This wasn’t a standard digital marketing problem. There’s no evergreen funnel that works the same in Tamworth as it does in Warracknabeal. Every show is its own product, in its own market, with its own audience size, its own timing, and its own logistics.

Three distinct advertising challenges, each requiring a different strategic approach.

The national tour. Fifty to seventy individual shows per season, each in a different town, each needing its own campaign with location-specific creative and geo-targeted delivery. Most of these towns are small. The targetable audience within an 80km radius might be a few thousand people. That means frequency management becomes critical. In a town of 800, your ad is going to show up repeatedly. You need enough creative diversity that people aren’t seeing the same thing five times a week and tuning out. And you need to start early enough to build awareness but not so early that the budget burns before the decision window opens.

The Katherine home show. The permanent attraction runs during the dry season and the audience is tourists, not locals. Katherine’s resident population is around 6,000. The people you need to reach are planning a trip to the Top End. They’re in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth. The targeting problem is essentially inverted. Instead of reaching people near the venue, you need to reach people who are nowhere near the venue but are about to be.

Music promotion. A newer addition to the scope. Tom is a recording artist with six studio albums, and promoting music through paid channels is a fundamentally different exercise to promoting live events. Different platforms, different creative, different conversion metrics.

Built and managed the paid media infrastructure across all three fronts, running campaigns across five touring seasons and counting.

Tour advertising. Each show gets its own campaign built around location targeting with a radius calibrated to the size of the town. Small town, wider radius. People out bush will drive an hour or more for a good show. Creative is where the real work happens. For every tour, we run a mix of formats designed to survive high frequency in small audiences. Tour announcement posts. A testimonial video of real attendees from previous shows, raw and unscripted. A professionally produced tour highlight reel. And a casual piece of Tom and Annabel in the arena talking about what the show actually is. That creative diversity isn’t a nice-to-have. In small towns where the same few thousand people are seeing your ads repeatedly, it’s the difference between building anticipation and building annoyance. Campaigns launch roughly two months ahead of each show date, with spend structured to build through to the event.

Katherine home show. Completely different targeting strategy. Rather than geo-targeting around a venue, we’re identifying and reaching people in the trip-planning phase for Northern Territory travel. People researching Top End holidays, people who’ve shown interest in outback tourism, people in major capital cities during the months when Katherine visitation peaks. The ad itself isn’t selling a show. It’s selling a reason to include Katherine on the itinerary.

Music promotion. In 2025, we added album promotion to the scope with the release of Tom’s sixth studio album, “Here’s To You.” Paid media strategy designed to drive streams, awareness, and chart performance in the window around release. The album debuted at number one on the ARIA Top 20 Australian Country Albums Chart and number one on the AIR Independent Albums Chart. For context, that chart includes every Australian country release. Independent or major label. Tom’s album hit the top spot on both.

Five touring seasons. The shows are fundamentally bigger than when we started. What were once modest regional gatherings now regularly draw hundreds of attendees, with larger shows exceeding a thousand guests. More shows per tour. More towns on the schedule. The growth in tour scale is a direct result of the paid media engine making it commercially viable to add dates in towns that wouldn’t have justified the logistics cost of showing up before.

That’s the part people miss about event advertising. It’s not just about selling tickets to existing shows. When you can reliably fill a 400-seat show in a town of 2,000 people, you can add that town to the tour. The advertising doesn’t just promote the business. It expands the territory.

The numbers are strong. Across multiple tours, we’ve maintained a cost per ticket sold that keeps every show commercially viable and a return on ad spend that justifies the investment at scale. On an annual paid media investment that runs into six figures, the touring operation generates multiples of that in ticket revenue.

But the real story is what this engagement demonstrates about how we think. This isn’t a campaign you set up once and optimise. This is: how do you sell a ticket to a live event in a regional town two months from now, to people who might drive 80 kilometres to get there, without wasting budget on an audience that was never going to convert? How do you target tourists who haven’t booked their trip yet? How do you get an independent country album to number one on a national chart?
Different problems. Same discipline. Understand the audience. Build the right structure. Choose the right creative. Measure what matters.

Five years in, we’re still here.