Draft Cafe x MDL Beast Festival

Draft Your Beat: Creating an Experiential Pop-Up in a Music Festival Context

Project Type
Innovation
- Service Design
Digital Marketing

Location
Saudi Arabia

Industry
F&B

Project Link

Achievements
Silver Indigo Award for ”Best Branding for Event”

Challenge

Draft Cafe is a renowned coffee shop in KSA targeting millennials and the creative community. Blue Hat was commissioned to come up with a Branding Concept for Draft Cafe’s pop-up as part of the MDL Beast music festival. MDL Beast is a three-days music festival in KSA that hosts A-list celebrities and artists from all over the world of different music genres, and showcases a list of magical series of concerts and shows with thousands of attendees.

Intervention

The booth was situated at the periphery of the main stages. Hence, the design concept and branding we had envisioned for the pop-up was immersive.Starting with the brand conceptualization, the booth was created from upcycled containers to reflect a huge stereo, and was named “Draft Your Beat”. The brand idea was based on “Bringing the Inside Out”, because we wanted the pop-up to manifest a continuation of the concert journey.

The booth acted as an additional brand touchpoint that allows customers to enjoy a sensory experience. It conveyed the same vibes of the stages, all while customers sipped on their favorite drinks. Tackling the brand’s sensory experience on all levels, we wanted to immerse the consumer in the scene and properly absorb the multi-landscape music, while engaging their senses of sight, sound and taste.

The social media graphics and the posters were designed with saturated colors merging the human elements of the brand to create a connection with the concert. We designed three posters with different music treatments to echo the different music genres. At the pop-up, bold neon colors were flashing and complementing the baristas who were also wearing branded pins and glowing accessories, as if they were DJs, while the Draft cups were branded in special editions to echo the event’s identity. We carried out all the on-ground execution and implementation in collaboration with Draft Creations, an interior design firm and sister company to Draft Cafe.

Results

As a result, “Draft Your Beat” was a complete hit. Draft Cafe has maximized their target in sales for this event and actually catered to the backstage hangouts with the performers as well. Customers were happy with the new redesign of their cups and contributed with user-generated photos on social media. The pop up brand identity became so iconic that it was featured on the @MDLBeast and @EnjoySaudi official Social Media channels.