‘Think Like A Promoter, But Execute Like An Agency’: Festival Marketing Deep Dive With Mustard Media’s Rob Masterson

The people, who launched UK marketing agency Mustard Media, all learned their craft in the field, working on the UK’s Warehouse Project and Parklife Festival, both of which have become popular events in people’s annual calendar. They turned Warehouse Project from a regional hot ticket in Manchester attracting some 2,000 guests per show, to a 10,000-cap “internationally renowned behemoth,” as Masterson puts it. In house, mind you. “Parklife Festival used to be 15,000 people. By the time we left, it was 80,000-odd a day, had become a major festival in the UK calendar, and got acquired by Live Nation,” Masterson recalls.

Their work garnered industry attention, as it happened right at the end of the pre-digital age of promoting, when people went from producing millions of flyers to spending most of the budget on digital. A new world, which few people navigated as smoothly and successfully out the gate as Mustard Media, which launched in 2013.

Masterson explains the company’s philosophy as follows: “The be-all-end-all, is whether or not we’re able to sell tickets for our clients. Whatever other fancy metrics there are in terms of marketing don’t really matter. We’re a performance marketing agency with the aim of selling tickets for our clients, getting bums on seats, getting people into their venues. That is the ultimate metric that our campaigns live or die by. We say to our team internally that we want you to think like a promoter, but execute like an agency.”

The company is running three departments: a strategy department, a paid media department, and a campaigns department, which produces the creative output. “I think we’re the first company in this sector that really started thinking about strategy in its own right,” says Masterson, “and we distill all of the knowledge that we have around how to structure and build marketing campaigns in order to sell tickets.”

That’s how Mustard has created its own playbooks, frameworks, and own IPs. “So,” Masterson continues, “when clients come to us, we often start working with them on a strategic basis first, and we develop a marketing strategy for them that takes all of our secret sauce and applies it in a bespoke way to their unique event.”
Every event is different, of course, but the one thing that is relevant for all of them in terms of marketing is telling their story, and telling it right, because a great event alone isn’t enough to get people to spend money on it.

“A lot of event promoters come to us with an amazing idea. And because more often than not it really is amazing, they sort of think, ‘if we just build this, people will come’,” Masterson explains, “and I wish that was the case, but we still need to tell their story first, in a way which generates hype and early ticket sales, but also in a way that completely [utilizes] the latest digital techniques out there for storytelling.”

And he continues, “it’s always been about storytelling, but today it’s about doing in such a way that people actually see and engage with it. When we started, people were coming to us because of what we did with Warehouse Project, and Parklife, brands at the forefront of showing how marketing could be done in the digital age.”

Festivals make up the majority of Mustard’s client base, followed by venues – everything from nightclubs to large-scale entertainment buildings. The company is also expanding into sports, working with the Aston Villa women’s team, for instance, but music festivals remain its bread and butter.

So, when the lockdowns during COVID were introduced, it almost killed the business. But the team managed to build back. In 2024, Mustard Media helped client sell 2 million tickets and generate £108 million in revenue. That’s up 25% from 2023.

One of the most impressive case studies in Mustard’s portfolio is the launch of TRIIP festival curated by Australian DJ Fisher on Malta, which sold 4,500 weekend tickets to visitors from 51 countries for the premiere in 2023.

It followed the successful launch of Annie Mac’s Lost and Found festival a few years earlier, which is considered a pioneer in artist-curated festivals, and which used to attract people from all over the world to Malta while it lasted.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Mustard Media has played a part in re-shaping Malta’s image – from a place where people go to retire, to that of an attractive festival destination that’s created a huge event tourism economy.

“It’s mad,” Masterson recalls, “I remember when we went over for the first Lost and Found Festival. You had maybe a quarter of the people on the plane going to the festival, everyone else was in their Sixties and Seventies. Now you fly over there when it’s festival season, and it’s more of the kind of flight you might expect when going to Ibiza, for example. I’ve lost count of how many events there are on Malta now, but there’s loads, it’s become an established party location, that’s now on the radar of every major party brand. And we’ve played a big part in that, we’re very much in the circle of people doing stuff over there, we’re often in the conversation, if not helping them with it.”

The main promoter in Malta is 365 Entertainment Group, which just got acquired by Live Nation. Mustard has been helping to spread the word across many of their new festivals.

When Mustard partnered with Annie Mac, influencer marketing wasn’t a thing yet. The fact that the premiere in 2014 sold out in just a few days showed the potential of using an artist and an influencer, especially if they’re really popular.

It can backfire, of course, if events aren’t delivered in the end – like in the case of Pollen, for instance, which tried to scale the idea of influencer-led events, but went bankrupt in 2022.

But, as long as it’s done right, the more an artist is front and center of things, people will want to buy it. According to Masterson, that’s “because regardless of all of the intricacies of marketing, people buy from people. I think that’s a universal truth, and one which will perhaps become even more powerful as we move into this world of AI.

“There’s going to be instances, where AI is going to try to replicate people, and people are going to become wise to it. And then we’re going to enter into this world where people will want proof that what they’re consuming is real. Even in the world of AI-driven social media, there are real people, who want to know what the real stuff really is like. All of the glossy, varnished stuff that brands want you to see is the stuff that doesn’t work anymore. What does work is the real, lo-fi stuff. That’s where people actually engage.”

When questions about the number-one mistake event organizers tend to make, according to Masterson, is “not build interest and community and hype around something before you launch it. If you don’t build hype and interest and desire in what you’re doing, and have people talking about it, whether online or in person, you’re not going to be able to get the numbers you need for your event.”
Hence, he says, the most underrated tool in marketing still is, and forever will be, word of mouth. “It is still the number-one marketing piece,” he says, adding, “once you’ve done the first iteration of your event, and if you’ve made it a great experience that people really loved, then that can be the fuel for your next marketing campaign; extracting and amplifying how much people enjoyed it through videos, pictures quotes, and other content.”

The big advantage of digital marketing is that’s it’s calculable both in terms of finding the right audience as well as measuring the success of any given campaign afterwards. Legacy media, including outdoor billboards or adverts in magazines may still have their place in a marketing strategy, though, as Masterson explains: “If you’re a major festival in London, for example, and you don’t put adverts on the tube, it doesn’t really feel like it’s a major event. The difficulty as a marketer is knowing how much emphasis to put on those kinds of things, where you can’t track how successful they are, versus putting stuff into digital, where the response is direct, and you know exactly how much impact you’ve had.”

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