For its historic 25th festival in 2014, the Colorado Brewers’ Festival’s producers wanted help to achieve some big goals:
- Regain lost relevance and appeal with beer drinkers and brewers in Colorado.
- Reposition the festival from an old and semi-stagnant local event to a pioneering, iconic, innovative fest that played a jumbo role in the rise of CO and US craft beer.
- Provide creative new ideas and features for the festival to quickly increase its consumer, brewery and media appeal.
- Dramatically expand the festival’s media coverage beyond Fort Collins to keenly targeted media outlets throughout CO and US.
- Boost attendance and income figures and stop the fest’s declining trend in those numbers.
Well, they came to the right place. We delivered a quick dose of beery cred and relevance, and crafted a new backstory that highlighted the fest’s trailblazing role in craft beer. We created a nine pack of new features that stretched from a more telling, image-lifting acronym (COBF) to a pre-fest brunch & march, high-profile new partners, rotating taps each day and the biggest and most ambitious beer list in the COBF’s history.
We also landed an unprecedented amount of great press for the festival. The list of about 40 major and first-time scores that included the New York Times, top beer publications and web sites, and numerous Denver/Boulder/Fort Collins print , radio and TV media outlets.
The COBF’s numbers? Attendance increased 100% over the previous year with 9000 more attendees and an estimated income jump of over $225,000.
