Clooney stole my Christmas

I've not had the restful Christmas I would of liked, mostly due to George Clooney's new film (Up In The Air - looks good) being nominated for 6 Golden Globes and me having to make a load more online banner ads than I would otherwise of had to do. To say I'm stressed is a massive understatement, having worked on this job through most of the holidays. It's certainly a scary step up in profile for my Paramount work. The last film I did was Friday 13th part 12 (I ask you) where after painstakingly animating knives slashing their way through the screen for The Sun 'homepage takeover' we were told that the Sun was a 'family' newspaper and wouldn't tolerate such violence on it's site. Perhaps sex and violence are indeed separate after all. 

Still, good to be busy and offsetting our spiralling festival costs, the number of tickets we need to sell to break even keeps creeping up. I still think of Wilf's death bed test as the dark clouds start to form over my head and it helps.

But hey, we have indie legends The Wedding Present headlining our first ever festival. I must of listened to 'Interstate 5' over 50 times over the holidays, such a massive track - go www.deershedfestival.com/music.aspx for a listen. We are chuffed. We think it places us just where we want to be musically in the festival market and it will make booking the rest of the lineup over the next few months so much easier.

Lots of thought gone into marketing messages too, bringing up some interesting discussions. For example if 2 weeks before the festival you decide that you need to sell loads more tickets should you target outside of your demographic? Our festival will appeal to families, 25-35 year old seasoned festival goers, Wedding Present fans and the folks that come along to our In The Dock nights at the Thirsk Courthouse. We are not going to strongly appeal to 16-20 year olds because we are targeting families. 16-20 year olds will go to Leeds Festival and have a much better time. The issue being really that we don't really particularly want 16-20 year olds because they tend to get hideously high/low/drunk (bless 'um) and our more grown up audience would leave saying that the festival was really good apart from that one group of lads/lasses that fell over their tent at 3 in the morning landing on top of their kids etc etc... and never come back or recommend it to their mates. This is not something we had thought about until our friend (Dr Marketing) brought it up. He never got any trouble at his 2000+ dance nights because the website had pink on it and it never appealed anyone who was likely to cause them a headache on the night. Wise.

Other news, today is Andy's first day working for us at mission control [office photo to follow]. We hope he can make good sandwiches. Andy will work on marketing and loads of other random jobs. Our office is starting to look like a call centre - the drum kit has had to go elsewhere.

In other other news, my mastery of the internet has built us a ticketing system and festival tickets are now on sale through PayPal. Be the first guinea pig to test it at www.deershedfestival.com/tickets.aspx and win an unwanted Christmas present :)