Reading & Leeds

Being one of the most recognised festivals in the UK, Reading & Leeds already has a large audience, but it’s an audience that has deeply embedded last-minute buying habits. Each year, a significant proportion of tickets were selling in a concentrated window close to the event, creating cashflow pressure, inventory uncertainty, and a dependence on lineup announcements to drive sales. Our challenge was to move buyers earlier in the purchase cycle without changing the festival itself.

Our starting point was Booker Behaviour analysis: a proprietary approach that maps purchase intent signals across digital touchpoints to identify when an audience is most likely to convert, rather than relying on demographic profiles.

The analysis identified a 14-day window immediately before the lineup announcement as the highest-conversion moment in the Reading & Leeds buying cycle. Buyers who had already committed to attending (but not yet purchased) were most reachable and most responsive in this window. Targeting them later, post-announcement, meant competing for attention against the noise of the lineup reveal.

We rebuilt the paid media schedule around this insight. A higher proportion of spend was front-loaded into the pre-announcement window and the creative was adapted. We focused on urgency-led messaging that addressed the buyer's existing commitment and behavioral signals instead of the classic age ranges or location data.

The 488% year-on-year uplift in purchases confirmed our approach. The gains were concentrated in the pre-announcement window where the campaign had been repositioned. Post-announcement, spend was reduced because the inventory was already moving.

The Reading & Leeds result is now a benchmark in our Performance Suite: the pre-announcement window is a consistent high-conversion moment for major festivals with established audiences. The methodology applies wherever there is an existing fanbase, a lineup-dependent purchase cycle, and a campaign that has historically waited for the announcement to start working.

The campaign was recognised at the UK TikTok Ad Awards 2025, where Mustard won Greatest Performance. It was the strongest award result in the agency's history, and reflects the quality of the system behind the numbers: a campaign that identified a specific window of intent, reached the right audience at precisely the right moment, and converted at a rate the industry had not seen before in a festival context.

For festival operators with an established audience, the most valuable campaign improvement is often a sharper understanding of when the audience is ready to buy. Instead of increasing spend, we redistributed the Reading & Leeds campaign campaign budget to where it was already most effective.

Your loyal audience knows your festival, trusts your brand, and has attended before. They are making a purchase decision well before you are advertising to them. In this case, waiting for the lineup announcement would have meant missing a huge opportunity, it is not the conversion trigger.

Booker Behaviour analysis, rather than demographic targeting, is the consistent differentiator between festival campaigns that perform and those that merely run. The question worth taking to your next planning meeting: at what point in the calendar does your audience's purchase intent actually peak?