The Adelaide Fringe is the largest arts festival in the Southern Hemisphere, running across February and March each year and drawing companies from all over the world. For a UK or international show it is a huge opportunity — and a real challenge: you are selling to a South Australian audience you have never met before, in a city half a world away, against thousands of other events. Mobius builds that local audience for you.
We are an arts marketing, PR and distribution agency working across both hemispheres. While our team is on the ground each August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, we spend the Australian summer running campaigns at the Adelaide Fringe — combining digital advertising, out-of-home planning, festival strategy and grassroots community marketing into one joined-up campaign.
Most of the ticket-driving work at a fringe is digital. We plan and run paid social campaigns — usually on Meta — in two halves: prospecting activity that finds a fresh Adelaide audience, and retargeting activity that follows up the people who have already engaged. Because we build audiences from your engaged data as the run progresses, spend gets steadily more efficient and lands in front of genuinely interested locals rather than the wider internet.
Crucially, we set up conversion tracking against your ticketing system — including pixels inside the AudienceView (AVR) box-office platform the Adelaide Fringe uses — so campaigns can optimise towards actual ticket purchases, not just landing-page views. We report on what the spend is doing throughout the festival and adjust the plan burst by burst.
Paid social only works when there is strong creative behind it, so the best campaigns rely on good content — video, images and copy — coming from the company itself, and we are upfront about that from the start. If you do not have festival-ready assets to hand, we work with a network of designers and content creators who can produce them for you.
Adelaide is a poster city. The Fringe clusters around a handful of precincts and garden venues, and a well-placed physical presence still does real work alongside the digital campaign. We plan your out-of-home — postering and outdoor artwork — around those key sites, manage the print and artwork deadlines, and co-ordinate distribution on the ground in Adelaide so your show is visible where the festival crowds actually are.
A fringe campaign is a marathon, not a launch. We map activity to the rhythm of the festival — the early on-sale push, the opening-week burst, and sustained bursts of paid and community activity right through the run — rather than spending everything up front. We use what the early campaign tells us about your audience (who is actually engaging, and where) to sharpen every following burst, and we keep a close eye on the on-sale and review timeline so effort lands when it counts.
The most cost-effective way to reach a local Adelaide audience is often the least glamorous: getting your show in front of the community directly. In practice, "seeding" means posting your show into the Facebook groups where Adelaide locals actually decide what to see — groups such as:
Alongside this we run targeted community email activity to festival-goers. On a recent Adelaide campaign this grassroots layer reached a potential audience of over 130,000 people, with community emails opening at 43% and click-through above 35% — well ahead of typical benchmarks, because the audience is warm and genuinely local.
Recent Adelaide Fringe clients include Dutch Kills Theater, Hannah Maxwell, Josh Glanc and Holy O — a mix of UK and international companies bringing work to South Australia. We also work directly with the Adelaide Fringe and its media partners, and know the local outlets that matter to a show trying to break through.
Plenty of companies now run a show at the Adelaide Fringe in the Australian summer and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the British one. We can look after both, carrying the learnings, assets and audience data from one festival into the next so you are not starting from scratch each time. Find out more about our Edinburgh Fringe marketing, our Adelaide Fringe PR, and our wider international services.
We would love to help you with your Adelaide Fringe marketing. Contact us to set up a meeting.
Yes. We plan and run paid social advertising for Adelaide Fringe shows, split between prospecting and retargeting, with conversion tracking set up against your ticketing system so the campaign optimises towards ticket sales.
Yes. We plan out-of-home around the Fringe's key precincts and venues, manage artwork and print deadlines, and co-ordinate distribution on the ground in Adelaide.
That is exactly what we do. Through community seeding, local group posting, targeted email and audience-led digital advertising, we build a warm South Australian audience for companies who have never played the city before.
Yes — we run campaigns at both festivals and can carry assets, learnings and audience data across from one to the other. Get in touch to talk it through.