Amateur bread bakers are passionate about the art of baking bread. They celebrate and practice something that many consider a dying art. The Kansas Wheat Commission, King Arthur Baking Company, and Red Star Yeast seek to acknowledge this art and grow further enthusiasm for upcoming bread bakers through the National Festival of Breads (NFB), held on a biennial basis in Manhattan, Kansas. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on travel, the 2021 event was determined to be unsafe to hold in person, but sponsors and followers of the event did not want to see another year go by without the celebration. The decision was made to host a virtual event, but new and innovative strategies were needed in order to drive traffic and engagement to an event that would be held online rather than in person. This campaign needed to solve the challenge of retaining the high involvement of previous years while taking advantage of the opportunity to reach more amateur bakers that would not have been willing to travel in years past.

By placing advertisements on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, we met our audience where they were already engaging with content that was valuable to them and highlighted the key points of the 2021 virtual event. These ads led them to visit the nfb2021.com website where they could participate in the event by submitting a recipe and encouraged them to join our Facebook Live event where they could experience the event in real-time. Audience members got a front-row seat in the comfort of their own homes. This excitement and engagement for the 2021 event ideally will build into future years and our hope is to see more engagement in recipe submissions and attendance for the in-person event.

NFB typically hosts on average 3,000 people at their live event. For 2021, we reached 24K website views and 1.5K Facebook Event views.

Plus, recipe submissions increased by 14% from the previous year.