Spotlight: The 5th Annual Dia De Los Toadies Festival
Perennial music fan favorite the Toadies will headline the 5th annual Dia De Los Toadies music festival this Labor Day at Whitewater Amphitheater again this year. ThunderTix is proud to be the ticketing software of choice for The Dia and always thrilled to see the use of social media for event promotion, fan appreciation and to cultivate the shared experience, as Sonar Management has done annually.
Big family reunion
Every year on Labor Day weekend the Toadies host the Dia De Los Toadies music festival at the Whitewater Amphitheater. The annual festival is a rowdy good time and a “thank you” to fans from Toadies and Sonar Management .
Guitarist Clark Vogeler describes the event:
The Dia keeps getting better every year. Last year's festival was without doubt the best weekend of the year. It always feels like a big family reunion with a great soundtrack.
The festival’s continued success is a perfect example of how event promotion is done.
Awareness, appreciation & anticipation
Every year on Labor Day the Toadies host the Dia De Los Toadies music festival. As the artist's management company, it is Sonar’s responsibility to promote the Toadies performances and bring about awareness to the band's legion of fans. One of those best practices is to establish a standalone website for the Dia music festival that is separate from Sonar’s and the artist’s web presence. By doing so, they have a central location for ticket buyer’s to use for all the information they need to attend at the Whitewater Amphitheater.
The dedicated site has it’s own Twitter and Facebook page and contains a treasure trove of photos and videos of past festivals, sourced from professionals and fans.
Event awareness is orchestrated from the dedicated Dia website and, when sales begin, there is a direct link to the venue for fans to immediately buy tickets the minute they are available.
It is important to note that the Toadies main website has a pointer to the standalone Dia festival website, separate from the Toadies nationwide tour stops. The band’s recording label, Kirtland records, contributes to awareness of the Dia event too via its blog.
Sonar also raises event awareness from its excellent fan appreciation ticket giveaways.
We’ve written about the benefits of contests and now, with the advent of social media, they are easier than ever to conduct. Concert tickets were once the sole domain of radio stations and record stores ( remember those? ) but now a few minutes spent writing a well worded tweet or Facebook update can yield the same, if not better, results.
Winning a ticket giveaway is one the primordial parts of an event’s shared experience, specifically in the ‘anticipation’ stage. Early on just before tickets go on sale, anticipation of attendees grows exponentially with each mention, each tweet, each Facebook ‘Like’.
Anticipation is in the ‘before’ sector of the shared experience timeline - but often overlooked aspect of the shared experience timeline is the ‘after’ sector.
Many music fans write virtual love letters about their attendance to favorite band’s performance, further extending the shared experience well beyond the day of the concert.
Some of these personal blogs are so well done they border on semi-professional music journals, like Kansas based h0key. He wrote of last year’s Dia De Los Toadies at length:
Dia de Los Toadies was a win not only for the talent, but also for the fact that tickets were about 30 bucks. All that show for that low price made it a steal. Granted we spent more out there, but they had just the right specials to even make festival drinks and food a great deal. The only real battle for the day was the heat and we survived. Next year we are locked into going but we will add something else very special. We’re gonna get there and float the river first then check out the show. Sounds like the ultimate day for me.
If you manage an entertainment tour or festival, you are encouraged to read the entire blog post as an example of how rich a resource the ‘after’ sector of the shared experience timeline is. Sonar fully realizes the value of the post demonstrated by their citing of the h0key post on the Dia website several times.
Be like savvy Sonar
We hope this spotlight on Sonar helps you with your event awareness as a great example of the how it’s done.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting many more “spotlights” on events, venues, our beloved ThunderTix users and some “secret” lesser known technical aspects of a successful event ( You can subscribe to the RSS feed here https://feeds.feedburner.com/thundertix ).
Be sure to take a look at all the features we have to offer and sign up for a free trial today!
Photos by Tommy Moore
