Divider with image Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016 FESTIVAL MARKETING & PR GUIDELINES

Welcome to the 2016 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival family. We’re thrilled to have you part of the program and we’re proud to bring together the wider Victorian hospitality industry to shine a light on our state as the capital of food and wine in Australia. This year we have a lot of exciting changes to tell you about! These include new media partnerships with the Herald Sun and Channel 10; a huge focus on digital communication including a beautiful new website, driving new audiences focussing on growing our social channels; and an entirely new brand, logo and creative roll out. We will be helping promote your event through the Festival’s overall marketing strategy including digital communication channels, online advertising and publicity efforts. This kit includes an overview of our key plans as well as some top tips on how you can market your own event. Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016

Key Dates: Tickets on sale: 27 November 2015 NB: all communication is embargoed until this date Festival Guide release: 31 January 2016 Distributed via Herald Sun Festival lift out release: 28 February 2016 Distributed via Herald Sun Melbourne Food and Wine Festival: 4 – 13 March 2016 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016 Umbrella Event– Keeping it Northside, Estelle

Social Media: The Festival has 130,000 avid and engaged foodies across our social media channels so it’s important that you capitalise on this and join in the conversation with us. This year through both our e-news and social communication we are going to make a considered effort to call out individual events as we think the industry events are some of the most exciting parts of the Festival and we want to celebrate you as much as possible. So be sure to 1. Follow us on: Twitter and and Facebook 2. Always use the hashtag #MFWF 3. Join in the conversation: Share our content and generate your own content too – this can be anything from behind the scenes pics, mini videos of a dish being prepped… get creative. 4. Consider social advertising – this can be a very cost effective way to get the word out to people beyond your own audience and friends.

Images & Video: Beautiful images are critical to selling your event. These will help you stand out on our website and make media much more likely to include you in press and online. Imagery : If you’ve had additional photos taken since your submission please feel free to share them with the Festival team at We will review updating your website event page as well as promoting them to media where appropriate. Please note images must be at least 300dpi for Video : Video is becoming increasingly important on social media. It’s really easy to take a short video using your phone these days, and you can download fun apps such as Cinemagraph, hyperlapse and 8mm to edit them and make them look great. We recommend you upload a video to Youtube and send us the link to so we can get it up on our website. Please note video must be under 15 secs for social media. Regional World’s Longest Lunch – Kilcunda Photographer: Rob Anderson

PR & Media Relations: The main Festival PR campaign runs November – March but you should also pitch your own publicity materials to targeted print, online and radio media. Consider sending a short summary about your event to ‘what’s on’ media e.g Herald Sun Weekend’s Live List or What’s on listings in The Saturday Age, Spectrum & The Sunday Age, M Magazine. Submit event listings to websites that receive high traffic. Two we highly recommend are That’s Melbourne and Visit Victoria.That’s MelbourneVisit Victoria If your business is open to hosting media or bloggers free of charge, please let our PR Manager know so that we can re-direct media attendance requests straight to your venue. Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016

Communicating the wider program: As mentioned, we have a renewed focus on communicating as much as we can about all of the events in the wider Festival program. This includes e-news to the growing number of consumers on our database (currently 65,000 +). We also see huge traffic to our website (last year we attracted 309,500+ unique visitors to the website overall, which was a 33% growth from 2014). We expect 30,000 people alone to visit our website on 27 November so it’s very important that your joining in the social conversation with us that day. As our website will be the cornerstone for our communication and key consumer touch point, we’ve made some considerable improvements to it this year including a complete creative refresh to reflect the new brand; new program categories to help to break down the program for our audience; which in turn should also help make your event more discoverable. Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016

Promotional material All menus/ collateral/ signage/ flyers, must include ‘Proudly Part of Melbourne Food and Wine Festival presented by Bank of Melbourne’ logo. All logo usage must be prior approved by MFWF. Please send artwork to allowing 48 hours for a response Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016

What next? That’s it for now! We will be in touch closer to tickets on sale with some fun video content for you to share over social media and help us spread the word as far and wide as possible. Also attached in this is are New logo files New logo guidelines Ticketing T&C’s Melbourne Food and Wine Festival 2016

Questions: Please contact the Melbourne Food and Wine office on or if you have any