If you’ve read our ‘we love’ blog posts before, you’ll know that a lot of them revolve around food and eating out in Leeds. Some might say we’re greedy, we just say we like our grub.

So when we got the call to say we’d won the consumer PR brief for Leeds Food and Drink Festival this year, you can imagine the yelps in the office. Our remit was to generate national and regional media coverage around the 17-day programme of events and position it as one of the largest urban food festivals in the UK.

And that’s exactly what we did. We generated an unprecedented amount of media coverage during the two-month campaign period (almost 70 pieces in total!), including The Guardian, Stylist and Shortlist, as well as front pages of local newspapers, mentions on TV, radio interviews and foodie blogger reviews all focusing on Leeds as an emerging force in the UK food and drink scene.

Social media activity was a huge success, with nearly 400 individual tweets including the hashtag #LeedsFoodFest and an audience reach of over 3m Twitter followers. Almost 90 per cent of the tweets relating to the festival were positive, and the @visitleeds Twitter account gained 550 new followers during the campaign period, while Facebook attracted 475 new fans.

Official consumer feedback also indicated that nearly two thirds of people understood that the festival was now a two-week programme of events, rather than just a weekend – a key communication objective of the PR campaign. And most importantly, footfall was at an all-time high.

The campaign generated an ROI of 5,880 per cent – that’s some going. And my personal highlight was hearing that my neighbour had gone down to the Yorkshire Food and Drink Show after hearing me talking about it on BBC Radio Leeds!

This is what the client had to say:

“Many thanks Nina and Jasmine for your hard work and commitment on the Leeds Food and Drink Festival. The coverage you achieved was excellent and played a key part in delivering what was our most successful festival yet. The creativity and drive you put into the project was second to none and we were delighted with the results which delivered a phenomenal ROI for the city.”

Job done!