MySpace has worked with Festival Annual to relaunch our page, with added features including festival playlists, a regular competition module, and a Twitter feed. MySpace will be supporting Festival Annual with regular homepage and run of site media across the summer.

Festival Annual is the user-generated book project launched by IU last year. Across the summer, festival goers share their photos and stories with the best content published in a book just after the festival season ends.

One winner will get the chance to drive a Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 car. All consumer facing aspects of the promotion, including visual design, competition mechanics and videos, were developed and produced by IU, working with Johnnie Walker’s sponsorship agency JMI.

The programme is active across several markets including Greece

and Australia – where it can be seen here (you will have to go through the age-gate to view).

The award was for our Festival Annual project which relied on social media platforms to solicit all its content from festival goers, and to host all galleries. Our submission outlined how we had used Twitter to target different groups of festival goers and recruit them into the community, and then later in the summer used Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to preview the book and secure online orders from those in the book.

Roxanne’s prize includes a day with PA’s top entertainment photographer. The Fan Photo Award was sponsored by Festival Annual.

Orders from HMV, Borders, Waterstone’s, Blackwell’s and Foyles will ensure the book is available throughout the whole of the country, and an order from Liberty signals that Festival Annual is set to be one of this Christmas’ hottest gift items.

In addition, we have partnered with the Festival Awards, with Festival Annual becoming the proud sponsor of the Fan Photo Award.

While the book is printing, we’ve made use of the large pile of paper generated during the design and repro phase of the book, by turning it into these limited edition notebooks, each featuring a little piece of Festival Annual on the reverse of its pages.

Notebooks produced from waste paper generated during the production of Festival Annual 09

Choose What You Read was set up by our good friend Claire Wilson, and her good friend Alfie Boyd, as a reaction to the rising tide of free papers being printed and pushed at us each day. Its monthly book-drops are now well established in London, and have recently hopped over the Atlantic to New York City.

We will be assisting Choose What You Read with becoming a properly established non-profit company, raising their profile through PR, helping them to develop sustainable funding models, and with international expansion to more cities. You can keep up with the latest CWYR news on their blog, and show your support by signing up for their nice little email updates, complete with book extracts and reviews, on the website.

To mark the demise of The London Paper last Friday, we helped organise a photocall of a CWYR bookdrop as the last copies of the free paper were being given out.

Choose What You Read offers commuters free books as an alternative to the final edition of The London Paper

We’re proud to be assisting Choose What You Read, alongside our existing partnerships with The Eden Project and with RockCorps.

This phase of the campaign has included the launch of the consumer focused PR effort, which has secured coverage in The Sun and The Independent (which you can view here) as well as an online gallery with The Guardian and extensive regional press coverage.

Festival Annual now has 4770 MySpace friends, a fast growing email database and 620 followers on Twitter.

We been mentioned on blogs including Brand Flakes for Breakfast and Data Transmission.

Over 950 photos have been uploaded to MySpace by users, in addition to the thousands added by Festival Annual’s photographers.

In a little over 10 days, we have recruited over 2,000 MySpace friends and over 500 Twitter followers – and all of this comes before we launch the PR campaign and online partner media for the project.

We have had dozens of festival goers upload photos to MySpace and tag them as Festival Annual, and have recruited a bunch of eager Glastonbury goers to take and share their photos. In addition we will be there to capture the pictures of the #Twisto group of Twitterers who are planning to meet at Glastonbury.

Festival Annual is the first ever user-generated book documenting the UK festival season.

We have also today launched a Twitter stream for Festival Annual, which will this weekend be at Isle of Wight, Download and Rockness. All festival reviews including the #FA tag will be considered for inclusion in the book, with prizes for the best festival related tweets.

We’ll be out documenting the festival summer, and inviting festival goers to submit their stories and photos for inclusion in the first ever user-generated book. 

More details will be announced shortly.

IU, together with our sister company CC-Lab and Ben Turner at Graphite Media, have booked all the main stage musical talent with a stellar line-up of Pet Shop Boys (live), Hot Chip (DJ), Little Boots (live) and a unique performance from Tom Middleton where the public will vote on which set Tom will play.