How Hideout Festival More Than Doubled Sign-Ups and Achieved 36x ROAS on Its 2024 Launch Campaign.

How Hideout Festival More Than Doubled Sign-Ups and Achieved 36x ROAS on Its 2024 Launch Campaign.

Date

2024

Deliverables

Stategy

Campaigns

Paid Media

Location

Croatia

Sector

Festivals

Hideout Festival achieved 36x ROAS and a 115% year-on-year uplift in sign-ups in 2024 by front-loading audience intent earlier in the campaign cycle and doubling down on the platform and creative approach that had driven the strongest conversion in 2023. Building on a record-breaking Super Early Bird campaign (238% YoY increase), the 2024 strategy used the compounding audience built through always-on paid activity to prime a larger and more qualified prospecting pool before the sign-up campaign launched. When pre-sale opened, it sold more tickets in the first 30 minutes than the whole of the previous year's pre-sale. The campaign ended 3 months ahead of target.

The results

36x

ROAS

115%

YoY uplift in sign-ups

113%

YoY increase in pre-sale ticket sales

the challenge

Hideout Festival is one of the original destination festivals. For over a decade, it has brought tens of thousands of electronic music fans to Croatia for a week of beachfront parties, building a loyal returning audience and a reputation as one of the most consistent events in the global destination festival calendar.

Following a successful 2023 festival and a record-breaking Super Early Bird campaign, the challenge for 2024 was a different kind of problem: not how to build momentum from a standing start, but how to build a bigger impact when the baseline was already strong. A 238% YoY increase in the Super Early Bird campaign had raised the bar. The question was how to create a lineup launch that generated a genuinely greater level of commercial impact rather than simply replicating what had already worked.

The practical challenge was conversion: improving the rate at which sign-ups became ticket buyers, while simultaneously growing the absolute number of sign-ups. Growing the top of the funnel and improving the conversion rate through it at the same time requires changes to both the data collection strategy and the campaign structure, not just an increase in spend.

the approach

The starting point was the always-on paid strategy run in the period following the Super Early Bird campaign. Rather than treating the gap between the SEB close and the sign-up launch as a quiet period, we maintained consistent paid activity to build a qualified prospecting audience before the sign-up window opened. When the sign-up campaign launched, it was reaching people who had already been in contact with Hideout's campaign for weeks, not cold audiences seeing the event for the first time. That pre-warmed audience converted at a higher rate, and it was larger.

The second strategic decision was to commit further investment to the sign-up phase and to prioritise the platform that had driven the strongest conversion results in 2023. TikTok had accounted for 62% of all conversions the previous year. We built the 2024 sign-up campaign around the format and creative approach that had performed there: audience and sentiment-driven content with urgency built into the creative concept itself, rather than added as a late-campaign layer. The creative was designed to move people, not just reach them.

Referral technology was introduced to improve data quality and extend reach through the existing audience. Rather than relying entirely on paid acquisition to grow the sign-up base, we activated Hideout's existing community as a growth lever, bringing in new sign-ups through a mechanism that also improved the quality of the data being collected. Higher quality sign-ups convert more reliably, which is how conversion rate improvement and volume growth compound rather than trade off against each other.

The 36x ROAS is the efficiency story. It reflects what happens when the campaign is working against an audience that is already in consideration rather than cold: cost per acquisition drops because intent is already present, and the spend required to close each conversion falls. The always-on strategy between the SEB campaign and the sign-up launch was not marketing spend in the traditional sense; it was audience infrastructure investment, and the ROAS is the return on that infrastructure.

The relationship between the sign-up uplift (115%), the pre-sale uplift (113%), and the conversion rate improvement (13%) shows what compounding looks like in practice. The sign-up base grew significantly. The rate at which sign-ups converted to purchases also improved. Both moving together produced the pre-sale result: more tickets sold in 30 minutes than in the whole of the previous pre-sale window. The 93% uplift in total launch week sales and the 3-month lead over target confirmed the effect held through the full launch period, not just the pre-sale spike.

What This Means for Festival Brands

The most underused period in a festival marketing calendar is the gap between campaigns. Most festival operators treat the close of one campaign window as the start of a quiet period. The brands that compound results year on year use that gap differently: building and warming prospecting audiences so that the next campaign launches into an already engaged pool rather than starting from cold. The difference in conversion rates between a cold audience and a pre-warmed one is significant enough to change the economics of the entire campaign.

For established festivals with a returning audience, the question is not just how to reach more people, but how to structure the campaign so that intent is present before the ticket sale opens. A sign-up window is more efficient when it is reached by audiences who have been in consistent contact with the campaign throughout the off-season. A pre-sale converts faster when the sign-up list contains people who are ready to buy, not just interested.

The question worth asking before the next campaign's sign-up window opens: what has the brand done in the months since the last event closed to keep a prospecting audience warm? If the answer is nothing, the campaign will spend its budget re-building awareness that could have been sustained for a fraction of the cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How did Hideout Festival more than double its sign-ups year on year?

Hideout's 115% YoY sign-up uplift in 2024 came from two compounding changes: a larger and more qualified prospecting audience built through always-on paid activity between campaigns, and a sign-up campaign that committed further investment to the platform and creative format that had driven the strongest conversion in 2023. The combination of a pre-warmed audience and a higher-intent creative approach meant the sign-up campaign was reaching people already in consideration, not cold audiences. Data quality improvements through referral technology also meant a higher proportion of sign-ups converted to ticket purchases.

Growing sign-up volume and improving conversion rate simultaneously requires changes to both data collection strategy and campaign structure. For Hideout 2024, the approach combined referral technology to improve data quality (higher-quality sign-ups convert more reliably) with a pre-warmed prospecting audience built through always-on paid activity before the sign-up window opened. The result was a 115% YoY sign-up uplift alongside a 13% improvement in conversion rate, which produced a 113% YoY increase in pre-sale sales and more tickets sold in the first 30 minutes than in the whole of the previous year's pre-sale.

Q: What is always-on paid strategy and why does it matter for festival marketing?

Always-on paid strategy means maintaining consistent paid media activity between campaign peaks rather than concentrating spend entirely around launch and urgency windows. For Hideout Festival 2024, always-on activity in the period following the Super Early Bird campaign built a prospecting audience that arrived at the sign-up window already familiar with the event. That pre-warmed audience converted at a higher rate than a cold audience would have, and the always-on investment was recovered many times over in the 36x ROAS achieved across the launch period. The strategy is how compounding year-on-year growth works in practice.

Q: How do you build on a strong previous campaign result without just replicating it?

Replicating what worked last year produces diminishing returns, because the same audience sees the same approach and the novelty that drove performance in year one is absent in year two. For Hideout 2024, building on the record-breaking 2023 SEB campaign meant using what had been learned (TikTok conversion rates, audience behaviour data, referral mechanics) to design a more structurally efficient campaign rather than simply scaling the same approach. The 36x ROAS and 113% pre-sale uplift were achieved not by spending more but by spending more precisely, against an audience that had been built and maintained in the period between campaigns.