The Festival has made its home in a reclaimed manufacturing facility — a three-story open-air site now known as the First Tennessee Pavilion, which offers 50,000 square feet of unique, accessible and weatherproof art exhibit space. All this art combined with hands-on art activities for children, acoustic musical performances and a wide variety of food and drink, is why 4 Bridges Arts Festival has been noted as a Top 100 Fine Arts Show by Sunshine Artist Magazine.

4 Bridges Arts Festival is a free and family-friendly event which has grown in size and stature to now be one of the highest profile cultural events in Chattanooga.

The Opportunity

The 4 Bridges Arts Festival is extremely dependent on a distinct and compelling promotional campaign to attract both Patron Program donors and general public attendees to the event. In the past Patron Program donors and 20,000+ festival attendees have combined with the arts community for a $1 million in economic impact in Chattanooga over the weekend.

4 Bridges sought to build on the successful promotional campaign of 2007 to continue to raise the profile and the awareness of the festival through a cohesive visual identity (see samples of 2007 campaign in our “Happy New Work” QT on our main page). For the second year in a row, Widgets & Stone was comissioned to create the promotional campaign.

With a limited promotional budget, the festival needed to maximize the impact of a few select advertising and print opportunities. The visual identity of the 2008 campaign needed to be unique, memorable and clearly related across multiple media.

The Strategy

Each year the festival commissions a different artist to create an original piece for its poster. Encaustic artist Patricia DeLeon Alfonso was selected to create the art for 2008. As her work naturally exhibits a cohesive visual style, Widgets & Stone designed the campaign identity of 2008 to be built around several different pieces by Alfonso.

Seeking to capitalize on the brand equity established in the 4 Bridges campaign of 2007, Widgets & Stone decided to build on elements of that visual style. In particular, the design utilized the die-cut stencil concept that allowed the art to be revealed through the festival’s iconic logo. The 2008 campaign carried the idea further, making the typography a stencil through which the art is revealed.

Through the cohesive work of the artist and the consisent typographic designs, the campaign’s visual identity is clearly established across a wide variety of media an applications — from posters to ads, from tickets to brochures, from web banner ads to billboards.

The Results

The 2 day festival had over 25,000 attendees in 2008, with the majority of them (57%*) finding out about the event through the print ad campaign. Almost $517,000** in art was purchased and the total economic impact is estimated to be $1.5 million.

*Information calculated from attendee surveys
**Information calculated from Artist surveys