2022 Gold Digital Product

Agency: Digitas UK

Client: EE

Campaign Name: GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL APP 2022

Campaign Overview

Glastonbury Festival returned after a three-year wait and two lockdowns. The UK really needed to party. The brief was to create an app that thousands of people could count on - to help them experience their best event ever.

Strategy

As official technology partner of the festival, Digitas UK’s strategy was to build the app to be a festival essential that could be relied on to enhance the visitor experience. It was built on three pillars.

First, putting the experience front and centre. Glastonbury is big and complicated. The app needed to help users plan and navigate their own way through it.

Second, make it festival-proof. Anyone who has tried camping knows the quality of kit has a direct impact on enjoyment. The app was required to withstand the strain of up to 220,000 festival-goers and work for EE non-customers, too.

Third, listen to fans. The festival has been running for more than 50 years, and many fans have been going for a while. For the app to be a success it would need to tap into the knowledge and experience of Glastonbury's core users.

Creativity

Based on research the team prioritised only the features that would enhance user experiences of Glastonbury.

Personalised line-up allowed users to plan their experience by creating their own line-up of favourite artists, and use a live festival timeline to keep up with who was playing where.

The interactive map was a fully searchable and interactive map allowing users to drop custom pins, to help find important things including tents and food vans.

Fan feedback features were available three weeks early on the app to respond to user feedback, and built in the most popular features suggested - including an A to Z artist search, and a map compass and radar for people who’d lost their bearings in the crowd.

A real-time data dashboard used live data that organisers could see in real-time to help monitor and manage the festival on the ground.

Results

The EE Glastonbury App quickly became a festival favourite, downloaded and used by more than 75% of those at the festival.

By prioritising core features and optimising performance to native iOS and Android features the crash rate was reduced from 8% at the 2018 festival to 0.01% in 2022.

The backstage, for managing and delivering content, enabling offline mode and live updates had 100% uptime - a first for the festival. More than five million push notifications were sent, including a message to tell festival-goers about Greta Thunberg's surprise appearance, resulting in one of the festival's biggest crowds.

Revellers embraced the app’s features, adding 5.3 million artists to line-ups, an average of 36 artists added to every personalised list. The app store rating went from 1.2 stars for the previous version to 4.8 stars.

Live data from the app helped organisers optimise staff allocation across the site.

The Team

Digitas UK - Rafe Blandford, Chief Product Officer - Gemma Daily, Product Director - Julian Cross, Executive Creative Director - Carl Fisk, Lead Product Designer - Alan To, Associate Tech Director - Francesco Petrungaro, Principle Mobile Engineer, iOS - Artur Tworzydlo, Principle Mobile Engineer, Android - Geetanjali Geetanjali, Lead iOS Developer - Ernesto Olalla, Lead Android Developer - Oana Onofrei, Senior Test Engineer - Moses Rathbone, Product Strategist - Sam Kemp, Product Owner - Magda Lojszczyk, Partnerships Manager - Peter Jeavons, Sponsor Lead - Emma de la Fosse, Chief Creative Officer - Tim Clegg, Executive Creative Director