Midhurst Jazz, Food & Blues Festival

We work with the Midhurst Jazz, Food & Blues Festival, a multi-venue celebration bringing world-class jazz, blues and food to the historic West Sussex town of Midhurst.

Now, we'd already landed some quality coverage for the festival in the summer, including pieces in the i Paper and UK Festival Insights.

But with the main event not taking place until November, we knew these recent wins wouldn't carry us all the way through.

So as we headed into September, the challenge was to create fresh news hooks that would keep people talking in the months before it arrived.

And that's where the idea came in.

Rather than simply repeating the line-up news, we wanted to give local people a reason to feel part of it.

So we created a competition offering a school band the chance to perform on stage at the festival for the very first time.

It gave us something genuinely new to talk about, and it opened the door to a different audience - young musicians, their families and the schools around them.

Pushing it out to media, the story landed with The Family Grapevine, and with Sussex Local.

Both titles sit right in the heart of the audience the festival wants to reach.

A great reminder that when the news runs dry, creating your own opportunity is often the best way to stay in the conversation.