WeAreWaterloo

Waterloo Food Fortnight 2019

SE1 eats and beats

Remember the 90s? Bucket hats and Britpop, baggy jeans and GameBoys? We brought it all back this summer for Waterloo Food Fortnight 2019.

Hosted every July by WeAreWaterloo, the festival features events, tastings, demonstrations and deals all aimed at boosting trade and community activities in and around the neighbourhood. It always opens with a launch party on Lower Marsh and this year’s theme was the 1990s – think vintage Glastonbury, retro gaming, DJs and Mr Blobby (remember him?). WeAreWaterloo invited us to create the festival identity and campaign.

Given creative free rein by our client, we got a tad overexcited reminiscing over what the decade meant to each of us. But hip-hoppers or ravers, indie kids or skaters, we united over mixtapes made and remade in the bedrooms of our youth.

Lovingly crafted with striking graphics and handwritten sleeves, the humble mixtape provided a rich visual language to inspire every aspect of this project, from our printed festival map to our animated cassette player GIF. Our social media campaign featured a Selfie Wonderwall competition on Instagram and a Food Fortnight playlist on Spotify. Branded social content featured the bold colour palette and geometric shapes of 90s MTV idents, with a liberal sprinkling of hot dogs, bananas and pizza. And the words! We’d forgotten the fine range of slang we had to play with back then.

Our #FoodFortnight social campaign ran across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram from 27 May to 15 July 2019, and the WeAreWaterloo audiences went mad-fer-it. In seven weeks, we generated:

  • 216 new likes/followers
  • Paid reach of 70,235
  • 215,960 impressions
  • 4,683 engagements
  • 41,195 video views

And footfall in Lower Marsh increased from 6,000 to 24,000 in a single day… but that may have been down to Mr Blobby’s cameo.

“Totally tubular! And much kudos to Hudson Fuggle for creating our really radical 90s-themed #FoodFortnight19 campaign earlier this summer! Mad props.”

Natalie Raben, Chief Executive, WeAreWaterloo BID