THE CHALLENGE: Spotlight on Songwriters
When it comes to popular music, songwriters usually remain in the background behind the performers. This is true even when the performer plays their own songs – their author persona receives less attention than their performance skills. The goal of Artisjus was to bring songwriters into focus and highlight the significant creative value they contribute. Another objective of the 2024 campaign was to turn Songwriters’ Day into a nationwide initiative, thereby increasing its public recognition.
THE SOLUTION: Unconventional event organization behind the school concert series
Since the younger generation plays an increasingly important role in this segment of the creative industry — not only as music consumers but also as creators — the creative concept of this year’s campaign was built around the idea of “back to school.” We invited 12 successful songwriters to return to their former schools and illustrate our core message — “The Song Has Value” — through intimate, songwriter-style mini concerts.
The unconventional concert venues required a high degree of flexibility in every respect. Not only did the schools differ in their daily routines, schedules, architectural layouts, and technical facilities, but all these factors also had to be coordinated with the diverse performance formats of the 12 songwriter-performers to ensure smooth execution.
From the start of the school year, we had only three weeks to complete all preparations. Therefore, immediately after making contact, we began coordinating local conditions and specific needs, as well as the legal requirements necessary for communicating the events. In the end, a unique event plan was created for each concert, coordinated on-site by an event manager.
The 12 concerts took place over 9 school days — on some days, two teams were working simultaneously in different parts of the country to ensure that every event ran seamlessly and that our camera crew could capture the most important moments everywhere.
Some artists filled their old classrooms with music during a special singing lesson, performing solo with an acoustic guitar, others transformed the school library into a fully equipped concert venue, some opened a sports day with a live performance in the main hall before the entire school, and a few had the opportunity to present their carefully arranged shows in the school’s ceremonial hall, using built-in professional sound and lighting systems.
Across the 7 rural and 5 Budapest events, our team travelled nearly 2,200 kilometres in total. Finally, as part of the essential administrative process, we carefully registered each school concert’s setlist on the Artisjus event organizer portal and paid the royalties due to the authors.
In parallel with organizing and executing the events, we carried out an extensive PR campaign. Even before the first concert, we announced the series through a press release, and arranged TV reports (RTL Klub, TV2, Petőfi TV), radio and online interviews (e.g. Index, Radiocafé, Jazzy, Kisalföld, etc.), as well as media collaborations (WMN, Telex, Refresher).
Short videos from the concerts were shared on Artisjus’s own social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube), while the artists also shared them on their personal pages. As an audiovisual record of this unique event series, award-winning visual artist and filmmaker Olivér Sin and his production team created a mini documentary capturing the special songwriter concerts held across the country. The release of the film was accompanied by another press announcement on Songwriters’ Day (October 8). The content was further supported by YouTube and Meta advertisements, and the establishment of the day was reinforced by the publication of a Wikipedia article.
RESULTS: National Campaign in Numbers
– 12 concerts, 1,855 participating students from across the country
– 17 exclusive interviews, 130+ articles, 1.38 million estimated online reach (Coveragebook)
– Over 1 million paid video impressions, 392,000 total video views (organic + paid) by the end of the campaign
