Festival Estéreo Picnic was born in 2010 to change the music festival landscape in Colombia, under the creed of “an experience beyond music”.

Attendees were faced with a universe of activities and sensations: the city’s finest restaurants, a design fair, brand activities and the shows themselves.

During its first editions, the festival attracted a very small niche and, even though word was spreading, it wasn’t until 2014 that the festival took a huge step forward with a line up the likes of which Colombia had never seen. As a result of this, expectations skyrocketed, leading to an underwhelming reception of the 2015 line up, proving that the festival still relied heavily on the artists. Bearing this in mind, in 2016 we decided to add a twist to our campaign.

Knowing that our buyers are commonly on social media and are avid radio listeners – and with the added challenge of drawing away attention and expectations that our audience might have regarding the artists – we decided to bet on giving the brand a well-defined visual identity. This identity would involve the fans and, at the same time, it would provide content that we could promote through social media since the warm-up phase. Out of this necessity, the idea to create a narrative universe was born: “Stories of a Different World and how music got its way”.

Each day, the festival’s posts on social media constructed the narration around a comic book-type aesthetic, which portrayed Bogota as a dark and grey city. In it, a dictator had ascended to power and worked to abolish music, fighting against colorful characters that represented the festival’s attendees.

The fans responded and so we decided to carry out a plan so disruptive that it would eventually become the most shocking activity ever done in a Colombian radio station. A day before the launch of the line up, we began announcing that a spokesperson for the festival would announce the line up through the country’s alternative genre radio station with the largest reach, La X. However, just before the interview was about to begin, the station shut down its programming and a computerised voice, akin to Anonymous, communicated that music had died. In the best War Of The Worlds style, a large part of the station’s audience thought that it had really been shut down. Soon, the news began trending globally on social media, generating conversations and speculation regarding what was really happening. Ten hours later, on Tuesday morning, the station went back up under the excuse that music had prevailed to announce the line up. Once again, the news trended globally and the audience, having the much-asked-for line up at hand, preferred to talk about the events they had just witnessed.