Daz Flatman, Operations Manager at ATA Events, on automating the overload.
ATA Events promotes some of the biggest EDM festivals and family music experiences across the UK and Malta: 80 to 100 events a year, 90+ staff, headline acts, multiple event brands under one roof. At that scale, marketing efficiency is not a nice-to-have. A few points on acquisition cost, multiplied across a full festival calendar, is real money.
The challenge
Three expensive inefficiencies were compounding. The team was paying to reach audiences it should already have owned, letting the ad platforms relearn from scratch every campaign instead of starting from real customer data. A large database of past attendees sat unused. And the marketing infrastructure was a patchwork of landing pages and disconnected tools with no coherent thread between them.
Underneath it all, a customer-service bottleneck: 200 to 300 enquiries a week, answered by hand, across every social channel, in the narrow, high-pressure windows before events that often sell out days beforehand.
Built in layers.
Multi-channel AI customer service across every social platform and the websites, built on a proper knowledge base so responses stayed on-brand for each event's personality. It now handles 300+ enquiries a week and moves people through the buying journey, backed by SMS, WhatsApp and email nurture matched to how each generation actually communicates.
Low-barrier pre-registration campaigns that capture interest early in the cycle, feeding audience data straight into the platforms. We activated their existing database for lookalike and custom audiences, and coordinated learning across Google and Meta so budget stopped being burned on the algorithm relearning every time.
Their customer database, previously dormant, became the engine for targeting, with performance tracking and clear KPIs against pre-registration and conversion.
Cost per acquisition fell 31%, delivering profitable presale ticket performance below target across multiple brands. AI automation gave every team member 10+ hours back each week, freeing them for the high-value work of actually producing festivals. And a scalable framework now supports the full 80-to-100-event calendar without the manual grind.
The AI automation has been a game-changer for our festival promotion. We've saved massive amounts of time while actually improving our customer service quality and response speed across all our events.