We’ve got two tickets to give away for the massive 2008 Big Day Out Festival, which is shaping up to be one of the most exciting and diverse yet. From Bjork to Billy Bragg to Brand New – we reckon they’ve got it covered this year.

To enter the draw, all you need to do is sign up to receive our monthly newsletter by sending us an email to competitions@nzlive.com.

Last week Big Day Out made their latest announcement of acts to join the impressive line-up. The new additions to Big Day Out 2008 are:

Spoon, Brand New, Anti-Flag, Carl Cox, Kate Nash, Shy Child, Enter Shikari, Operator Please, Unkle (live), Krafty Kuts & MC Dynamite, Die! Die! Die!, The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello acoustic), Dr Octagon with Kutmaster Kurt, Aceyalone, Op Shop, Pluto, Scribe, Liam Finn, Tiki Tanne, Havoc, Collapsing Cities, Bleeders, Supergroove, The Checks and Dam Native.

These acts join the already announced:

Rage Against the Machine, Bjork, Arcade Fire, Shihad, LCD Sound System, Dizzee Rascal, Billy Bragg, The Clean, Katchafire, The Phoenix Foundation, SJD, Grinspoon, Cut Off Your Hands, Hilltop Hoods, Paul Kelly, Battles, Young Sid, Antagonist, Motocade and White Birds.

Smart approach to marketing
We’re also really impressed with the way that Big Day Out approaches their marketing. With their funky, Sergeant-Pepper-influenced designs and the simple, but user-friendly website, they’ve made their brand instantly recognisable.

Even the way they announce their acts shows they’ve got it sussed. Big Day Out announce a large part of the programme as tickets go on sale and then phase announcements for the rest of the line-up. This generates a huge amount of speculation – with fans pondering who might make the next BDO cut – on blogs, chats and forums.

And even though the stellar line-up of events almost guarantees a sell-out, BDO offers ticket giveaways to a bunch of folk who help to do their promotion for them. Smart and simple!

Ticket hawkers beware!
This year Big Day Out organisers are actively discouraging ticket touting so that “genuine punters” will get a chance to see their favourite acts. It is difficult to imagine how they might effectively control this. Big Day Out organisers have limited ticket sales to four per person and have instigated strict conditions of sale and admission:

Selling tickets for higher than the face value is a breach of the conditions of sale. In an effort to ensure that our tickets are available to genuine punters at the price we have set, every customer will need to read and agree to our Conditions of Sale and Admission before they can purchase tickets. These can be viewed on our website now. Tickets sold on auction sites will be declared invalid and the ticket holder will be refused entry. You have been warned.

It will be very interesting to see how successful they are at curbing ticket hawkers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 8:41 am and is filed under Events, NZLive.com, Technology, Building audiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.