Driving a 58% Attendance Lift with Paid Media and Partnerships

We helped grow the event with new activation ideas, paid marketing support, and a strategic partnership with MartiniWorks that expanded awareness from a local crowd to a much larger enthusiast audience.

The Challenge

The Season Opener Car Show had a loyal base, but the opportunity was bigger than a standard local event push.

The goal was to increase awareness, drive attendance, improve pre-registrations, and create more reasons for people to show up, stay longer, and talk about the event afterward.

In 2025, the event had about 1,800 wristbands given at entry, 145 pre-registrations, and 10 vendors. A solid foundation. For 2026, WCEC needed to bring creative freshness to the event, and MetaMartini delivered.

Strategy

We focused on three things that directly affected event growth.

First, we helped make the event itself more compelling. A bigger event needs more than a bigger ad budget. It needs more reasons for people to care. So the team added fresh experiences like a drift ride along activation and a field concourse.

Second, we used paid marketing to increase awareness and drive measurable ticket action. In 2025, paid media focused on awareness. In 2026, we built the ad account to support both reach and purchases.

Third, we partnered Wisconsin Car Enthusiast Club with MartiniWorks to expand the event beyond the local bubble. That included content, podcast features, and Story posts to get the event in front of a broader enthusiast audience.

Local events grow fastest when the community feels like something is happening, not just that something is scheduled.

Execution

MetaMartini supported the campaign with paid advertising, event positioning, and audience expansion through MartiniWorks.

The 2026 campaign included:

• Paid Meta campaign support to drive event awareness and ticket purchases
• Facebook Event promotion that generated 508 going and 4,100 interested
• MartiniWorks partnership promotion through content, podcast features, and Story posts
• Event experience improvements, including a drift activation and field concourse
• Vendor growth support that helped increase vendor participation from 10 to 18 vendors

The campaign gave people more reasons to attend and more places to hear about it.

Which is usually the difference between “I saw that event somewhere” and “Yeah, we're going.”

The paid media worked harder too. In 2026, $2,780.15 in ad spend produced 633,829 impressions and 239 attributed ticket purchases. In 2025, $782.48 produced 223,041 impressions and no purchases, because that campaign focused only on awareness.

Why It Worked

This worked because the campaign did more than advertise the event. It improved the event, expanded the audience, and gave the enthusiast community a reason to pay attention.

The paid media created scale. The MartiniWorks partnership created reach and credibility. The new activations created a stronger on-site experience.

That combination turned awareness into attendance, interest into pre-registrations, and a local event into something with a much bigger footprint.

The result was clear: more people showed up, more people registered ahead of time, more vendors participated, and the event had far more visibility than the year before.