Biggest and most beautiful festival in Finland through persistent work

Held each summer in Turku, Ruisrock is Finland’s oldest continuously running festival. Mellakka has been comprehensively involved in the strategic planning and implementation of the festival’s communications and PR since 2015.

One of the cornerstones of our collaboration is the use of influencers, which has been purposefully developed year by year. Finland’s first influencer backup band was not born in Ruissalo by chance! The same focus is on growing community and producing interesting content on social media.

When the Covid pandemic began creating dark clouds over mass events, it was time to come up with new ways to interact and stay relevant to the audience, which ultimately couldn’t make it to the festival for two years. TikTok was primarily used for this purpose, which we were able to conceptualise for Ruisrock from the start. Mellakka is responsible for channel development, coordinating the influencer roster and content sparring. In a few years, the channel has gained more than 20,000 followers, and the best posts attract more than 200,000 views.

There has also been a desire to look at festival communications from a fresh angle, and artificial intelligence was used already in the 2017 event when our client Affecto conducted a study based on billions of data points about the emotional states of the festival audience. The communications output from the results led to media headlines about the happiness level of Ruisrock audiences and also led to the Grand One award for the best use of data in 2018.

During our years together, Ruisrock has continued to grow into the biggest and most beautiful festival in Finland. Every summer has its highlights. In summer 2022, hardly anyone could have missed our social media photographer’s shot of the Prime Minister of the time, Sanna Marin, arriving at the festival, which became one of the most widely shared and widespread Finnish social media images!