**Wilderness Festival |** MAMA Group

Founding Team

Founding Team | PR, Communications & Partnerships 2011 - Best New Festival

Wilderness launched in 2011 with no template to follow. The format it introduced - a festival conceived as a fully realised cultural world, blending live music, arts, fine dining, wellness and luxury hospitality into a single proposition - did not exist in the UK at the time. The brief was to build something that felt genuinely different from every other festival on the calendar, and then to communicate that difference to an audience that had not yet been asked to want it.

That combination - inventing a format and simultaneously building the audience for it - was the defining challenge of the launch.

Positioning & Strategy

Wilderness was positioned from the outset as an experiential event for a culturally sophisticated audience - one that expected the same quality from a festival that it expected from a restaurant, a gallery or a theatre. Cornbury Park provided the setting. The programme provided the proof.

The PR and partnerships strategy was built around a single idea: that the festival's credibility would come from the company it kept. Every partnership was chosen to reinforce the proposition that Wilderness was a serious cultural event, not a music festival with a wellness tent attached.

Cultural institution and arts partnerships included The Old Vic Tunnels, The Last Tuesday Society, The Idler Academy and Go Traviata - giving the festival genuine arts and performance credentials from its first year. Culinary partnerships brought Skye Gyngell of The Petersham Nurseries Cafe and Sam and Sam Clark of Moro, treating food as a cultural programme rather than festival catering. Media and brand partnerships were confirmed with Psychologies, Wired and Intelligence Squared. Charity partnerships were built with War Child and Nordoff Robbins.

Every relationship was chosen with the same question: does this make the festival more credible, or does it just make it bigger?

PR & Communications

The PR strategy was built around storytelling rather than coverage volume. The narrative - a return to nature, to authenticity, to cultural experience that rewards attention - was inherently editorial. The goal was to be written about in the way a cultural institution is written about, not in the way a festival is promoted.

Exclusive previews and launch events gave key editors and cultural voices genuine access before the festival opened to the public. Social media was used to build anticipation and community rather than simply broadcast. Word of mouth from early attendees was treated as a primary communications channel.

The experiential nature of the festival itself was the most powerful PR tool available: people who attended wanted to tell others about it. The communications strategy was designed to amplify that instinct rather than replace it.

Results

Best New Festival - UK Festival Awards.

319 pieces of coverage across national, online and regional platforms.

28 pieces of main national coverage. £132,350 AVE on national coverage alone. Total coverage AVE in the region of £400,000.

100% positive press reviews across Year 1.

40:1 ROI.

Strategic Significance

Wilderness proved that a festival audience existed for something that had not previously been offered to them - that the appetite for cultural depth, culinary quality and genuine experiential programming was real and underserved.

The format Wilderness introduced in 2011 is now standard across premium experiential marketing globally. The luxury festival model, the brand partnership frameworks, the idea of a festival as a fully realised brand world rather than a lineup with a field around it - all of it traces back to a moment when a group of people decided to build something that did not yet exist and find the audience for it afterwards.

That is still the most interesting kind of brief there is.