alexis Mildren, Figo Wang
Motion Graphics: Troy Ramiscal
Illustrations: Creative Team
BACKGROUND
FreezeFest is one of the Rochester Institute of Technology's major festivals, and the College Activities Board plays a key role in planning events for the festival, as well as designing the FreezeFest brand.
My role was to develop the creative marketing strategy for the events of the festival.
CHALLENGE
RIT's festivals are usually only 3 days, but FreezeFest is over 2 weeks long, creating brand/experience fatigue. Additionally, the winter weather makes it harder to get students out of the dorm. How can we incentivize students to attend events to against these factors?
ROLE
Lead Content Manager for RIT CAB
DELIVERABLE + IMPACT
The FreezeFest Quests is an award-winning social media campaign that incentivizes students to go to FreezeFest events through immersive social media story telling.
This campaign increased event attendance by 8% from the previous year, and social media engagement by 20%.
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Getting students to enter the world of FreezeFest.
I pitched a main concept of a gamified scavenger hunt that rewards students for going to different events, and planned to develop brand awareness by creating the world of "The FreezeFest Quests" to emphasize the gamification of the marketing strategy.
I also wanted to incorporate behind the scenes footage of what goes into planning FreezeFest to introduce the CAB brand to those unfamiliar with our organization, primarily first-year students.
The pitch & execution.
I pitched my ideas to the creative team at CAB coworkers feedback and worked through different deliverables that would be needed to fully realize the campaign.
The main components included:
1. The FreezeFest Quests Website
2. A set of motion graphics and animations
3. A digital scavenger hunt
Working through a roadblock.
After launching the first set of FreezeFest Quests, unfortunately, we were notified that we had to cancel the digital scavenger hunt because of an oversight in the legal process of gift-giving students. So, I had to quickly pivot and think of new ways to create this immersive "FreezeFest Quests" world when all these different assets were already in developing.
The FreezeFest Quests: Choose Your Character!
In order to continue to develop the world of The FreezeFest Quests, I created a social media series of "Choose Your Character" Vlogs where some of our staff showed behind the scenes of planning the festival, I made more than originally planned for, elongating the campaign to supplement the missing scavenger hunt.
Collaborating with the Creative Team.
I worked with the entire creative team at CAB to brainstorm and ideate different types of content to use on social media to promote our events.
Links to content I made:
Takeaways
The marketing campaign was incredibly effective- there was an increase of 8% in attendance of events compared to the previous year. It was apparent that the prizes and giveaway items were most effective in creating hype around the events.
The website was useful for our collaborating partners, as well as for our event organizers, to help keep track of schedules. This was surprising to me as the primary audience was meant to be for students, but it did not seem that most people used them to find out what events were happening on campus.
This event won 2 awards, submitted on behalf of RIT CAB.
1st Place Digital Campaign • Association of College Unions International: Steal this Idea
Winning Campaign • National Association of College Activities: Virtual Marketing Competition
Winning Campaign • National Association of College Activities: Virtual Marketing Competition