Manchester has such a rich musical heritage, it made perfect sense to focus on this as a reason to visit the city. We decided to position this post-industrial powerhouse as an unmissable destination for US music fans.

We created an interactive map and a detailed blog post exploring Manchester's popular music culture - from The Hollies in the 60s, through the heady Madchester 80s and right up to the present day.

BRIEF:

Promote Manchester as a desirable destination for Virgin Atlantic's US holidaymakers.

EXECUTION:

In order to increase the reach of our post, we partnered with the award-winning Manchester Taxi Tours, and a local Instagram influencer.

I travelled around Manchester in the Manchester Taxi Tours taxi with tour-guide John and Instagrammer Ronnie, discovering all I could about the city's musical past and present, in order to write the blog post. Manchester is a city I know very well, but there were many stories and locations I'd neither heard nor visited before.

The blog post I wrote shared these classic stories with a wider audience, and introduced readers to the spaces and venues that are driving Manchester's music scene today.

When viewed in situ, users can click on the map to reveal photos of the building depicted, and discover how each location links to a different Manchester band.

Post snippet:

View the whole article here

Busy making notes in the ring at Salford Lads Club

We outreached the article to Marketing Manchester, Visit Manchester and VisitBritain. It has enjoyed:

 - 140,000 social impressions on twitter

 - 255 social shares

 - 2 referring domains

and remains Edinburgh DigitasLBi's top performing blog post.