The TRNSMT music festival in Scotland began in 2017 and effectively replaced the country’s long-running T In The Park. Rather than do a standard line-up announcement in the build up to the July 2020 event, it has chosen instead to turn it all into a digital scavenger hunt.

We have seen pop stars do this a lot, often using Landmrk as their platform partner, but we have not seen an entire festival doing something like this. On 26th November, three days before tickets for the 2020 festival went on sale, a series of clues and questions relating to UK music venues were posed on a dedicated website with an integrated Google Streetview map.

Fans had just five minutes to work out each of the 12 clues – e.g. “1,000,000 visitors every year. Over 140 shows a year. A **** load of lights on the outside. We’re obviously talking about the place to watch a gig in Glasgow”. They then had to type in the name of the venue in the search bar and scroll around to find the TRNSMT Marks The Spot logo. When clicked, it would reveal the name of one of the acts performing.

Fans could then share their answers on Facebook and/or Twitter where they competed against others to win a pair of weekend tickets to the festival.

It is great to see an event take some of the well-established tricks of artist marketing and use them to promote themselves and this worked as a nice way to build up a bit of anticipation in the days before tickets actually went on sale. Until…

TRNSMT has been openly criticised in the past for having line-ups that are heavily male and had to respond to this by introducing the female-only Queen Tut’s stage last year. But on the reveal of the initial names for 2020, Rita Ora and Little Simz were the only female acts to be seen, turning the whole thing from a marketing buzz into it very publicly stepping on a garden rake.