A3C’s successful use of traditional marketing

The A3C Music Festival and Conference, Hip Hop’s internationally revered event, took place on October 5-9, 2016 in Atlanta. As many other festivals do, they used a modern marketing plan that included a variety of mediums and outlets. They collaborated with local radio stations for ticket giveaways, Uber, and music industry-related companies by allowing them to set up shop at A3C’s conference at the Loudermilk Center and its festival grounds. They created event pages across all the major social media platforms and launched an app for artists and music fans to utilize throughout the week for up-to-date scheduling, maps, and event information. However, what really made A3C stand out was its local community marketing strategy.

Atlanta has always been a colorful canvas for marketing, advertising, and promotion. Similar to Times Square in New York, one can find themselves in the middle of an oversaturated and continuous ad campaign stretching across many Atlanta neighborhoods and districts. However, rather than bright lights and large digital billboards, Atlanta boasts an impressive business-to-consumer marketing platform that involves a heavy amount of street team promotions and guerrilla marketing that attracts people at eye level or lower. On almost every street corner, wall, window and sidewalk, flyers, stickers and creative graffiti attracts attention from people throughout the city. Atlanta is bustling with millennials. So when we see a piece of artwork painted on a brick wall or notice a series of flyers guiding the walk between Georgia State and midtown, our curiosity is piqued by this eye level marketing.

The following two marketing platforms really stood out during the A3C Music Festival and Conference:

Traditional Street Teams:
When A3C began in the first week of October, it was not surprising to find street teams for artists attending the conference and festival out in full force. A3C took place at the Loudermilk Center and at various venues and festival grounds within the eclectic Old Fourth Ward district. When artists weren’t attending conference panels, they took their networking skills and marketing teams to the streets around and beyond these districts to pass out CDs, business cards, stickers, and flyers for their A3C performances in an attempt to build their fan bases out of the other conference attendees and panelists who were all industry (or aspiring industry) professionals. When I took a break from working the festival to walk around Midtown and Georgia State University, I was approached at least four different times from aspiring artists who wanted to give me a CD, sticker, or business card. And, you have to admire their hustle. While I was walking from the conference center to the music festival grounds one afternoon, I stumbled about three different street teams for three different artists. They had a ton of tape and staple guns, and were armed with hundreds of flyers and stickers just waiting to be plastered to light posts, brick walls, and sidewalks. The closer I got to the festival grounds, the heavier the flyer posts became. And, because these street teams were out in full force, A3C didn’t have to hit the streets with their own street team as hard as other festivals do. The artists performing at showcases and attending panels at A3C did it for them.

Call for Showcases:

A3C is an Atlanta and a Hip Hop staple (aside from Freaknik) that is nationally and internationally known within the Hip Hop community. In fact, most consider A3C the genre’s “family reunion.” As a result, to keep the tradition of having a family reunion alive, A3C allows people to curate their own shows at select venues. Not only was this a way to bring in fans from different underground Hip Hop scenes from across the world, but this also allowed the dozens of artists performing at showcases, as well as the handful of third-party music venues participating at A3C, to promote the festival via their own marketing strategies.

When the industry becomes oversaturated with modern marketing streams, it makes sense to recycle old methods as a means to better attract fans who have become numb to the endless scrolls of messaging on their preferred devices. Sometimes, it just takes a creative flyer placed on the right window in the right neighborhood to effectively gain attention.

Story and images by Claire Contevita.