How We Helped Oregon Shakespeare Festival Launch TikTok and Reach New Audiences

The Challenge: Building Future Audiences

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is a nationally renowned theatre arts organization that presents a rotating repertory season of up to 10 plays and musicals, including illuminating interpretations of Shakespeare, other enduring classics, and new works. It is one of the largest nonprofit theatres in the nation with three stages, including the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre. And until December of 2024, their marketing team had never invested in TikTok. 

When budget shifts freed up thousands of media dollars going into the 2025 season, leadership saw an opportunity: test the platform’s potential to reach younger demographics and experiment with new and timely audience-building strategies. The campaign wasn’t just about ticket sales; it was about cultivating future audiences for one of the country’s most celebrated theater organizations.

The Strategy: Three Campaigns, One Bold Platform Launch

1. Season Branding – Upper Funnel Reach

A broad awareness campaign focused on clicks delivered the majority of impressions and site traffic. Native-style TikTok content, like behind-the-scenes videos exploring OSF’s costume history, kept engagement rates high. By monitoring engagement closely, the team was able to refresh videos as soon as performance dipped, ensuring momentum throughout the campaign.

2. 2025 Season Trailers – Driving Purchases

This campaign leaned into trailers. While TikTok “best practices” often push for native-style content (and that content type was very successful in the upper funnel campaign), OSF’s existing production-specific trailers performed nearly as well in terms of engagement, and drove the majority of purchases. The takeaway: authentic storytelling and strong creative assets can thrive on TikTok, even in non-traditional formats.

3. Hyper-Local Medford – Community Engagement

Creative called out local misconceptions, and promoted OSF’s rush ticket program. This hyper-local approach resonated, with the highest purchase conversion rate and lowest cost per purchase of the three campaigns. 

The Results: Reach, Engagement, and a Younger Online Audience

Across all three campaigns, OSF’s TikTok debut delivered over 8M impressions, 35K website key page views, and nearly 100 purchases. Even though overall ROI was negative (expected for such a large awareness push, with more than 50% of the substantial spend going towards the highest part of the funnel), OSF embraced the results as a win in expanding reach and engagement within their immediate community.

Moreover, the cost per click and social engagement rates on TikTok were comparable to those that OSF saw across Meta campaigns during the same time period. This is particularly notable when considering that Meta campaigns spent about 33% of the budget reaching bottom- and middle-of-funnel audiences, whereas this lower-funnel targeting made up just 24% of the TikTok investment. 

Perhaps most importantly, OSF reached a new audience segment: 18–24-year-olds made up 38% of overall impressions and 42% of clicks. These campaigns not only built awareness, but also planted the seeds for future audience growth.

The Takeaway

OSF’s first-ever TikTok campaigns didn’t just generate impressive reach and measurable conversions—they successfully introduced the organization to a new generation of theatergoers. By strategically blending native content with trailers and hyper-local messaging, OSF proved TikTok could be a powerful tool for both community engagement and long-term audience cultivation.

CI’s expertise in digital advertising and content strategy helped OSF take a bold step forward, positioning TikTok as a key channel for building sustainable future audiences.