How to get fans to Sesame Street

The Challenge

Sesame Street, in partnership with Lifelike Touring, were bringing their iconic characters to Australia for the first time in 50 years. They needed to maximise ticket sales with a minimal budget. But when your brand is universally loved by multiple generations of kids and parents – how do you define your primary audience?

Our solution

We knew finding Sesame Street fans online would be easy – come on, who doesn’t love Elmo! But likes and shares weren’t going to pack the theatre. We needed to target those most likely to buy tickets.

Given Sesame Street had never engaged their audience with direct response marketing, there was no existing data to shape a digital strategy. So we used the early phases of our digital media campaign to test and learn.

Testing multiple creative approaches across search, social, video and display, we tracked analytics across each medium, quickly identifying the best-performing messages and most receptive audiences.

We shifted spend daily, diverting budget from underperforming approaches to those driving ticket sales, helping us discover our most passionate audience – women aged between 35 and 40 on social.

Then we went to market at scale, producing a set of numbers that would make The Count proud – 65,000 tickets sold in 90 days, 30% conversion rate and a 70% drop in cost per booking.