Santa Anita Food Truck Festival – “Let Foodies Unite!”
Santa Anita Park, a thoroughbred racetrack in Arcadia, California, offers prominent racing events throughout the winter and spring. The oldest track in Southern California, Santa Anita has earned a reputation for tradition as home to many prestigious races.
Santa Anita Park regularly hosts unique events, live music and entertainment on the infield of the track concurrently with the races. In recent years, food trucks have become increasingly popular in Southern California. Followers are typically “tastemakers”, people who are influential amongst their peers; trendsetters with a strong interest in local flavor.
Santa Anita saw an opportunity to introduce a new, hip audience to the park while simultaneously positioning itself in the middle of a current pop culture trend. In January 2011, the first Santa Anita Food Truck turnout gave organizers a solid base to improve upon. Target Interactive was approached to launch a campaign that would engage locals, create buzz around the event and ultimately encourage supporters to join the food truck festivities in March 2011.
Target’s in-house creative team designed a set of creatives utilizing imagery aimed at capturing the attention of individuals looking at content on food enthusiast blogs and websites which ran up to the day of the event. The campaign utilized geographic targeting capabilities by focusing on regions within the LA DMA within a reasonable commute to Santa Anita Park. Target Interactive realized that although the Food Truck Festival was being hosted at a sports arena, the inclusion of entertainment, event, niche and food sites was imperative for successfully attracting the desired population. High click and view through rates confirmed the use of interstitial ads and roadblocks on these highly trafficked sites the day prior to the Food Truck Festival were extremely effective.
Email advertising and search engine marketing was also employed to ensure maximum coverage. Words related to food network, famous personalities and popular food trucks were added to search profiles.
Used in concert, these tactics produced seamless coverage of the LA DMA. When the final attendance was tallied, the numbers exceeded expectations.
Ad Creative – Santa Anita Food Truck Festival
Here are some of the ad creative that we used in our online advertising campaign for the Santa Anita Park Food Truck Festival:
The Food Trucks found a home at Santa Anita. The second Festival was expanded to include the entire infield area as many more trucks were added.
- The campaign successfully increased awareness of the event and boosted ticket sales by 300%.
- The campaign reached up to 500K unique users daily over the course of the four days leading up to this event
Santa Anita President, George Haines, was very pleased with the turnout. In a press release after the event, he stated, “We have received very positive feedback not only from attendees, but from all of the vendors as well. The Food Truck phenomenon has really taken root here in Southern California, and these vendors realize Santa Anita is a perfect place for them to maintain and expand their own fan base.”