Arnfestivalen is a newcomer on the Swedish festival scene. With a vision of offering visitors Sweden’s best artists and the most entertaining medevial activities the festival lasted a sunny (well, most of it atleast) week in August attracting thousands of kids, parents, campers and the occasional knight Templar. All held at a medieval theme park in the west of Sweden, an enviroment built partly with material from the Arn and Troj movies.

We were initially approached to programme the festival website. However, upon presenting a more comprehensive solution our part of the project grew to doing all design work (integrating the visual language previously developed for the Arn movies), designing and programming the website, negotiating media prices, incorporating social media in the marketing and so on. We worked with a project group and created a radio jingle (a medevial remix of one of Sweden’s most popular songs) and event marketing. We also had a live chat and live video broadcast from the press center (which was open to festival visitors) where we were working during the festival. An important aspect of our work was the honesty and transparency towards press and visitors which was also acknowledged in a few newspapers, many finding it amusing that ‘a festival with a medieval theme is the most modern when it comes to marketing’.

The website was built with WordPress. Arnfestivalen had it’s own Twitter, Flickr photostream, Youtube channel, blog, Facebook group and event. Numerous ads were designed and published in some of Swedens biggest newspapers as well as in the local press. Numerous articles were written about the festival and it was featured on Swedish channel TV4 and on GP TV.