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What Authors Can Learn from Summerfest Marketing
Five quick lessons from those promoting their wares to 650,000 music fans in nine days
Summerfest is a 55-year-old Milwaukee tradition — one of the world’s largest annual music festivals — that offers nine long days of people watching, food, shopping, and stage after stage of musical act after musical act on sprawling, scenic grounds along the Lake Michigan coastline. And every summer it offers brands multiple opportunities to reach the relaxed, open minds of hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers.
Here are some easy, transferable marketing lessons for authors that I picked up last weekend at Summerfest.
1. Employ humor and surprise.
Nonstop to Atlanta! Nonstop to Baltimore! Nonstop to Boston! Ha. Ha. I chuckled at the signs on the overhead Skyglider cars and instantly imagined riders hopping aboard and cars taking them to Atlanta. Baltimore. Boston. Where else? I waited to see which cities the cars went to. Only after I enjoyed the humor did I understand that it was an ad for Milwaukee’s Mitchell Airport (easiest airport to get in and out of, BTW).
“Don’t Click This Button” read a very clickable button in the middle of a sub-page of an author site I was at several months ago. Hah! It…
