A Beer Garden BFF

Team Communities looks to (1) surprise, (2) delight and (3) build loyal audiences for the Financial Times. Raising awareness of our weekend content is a large part of achieving this goal.

As part of this mission, Team Communities partnered with Narrative.ly — as a Beer Garden BFF (BFF stands for Best Friend Forever) — to support evening programming at the New York visual exhibition Photoville and the Narrative.ly After Dark series.

Over 80,000 people attended Photoville, which ran from Sept. 18–26 and featured 50 retrofitted shipping container photo installations. Narrative.ly curated six separate evenings, which included both live storytelling and short documentaries/multimedia screenings.

It looked like this (woh, amiright?):

View of Manhattan from the Photoville Beer Garden

As Beer Garden BFF:

• The FT Weekend promotional video played each night before multimedia entertainment began
• FT logo and branding around the beer garden
• Advertising on the Narrative.ly website and email newsletter

Why did we do it?

• Photoville promised a new audience development opportunity to showcase FT Weekend content
• The Narrative.ly — both the After Dark series and website sponsorship— complemented our own coverage, and led people directly into our FT Weekend content on ft.com
• We wanted people to say: “I did not know the FT was involved with life and arts content to this capacity. I will begin reading FT Weekend and perhaps take out a weekend subscription.”

And the results? Success!

• 100–200 people took part in the after dark programming each evening; we received great qualitative feedback with many remarking with many remarking they had no idea of the breadth of our lifestyle content
• In terms of the on site sponsorship, we drove visitors to FT.com to read: Art on the Menu and How to Fly a Gripen Fighter Jet
• While I can’t speak for all the nights but people cheered (yes, cheered) for the FT the night I attended

Next year we’d like to make this bigger and badder:

• Staff onsite each night to discuss the FT (and sell)
• Better curation of the FT articles we choose to link to from the narratively website
• Swag giveaways, to keep attendees thinking about the FT and aware of FT Weekend
• Having an FT photobooth at photoville to showcase our coverage, as well as beer garden sponsorship
• Keeping the fun going all year round (possible sponsorship of a regular ‘After Dark’ series)

And some more photos, because it was just so darn fun.

There were fireworks too!

And, the advertisements: