City of Santa Ana’s Winter Village

MISSION OBJECTIVES

In 2021, the City of Santa Ana had the vision to build an outdoor ice skating rink and holiday festival to unite the community after nearly two years in pandemic-driven isolation. A few hurdles loomed in the way.

• First, the event coincided with other similar regional holiday and seasonal activities.
• Second, the location of the festival and ice skating rink had low visibility to the public because it was in the middle of the Santa Ana Civic Center.

Our mission was to bring mass awareness and excitement to this new community event and drive attendance and ice rink ticket sales during a season saturated with holiday messaging and events.

STRATEGIC FLIGHT PLAN

With decades of experience in attractions, event marketing and PR, our team of Rocketeers knew the only way to build a meaningful presence for the Santa Ana Winter Village during this time was to flood the market with on-point messaging. Developing custom creative gave the event a grassroots community feel, which was essential to the City of Santa Ana to encourage local participation.

The team crafted an integrated, multilingual marketing and PR plan targeting Orange County residents with a hyper-local focus on the City of Santa Ana. The event advertising utilized a mix of high-visibility placements, including billboards, pole banners and door hangers, and targeted digital media like search, display and social media. This media strategy ensured the frequency of messages across our target audience.

Simultaneously, a PR campaign garnered DMA-wide coverage (broadcast, digital and print) and local reach (local media, influencers and strategic partnerships). The result was a full-scale marketing and PR effort that penetrated the market for six months and made the Santa Ana Winter Village an Orange County destination for the holiday season.

MISSION RESULTS

The winter event saw consistent visitors throughout the holiday season, and the City of Santa Ana achieved its overarching goal of uniting the community for the holidays. The advertising campaign was successful across the funnel, from garnering general awareness to online ticket purchase conversions. The PR campaign resulted in 39 placements across print, online and broadcast media outlets and garnered more than 52 million impressions.