Maker Faire Rome 2020: the online ad is by Mashfrog
Maker Faire Rome selected Mashfrog to manage the online ad campaign for the 2020 edition, which took place entirely digitally.
We are proud to have been able to put all our know-how at the disposal of Maker Faire Rome – The European Edition, the annual event that celebrates innovation and allows dreamers and talents to meet to learn, discover and create incredible new projects.
For the 2020 edition, Maker Faire Rome selected Mashfrog to handle digital advertising, in order to enhance knowledge of the brand and extend coverage of the event, which was entirely digitised this year.
What is Maker Faire
It saw the light in 2006 in the San Francisco Bay Area as a project of Make: Magazine, now Make: Community. Since then, it has grown into a large worldwide network of events that have been transformed into real platforms for innovation. It is the place where people of all ages come together to show what they are doing, share what they are creating, and validate their prototypes. The first edition was held in 2006 in San Mateo, California. The event immediately met with great success, and over the years expanded first to the entire United States and then to the rest of the world. The edition in Rome is the only Maker Faire outside the USA that can be called 'global' due to the number of exhibitors and to a public with a format calibrated for the European reality that allows exhibitors to share their knowledge with the public, which in turn becomes an integral part of the event together with institutions, major companies, makers, schools, universities and research centres, with great attention to technology transfer and the dissemination of digital culture.
The eighth edition of Maker Faire Rome, held from 10 to 13 December, had to contend with the pandemic and adapted to a totally digital format that was totally free for the public. A real television studio was set up in the spaces of the former Gasometro in Rome, with live feeds to the top national and international players of the world of innovation working or experimenting there. In the studio, two exceptional conductors who, thanks to the support of over 33 television crews, accompanied the public connected via platform and streaming in links with over 90 national realities. Mashfrog developed a dedicated online platform, a digital infrastructure divided into 9 pavilions that represented the different thematic channels dedicated to the main topics. Within the 9 thematic channels (or pavilions) there were over 250 exhibitors who organised 311 virtual stands to present their projects in as many live broadcasts with innovations coming from calls (makers, universities, schools) and private and institutional partners. During the days of the event, there were 27 hours of live television coverage of the Main channel of the platform made available also in streaming, which recorded over 100,000 unique users, more than 600,000 pages of the platform viewed by 73 countries, 2,009 unique people involved in stands (stand presidium) and talks (speakers), 328 webinars attended by 18,544 users and a peak of 105 live simultaneous broadcasts for a total of 2,435 hours (including stands, talks and webinars).
Centrality of the online ad for an all-digital event
We at Mashfrog were awarded the important task of launching and managing all the social and web promotional activity, which was inevitably conditioned and made more complex by the complete digitisation of the event. The ad campaigns had a twofold purpose:
- increase awareness, i.e. consolidate knowledge of the brand and of the 2020 event for people who already knew Maker Faire Rome, informing them that it would be held online on a digital platform;
- acquire new traffic by exploiting the digital potential that makes it possible to extend participation without taking geographical limitations into account
- convert
So it was a demanding challenge, which we faced by fielding our best professionals in the advertising field thanks to the careful work of the Digital Marketing & Optimization team.
To promote the event, we agreed with the customer to activate campaigns both on social networks (Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn) and on the Google search and display network, in order to deliver the greatest possible number of impressions on the segments of set targets and get clicks to the event site.
During the campaign delivery period, the sponsorship team was able to efficiently manage the effects of two very important factors, which were driving changes in campaign performance:
- the proximity to the Christmas holidays, which led to an increase in competitiveness and therefore in the costs for publishing ads;
- Covid-19 , due to which advertising platforms experienced a general slowdown in the approval times for ads.
These variables were addressed by our professionals through correct budget reallocation in the various advertising channels, which made it possible to obtain better performing campaigns in terms of cost (CPC) and visibility (impressions).
"In Mashfrog we found a reliable and prepared partner which helped us find the correct media mix optimisation for promoting the event which can be visited until June at this link https://digital.makerfairerome.eu," said Massimiliano Colella, General Manager of Innova Camera, the special company of the Rome Chamber of Commerce that has been organising the event since 2013.
