Podcast Summary 

  • Hay Festival Global is a global charity that creates accessible spaces for cultural exchange and pathways into the creative industries. It was founded in 1987 in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, a town known as the world's first "book town."
  • The flagship Hay Festival UK event is an 11-day festival held each May/June, attracting around 150,000 people. It features a diverse program of book-related events as well as panels, debates, and discussions on the intersection of culture and the wider world.
  • Hay Festival has expanded internationally over the past 20 years, with additional festivals and forums held across 5 continents.
  • A key innovation was taking the festival to Cartagena, Colombia to host an event for the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez who was too old to travel to the UK.
  • Hay Festival's audience is diverse but skews older, with around 60% being repeat attendees. The organisation works to reach new, younger audiences through initiatives like busing in students and partnering with platforms like TikTok.
  • In addition to engaging audiences, Hay Festival must manage relationships with key stakeholders like the local community, artists, funders, and media partners like the BBC who help promote the events.
  • The organisation has expanded beyond the flagship festival to include a book club, awards, and branded products, though they are constantly evaluating their priorities and product offerings to stay focused on their charitable mission.

 

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated. 

 

Kiran Kapur (00:01):
This week on the Cambridge Marketing Podcast, we find out how you market a festival.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (00:06):
Comms is the responsibility of everyone in an organisation. These relationships, which we are managing every single day, need to be managed and need to sort of fit within the brand. And they're crucial to everything we do. Every festival and project is a community effort for us, no matter where we're doing it.

Kiran Kapur (00:24):
You are listening to the Cambridge Marketing Podcast. We are looking at festivals this week and how you market a festival, and I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Chris Bone, who is the communications director at Hay Festival Global. Chris, welcome. Could we start with what Hay Festival Global is? Perhaps start with the history because it's grown so much, could we start with what the original core product was?

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (00:49):
Sure thing. And Han, thank you for having me. This is a real pleasure and honour. It's great just to talk comms for a little bit outside of the day-to-day of our work. And yeah, think about the bigger picture stuff. So Hay Festival Global. So yeah, I'll give a snapshot introduction. So we're a global charity. We exist today to create accessible spaces for cultural exchange and offer pathways into the creative industries. And we were founded in Hay and y, which is known as the world's first book town in Wales. And I think the important thing to know is sort of years ago before the internet, if you wanted to sell your secondhand books, let's say you, I dunno, inherited a shelf from someone, you would go to Hay, you wouldn't be able to sell them anywhere else really. And so from this sort of place, an idea of selling those books, lots of independent bookshops came into being.

(01:40):
And because there were so many of them, they all would take a specialty. And so we would have a crime fiction shop or a gardening bookshop. So you would go to this town of 1,500 people and find 40 to 50 different bookshops and it became a real paradise for book lovers. And the festival itself was born out of that. So the Florence family who founded it in 1987 just thought, what if we brought writers to the town to meet their readers and have conversations about books and therefore the wider world around us. And this really took off. So within sort of five years, it outgrown its sites in the centre of town. After 10 years we sort of took over a field, built our own venues. I've been with the festival for the past decade, so with 38 this year, and even in that time I've sort of seen a lot of change.

(02:32):
But yeah, primarily it sort of started in that town to bring writers and readers together. And 20 years ago we began working internationally. So we took the model to Cartena to India in Columbia, and that was basically down to Gabrielle Gassier, Macca, the great novelist. We really wanted him to come to Wales, but he was too old to travel, didn't want to make the journey, so we thought let's bring the festival to him as a one-off. And again, it sort of took root, this community really with a grassroots feeling, born out the land there and became a very successful addition in itself. And from that it grew and grew and we now operate 65 days of activity annually across five continents. We have festivals in the UK but we also run smaller forums. We do a lot of education and outreach projects as well.

Kiran Kapur (03:23):
So I think if you haven't been to Hay on Y, it's almost impossible to describe what a quaint place it is, what a lovely place it is and how full of books it is even now. I mean it's an absolute paradise if you are into books, but you will do nothing but pick up books, put down books, read books. I mean it is just the most amazing place. But it is tiny.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (03:44):
It's tiny. And so if we just zoom in, we're most known for this spring festival in the uk, the original Hay Festival event for sure. And that's 11 days over the half term, week end of May, beginning of June every year. This year everyone should come 22nd of May to the 1st of June. And what we do there is, so we build this tented village. We have 12 venues that vary in size from a 100 seater through to a 1,700 seater and bring in each year about 150,000 people to enjoy events across this 11 day programme. And the events, I mean sort of 50% of our programme is book related directly. So we're launching the very best new fiction and nonfiction in that 50%. And that's conversations with writers, readings, sort of mini performances based on the books. And then the other 50% of the programme, which is different to other book festivals, is our own kind of creative curation with panels, debates, discussions, performances.

(04:46):
And we're really interested in this sort of intersection of culture and the wider world. So what is the role culture plays in politics, in environmental science and all the other things that have such a huge bearing on our life. And we believe that these kind of events are really important on those stages as well. So ideas can change the world. These sort of spaces are democratic, they're open to free expression and it's about that kind of cross-pollination. So that's why over the years we've had some incredible speakers come to our events. So we've had Dua Lipa, stormy, Hillary Clinton, her Royal Highness, the Queen, they've all been to Hay Festival. It's because it's that sort of bed of ideas that people really want to engage with.

