King Kong Company are an Irish electronic band, kinda like The Prodigy. Having come from a music events and socials background, and grown up with the band, they roped me in to help in 2011 and I stayed for the next decade. It started as doing socials, booker, manager and as the band took off I got to focus on how to use social to make people go to gigs. Easy.

Through hard work, graft, stunts, content and community management we turned the band into one of the biggest in Ireland. In 2020 they were due to play the main stage at Electric Picnic (EP) but then Covid (boo).

The main stage dream did come true in 2023 when they played to 20,000 people at EP. If you don’t know the band, you might have seen them in Bobby Finger’s brilliant Jeff Bezos diorama video which features that gig.

From nowhere to main stage at the biggest festival in Ireland in 9 years is incredible. If I had to pinpoint when things changed it was over a six month period 2017.

This is what happened.

Lots of pics at the end if you make it that far!

Things weren’t always main stage.

In 2016 the band played Electric Picnic filling a 2,000 capacity tent off the back of their debut album.

In 2017 we were offered a bigger tent, a 10,000 capacity tent at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon. A slot that never fills. But we always liked a challenge.

There was no new music coming in 2017 and we wouldn’t be able to tell anyone we were playing the festival until it was officially announced. We were in the last announcement. Two weeks before the festival. A time when there’s so much noise about EP there was a danger the news of our slot would get lost.

We did not want to play to an empty tent.

Act like we’re playing it.

KKC are an energetic and visual band, most people who go to see them, come out fans. This was something we could use in our favour. The more people who saw KKC would become fans, how can we supercharge this?

So we adopted a strategy; act like we’re playing the biggest gig of our life, but we can’t tell anyone we’re doing it.

That helped us figure out what to do.

• Shoot killer content at all gigs

• Turn it into frequent posts for organic; right after a gig, edit on phones at 1am at the side of stage

• Stunts in the real world and on social, such as a beer (more on these below)

• Use paid ads to get the reach a ‘music festival’ audience with the above

• Build a paid retarget audience to keep warm to activate for any big announcements

• Have a ‘launch’ campaign once the news is released, it’s the biggest gig of your life, don’t just re-share festival content!

• Have a content plan to keep the audience laser focussed on our gig

• Responsive and prompt community management all the time to build an organic community

• Activate the paid and organic communities in tandem

• And somewhere along the way, we got really lucky!

The beer!

We worked with Yellowbelly brewers in Wexford to bring out a Buckfast style-beer. We were paid in beer (dream job), then gave all the free beer to journalists, radio DJs and fans which was all over social, in the build up to our gig at Body & Soul in June.

This resulted in some very interesting DM’s from the Monks of Buckfast Abbey who own Buckfast. It’s the first time a monk slid into our DMs. They had a licensing question which we resolved.

Body & Soul to Glastonbury Documentary.

We closed Body & Soul, in Ireland at 3am on Sunday, then we played Glastonbury at 3pm that day. We made a mini-doc out of the journey from stage to stage and stuck that on YouTube. Everything is content.

The Photo.

A photo went viral from one of the gigs that was just pure luck. It got people talking about us.

It was taken at a street festival in our hometown of Waterford. The pic is in the gallery below, we later met her parents at a gig, very nice people. I wonder if she’s still a fan.

The President of Ireland.

This was also luck, the President of Ireland invited us to an afternoon tea party at his gaff where the audience were treated to banging dance tracks about coming down. It felt like a band who came from the internet had crossed into the public eye.

Or the President had a late cancellation. We will assume not!

The Content Plan.

After every gig; edit and post from backstage, then follow up with more clips for the next 2 days. Keeping building that retargeting audience.

The band are so electric and visual that capturing lots of deadly short clips was easy. The more deadly clips people saw on social the more they wanted to check us out at gigs over those six months. The more people we got to gigs the more fans we converted.

We had a serious content plan; especially for the big announcement and the two weeks leading up to the gig. Most acts just reshare festival content. We shot our own video content capturing the mood of the band at our announcement.

Then it was multiple posts per day, some in organic only for the hardcore fans, some in paid for the more passive fans.

Community Management.

So often overlooked. If someone leaves a comment, they have either just spent their hard earned cash on a ticket or they will in the future. A little acknowledgement goes a long way. Same for festivals.

By the time we were announced for EP the comments were off the charts. I stayed up till 1am just replying to people. I think I’d probably made 10k replies. And most the people were some laugh, you get to know them in the comments then meet them at gigs. That’s an actual community, so later when we asked fans to shoot something at the gig (coming up in the Post Gig Content section) for us they jumped on board.

Full House.

We did it. 10,000 people in a tent at 3pm on a Sunday at EP.

This is how building a community pays off.

Community doesn’t end there.

Post Gig Content.

Months in advance we worked out all the things we could do before, during and after the gig to make it unforgettable.

One idea we had was to make a video at the gig, but the best angle to film a raucous gig is from the audience. The stage is too far from the action. We came up with a plan to recruit audience members, brief them in a private Facebook Group and get them to record one track at a specific time, then send us the footage to edit. We received footage from 100-ish people and turned it into this video.

Post Gig Impact.

The day after the EP gig we announced an Ireland and UK tour. Thanks to EP, people couldn’t get enough of the band. Tickets flew. Every single date sold out.

Except all of the English ones. Lol.

In 2018 - we had the same slot, they made the tent a little bigger.

In 2019 - yep, we’re back, same tent, bigger and packed again. A social media company listed the most talked about acts at the festival, we came in at number 6, behind Billie Eilish, The Strokes, Christine & The Queens, Hozier and Florence and the Machine. That’s insane!

In 2020 - we were booked for the main stage on Friday evening. The exact same slot Billie Eilish had the year before. When King Kong Company got together the idea of playing EP was a dream, but to make it all the way to the main stage was truly remarkable.

Literally a dream come true for everyone, not just the band but the lights, sound, visuals team working on each show. A team of 14 people who make each show.

Then Covid put a stop to everything.

During Covid, The Irish Times did a ‘Five Iconic Moments of EP’ and listed; Arcade Fire in 2005, The Fall, Hoizer, Billie Eilish (2019) and ourselves closing the Body & Soul arena in 2019. It’s mental re-reading that list.

In 2023 - the main stage dream actually happened.

But in 2018 I had my own mainstage moment. After the KKC gig I was stood backstage on my own editing on my phone. A guy asked me what I did in the band, I told him. He congratulated me, he thought the band had the best socials, entertaining, fun and everyone was talking about them. The band might have had 13,000 people at their feet that day, I had one. This was my moment to shine, I took a swig of beer, turned back to him. But he was talking to someone else at that stage.

My moment of glory had come and gone.