Pair'd Margaret River Region

A brand-new four-day food and wine festival, launched from scratch — and turned into a multi-platform campaign that sold tickets nationally and internationally.

Category: Events · Services: Meta Advertising, Google Advertising, LinkedIn Advertising, Festival Launch Strategy, Conversion Tracking

The challenge

As an inaugural event, Pair'd had no historical data, no proven audiences, and a wide mix of ticketed experiences — from large-capacity flagship events down to intimate dinners — all needing to sell simultaneously across intrastate, interstate and international markets.

Our solution

Big Head Digital ran the digital media in close partnership with Milestone Creative (strategy and creative) and the Pair'd team. The campaign moved audiences across Meta, Google and LinkedIn through distinct awareness and conversion phases. Advantage+ campaigns targeting broad Australia-wide audiences outperformed narrower traditional funnels, and messaging shifted to urgency-driven "selling fast, don't miss out" copy in the campaign's final weeks — a shift that meaningfully lifted late conversions.

Strategy

  1. Test the funnel model, not just the ads — Running Advantage+ against traditional staged funnels side by side showed broad, algorithm-led targeting outperformed manual audience staging for a new event with no warm data.
  2. Let video carry early awareness — Video creative drove the strongest awareness results, tapping into audiences before any purchase intent existed.
  3. Create urgency at the right moment — Switching to "selling fast" and sell-out messaging in the final weeks noticeably lifted conversions when the campaign shifted from awareness to close.
  4. Learn fast for next time — Every channel and campaign type was benchmarked in year one specifically to build a smarter, more efficient model for future seasons.

Results