No shroom for error! Making magic with mushrooms for Wake The Tiger
Creating magic with mushrooms for Wake The Tiger.
Wake The Tiger
Wake The Tiger crashed onto the scene when they opened their one-of-a-kind, mind-bending immersive experience in an old paint factory in St Phillips in 2022 and needless to say, we were instantly obsessed.
Having gotten to know the team through our sister agency, Hey!What?, who were responsible for their incredible launch graphics which you no doubt saw all around the city, we knew since day one that we wanted to work with the team. After several chats with Marketing Director Lucy, we were appointed to pull together some creative campaigns around their new ‘Mushroom’ trail, which was launched as part of their regeneration last Autumn.
Having closed for a few weeks in the summer to add some additional features to the experience, Wake The Tiger were looking to reopen with a bang, and tasked us to create some interactive campaigns to promote their new mushroom trail - an educational, family friendly feature whereby visitors had to locate the different mushrooms around the experience - and in turn they could learn about the part they play in our ecosystem.
If ever there was a client we knew we could go all out creatively with, it was Wake The Tiger - so we set about planning…
What they needed
What we did
In our experience, some of the most engaging interactive campaigns are relatively straightforward and have a good incentive to get people involved. Working with Wake The Tiger’s unrivalled props team, we created seven golden mushrooms (you see where we’re going here!) to be hidden in different locations across the city across a week long period. Attached to each mushroom was a different prize - ranging from entry to the experience, to membership, merch and mushroom tinctures from Bristol Fungarium.
In the run up to launch week, we spent several days whizzing around town and placing the mushrooms in various iconic Bristol locations, filming clues to help people to find them, and obviously being quizzed by the public as to why two grown women were planting golden mushrooms around the city! The videos were then edited to be in-keeping with Wake The Tiger’s signature psychedelic style.
We released the videos daily over the course of a week, placing the mushroom in situ just before we released the video each day. The entry mechanism called for whoever found the mushroom to take a selfie and post it on Instagram, tagging Wake The Tiger - so it was then a case of us eagerly waiting to see who found it.
In a weird stroke of Bristol influencer fate, our very first mushroom was found by none other than Bos Finesse. We knew Bos was a big fan of Wake The Tiger, so after organising his prize we decided to make the most of the opportunity to see if he’d be up for doing a collaboration on the final mushroom of the week - this gave us an even bigger platform to spread the word about the new feature to the experience and engage a much wider audience.
Lucy Jarjoura, Marketing Director
Duchess Media are the perfect extension to our team. They took the time getting to know us, our audience and our challenges, before applying their Duchess magic. From strategising to planning to injecting their creativity and executing, they do it all, and I couldn't be more grateful to have them on board.
Wake The Tiger
Over the course of the week the campaign gained huge momentum and generated a real buzz, with people poised and ready to run as soon as we released the videos.
The videos gained well over 100,000 views across Instagram and TikTok, and over 1,500 likes, undoubtedly driving interest and sales to Wake The Tiger’s reopening, with ticket sales soaring.
In addition to the mushroom campaign, we also worked with the team to create a series of ‘housekeeping’ videos. Whilst they might not be quite as wacky the golden mushroom campaign, they are essential in showing people the need-to-know information - such as how to get to Wake The Tiger from key points in the city, and which modes of public transport they could take. These videos performed extremely well and are still getting views six months down the line - proof that you should never underestimate the importance of day to day content!