Stealing the Kendal Mountain Festival Spotlight
[Creative]
ALL EYES ON US
Kendal 2024 was the year of ACM.
Not our words, but a very nice (and accurate) sentiment talked up by the organisers, clients, media, KOLs, and even competitor agencies who couldn’t escape our festival omnipresence and unapologetic crowd nabbing throughout the manic weekend.
See, we’ve racked up a timesheet-imploding number of Kendal team hours over the years. We’ve peered in on enough drag-and-drop brand stands and dry panel talks to know that brand education starts not with big wafty messages or exciting new products, but by getting bums on seats and ears in stories.
It’s why every activation idea leading to the unofficial ACM takeover of Kendal had to pass a simple test: will the concept jump out of the programme and lasso the punters/media in with a single sentence? The result was a schedule packed with more ACM clients than ever on site, showing up in local breweries, packed-out quiz rooms, hangover-soothing ASMR soundscapes, and Utah (thanks, Outdoor Recreation Archive).
And it’s why the YETI Yurt became the most popular activation on the site, by a Lake District mile.
Our huge, nomadic, creative canvas palace is where the tear-up-the-programme mentality shone clearest. It was a creative totem to YETI’s ambassadors, communities, product stories, and brand values, all elevated and united in the most authentically entertaining way possible.
We had live folk songs and fishing tales with friends of the brand. We respun the classic cinema screening by giving the audience an active role in what they watched. We served up 60-odd sausages with a YETI BBQ pro before diving into a celebration of fearless women in male-dominated industries. And we’re going to do it all over again in 2025.
