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FESTIVAL
MARKETING & PR GUIDELINES
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016
Welcome to the 2016 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival family. We’re thrilled to have you part
of the program and we’re proud to bring together the wider Victorian hospitality industry to
shine a light on our state as the capital of food and wine in Australia.
This year we have a lot of exciting changes to tell you about! These include new media
partnerships with the Herald Sun and Channel 10; a huge focus on digital communication
including a beautiful new website, driving new audiences focussing on growing our social
channels; and an entirely new brand, logo and creative roll out.
We will be helping promote your event through the Festival’s overall marketing strategy
including digital communication channels, online advertising and publicity efforts. This kit
includes an overview of our key plans as well as some top tips on how you can market your own
event.
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016
Key Dates:
Tickets on sale: 27 November 2015
NB: all communication is embargoed until this date
Festival Guide release: 31 January 2016
Distributed via Herald Sun
Festival lift out release: 28 February 2016
Distributed via Herald Sun
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival: 4 – 13 March 2016
Umbrella Event– Keeping it Northside, Estelle
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016
Social Media:
The Festival has 130,000 avid and engaged foodies across our social media channels so it’s important that you
capitalise on this and join in the conversation with us.
This year through both our e-news and social communication we are going to make a considered effort to call out
individual events as we think the industry events are some of the most exciting parts of the Festival and we want to
celebrate you as much as possible.
So be sure to
1. Follow us on: Twitter and Instagram @melbfoodandwine and Facebook MelbourneFoodandWineFestival
2. Always use the hashtag #MFWF
3. Join in the conversation: Share our content and generate your own content too – this can be anything from
behind the scenes pics, mini videos of a dish being prepped… get creative.
4. Consider social advertising – this can be a very cost effective way to get the word out to people beyond your
own audience and friends.
Images & Video:
Beautiful images are critical to selling your event. These
will help you stand out on our website and make media
much more likely to include you in press and online.
Imagery: If you’ve had additional photos taken since
your submission please feel free to share them with the
Festival team at marketing@foodfest.com.au. We will
review updating your website event page as well as
promoting them to media where appropriate. Please
note images must be at least 300dpi for print.
Regional World’s Longest Lunch – Kilcunda
Photographer: Rob Anderson
Video: Video is becoming increasingly important on
social media. It’s really easy to take a short video using
your phone these days, and you can download fun
apps such as Cinemagraph, hyperlapse and 8mm to
edit them and make them look great. We recommend
you upload a video to Youtube and send us the link to
marketing@foodfest.com.au so we can get it up on our
website. Please note video must be under 15 secs for
social media.
PR & Media Relations:
The main Festival PR campaign runs November – March but you should also pitch your own publicity materials
to targeted print, online and radio media.
Consider sending a short summary about your event to ‘what’s on’ media e.g Herald Sun Weekend’s Live List
or What’s on listings in The Saturday Age, Spectrum & The Sunday Age, M Magazine.
Submit event listings to websites that receive high traffic. Two we highly recommend are That’s Melbourne
and Visit Victoria.
If your business is open to hosting media or bloggers free of charge, please let our PR Manager
holly@foodfest.com.au know so that we can re-direct media attendance requests straight to your venue.
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016
Communicating the wider program:
As mentioned, we have a renewed focus on communicating as much as we can about all of the
events in the wider Festival program.
This includes e-news to the growing number of consumers on our database (currently 65,000 +). We
also see huge traffic to our website (last year we attracted 309,500+ unique visitors to the website
overall, which was a 33% growth from 2014). We expect 30,000 people alone to visit our website on
27 November so it’s very important that your joining in the social conversation with us that day.
As our website will be the cornerstone for our communication and key consumer touch point, we’ve
made some considerable improvements to it this year including a complete creative refresh to
reflect the new brand; new program categories to help to break down the program for our
audience; which in turn should also help make your event more discoverable.
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016
Promotional material
All menus/ collateral/ signage/ flyers, must include ‘Proudly Part of Melbourne Food
and Wine Festival presented by Bank of Melbourne’ logo.
All logo usage must be prior approved by MFWF. Please send artwork to
marketing@foodfest.com.au allowing 48 hours for a response
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016
What next?
That’s it for now! We will be in touch closer to tickets on sale with some fun video
content for you to share over social media and help us spread the word as far and
wide as possible.
Also attached in this is email are
New logo files
New logo guidelines
Ticketing T&C’s
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016
Questions:
Please contact the Melbourne Food and Wine office on 03 9823
6100 or program@foodfest.com.au if you have any questions.
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016