Joburg Ballet had been struggling to sell tickets for its productions. Like any classical art form, it simply has to attract a younger, more diverse audience to survive. The problem is, for most millennials ballet is not even on the radar as a viable form of entertainment. To them, it’s just a boring, irrelevant old art form.

So, when Joburg Ballet approached us to promote its upcoming production of Unbound, we knew we needed to do more than simply meet a sales target. We needed to position ballet as a relevant and appealing form of entertainment amongst millennials.

The cool kids weren’t even thinking about ballet, let alone buying tickets to productions. This meant that we needed to take ballet to them. So we approached Superbalist.com, South Africa’s biggest, coolest online store, and pitched an idea:

Cross-sell Superbalist's new range of activewear and Joburg Ballet’s production of Unbound.

Ballet, like most of the classical art forms, is struggling. It needs to expand its audience base in order to survive. And this means attracting and appealing to millennials. The problem is, for most millennials ballet is not even on the radar as a viable form of entertainment. To them, it’s just a boring, irrelevant old art form.

Because our intended audience wasn’t even thinking about ballet, let alone buying tickets to productions, we needed to take ballet to them. So we approached Superbalist.com, by far South Africa’s biggest, coolest online store among millennials, and pitched them an idea to cross sell Joburg Ballet’s production of Unbound and the new Superbalist activewear range.

This meant Superbalist shoppers could see ballet as more than twirls and tutus. They saw that it could be contemporary, relevant and cool. They could also see the hustle behind the scenes, and people just like themselves.

Modelling Superbalist activewear while they rehearsed for the show, the Joburg Ballet dancers infiltrated Superbalist.com as the stars of a fully integrated retail campaign.

We swapped out all the regular Superbalist product shots, created trailers for Unbound that we seeded on Superbalist’s social channels, and a posted day-in-the-life documentaries and behind the scenes footage on Superbalist’s lifestyle section.

At checkout, Superbalist shoppers could then add tickets for the Unbound production to their carts.

Joburg Ballet exceeded their ticket sales targets for Unbound by 5%. But much more importantly, Unbound’s 2 week run had the youngest ever audience for a Joburg Ballet production.

This campaign was created with a production budget of just $7 494. Superbalist saw so much value in the content for their own platforms – the online store, lifestyle blog and all social channels – that they ran it at no cost to Joburg Ballet. The campaign was thus exposed to hundred of thousands of millennials with a media budget of $0.