Kiran Kapur (05:29):
And then the other thing you said when you were giving the history was, well, we wanted to get Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this amazing writer. He was just too old to travel, so we just thought we'd take the festival to Columbia. I can't imagine the thought process that goes there, but what a fantastic piece of innovation. Well, literally we can't take the mountains, so we'll go to the mountain. It's a brilliant idea.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (05:53):
Yeah, I mean our international director, Christina Fuentes, who's based in London but sort of heads up our international work is incredible. She's won 400 medals around the world, had keys given to her to every city because the vision that it takes to create something like that is, yeah, I find it very inspiring every day. And the thing with Hay Festival is the ideas. I mean in any cultural institution, the ideas can come quite easily, but it's how you make them happen and why. And I think this is where sort of orienting ourselves around this charitable mission is really important because every decision we make, every place we go, every partner we work with, you're sort of always thinking about how that relates to this mission, what we exist for in the world. And audiences are a huge part of that. So wasn't, I mean it's a good anecdote that Gabrielle Gussie Macon, which is why I told it.

(06:49):
But I think a big part of our work is really engaging communities and it's very hard to do that unless you really take things to them. One of the big challenges, which I'm sure we'll dig into more with our event in a sort of rural space is that difficulty of bringing an audience in and there is therefore this sort of built in elitism to that. So people need to travel, they need to have accommodation. We don't only have this threshold problem that a lot of cultural institutions have where people might think, oh, that's culture. It's not for me. But we also have these physical barriers that we work within our comms to break down.

Kiran Kapur (07:26):
Yes, that's also a very interesting point, isn't it? I just wanted to come back on the Columbia. Yes, I appreciate the Garcia market is a nice anecdote, but what I was interested in was the fact that you took a brand which is grassroots based in a local community and took it somewhere else and made it also grassroots and based in a local community. You just happened to have a nice big headline writer that could come along, which is obviously important from a marketing perspective.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (07:50):
Super important. And it really speaks to this thing which we'll come back to again and again, I'm sure we are a charity, we're there for this mission. Everything is built out of that purpose and all of our successes come through that partnership community, working, everything you can point to with the festival, the glamorous stuff all the way through to the day-to-day outreach we do. Where it's successful is all because of that creative collaboration. So it's where bringing people together, creating those spaces, and then the magic happens. And that's not down to us creating the space, it's down to the contributors that come in and really do it.

Kiran Kapur (08:27):
Which is also interesting that you are physically bringing people together in what we would now can describe as this very sort of digital online world, but actually physically bringing people together also matters. So can we discuss who your customers are? You mentioned something, you mentioned that you've got physical barriers and also there's a mental barrier that says culture is not for me. So who are your customers and how do you go out to get more customers?

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (08:50):
Yeah, so I should say mean in the introduction. One thing that's interesting is that, so we as a charity, which means that obviously we have a mixed funding model, we have sponsors, funders, foundations, but 70% of our income each year is from ticket sales, which means that our audience is absolutely central to what we do, both in terms of the purpose and why we're doing it, but also the tickets we sell fund the work we are able to do here and around the world. So we really focus a lot on who our audience is. Something we've been doing more and more, particularly post covid when we saw those assumed audience behaviours change. So I think if we just sort of focus I guess in the UK, because that's probably simplest to contain it, we use the audience agency spectrum segmentation, which you might be familiar with.

(09:38):
A lot of cultural organisations use that. So basically we run our postcode data through their system and it gives us a demographic breakdown of who our ticket buyers are. I think the interesting thing is we cut across all the segments, so we really do, and this can poses lots of challenges to the comms, see ourselves as a festival for everybody. So wherever you are in the uk, there are ways that you can engage with Hay Festival and projects for you. But largely in terms of sort of ticketing, the spring event that we have, we over index particularly in the more culturally engaged audiences. So the metro culturals, the commuter and culture buss plus rural and suburban groups. And that's largely down to the location, the drive time visitors. We break down about 35% of our audience comes from Wales, 10% from London, 10% Midlands, and then equal splits the rest of the uk.

(10:37):
We have limited international travellers coming in. And then we have a sort of 40, 60 split each year on established and new attendees, which is something we try and really focus on particularly on the new audiences side. In terms of the physical festival, it definitely skews a little bit older, so I think the majority of attendees are over 45. But when you then break it down into projects, digital platforms, it obviously skews differently depending on what things are for. And this really speaks to something that's sort of becoming more and more apparent for us and probably sounds very obvious, is that when you're developing a project, a festival, an event, you really have to do it with an audience in mind, even if you are speaking to everybody. And so much of marketing comes down to super practical things around is that product, let's say for that audience.

(11:32):
And this is where really practical things like travel accommodation become really important and critical. So if we say at Hay Festival, we want to reach a younger audience, let's say that in and of itself means nothing because with what and how are the sort of big questions. And so through our school's programme, we bust in young people from all over Wales to the festival through our digital platforms, our partnership with TikTok, we reach pretty much exclusively under 20 fives on that platform with festival content. So it's developing things that reach outwards but aren't just about bringing people to the site itself.

Kiran Kapur (12:08):
I think that's such a good point because it's something we talk about a lot in marketing about reaching new audiences and clearly if your split is 60, 40 and 40 is new people, that's a marketing triumph in itself. But you are right. So much of it's actually down to the practicalities. If you want a younger audience, it's expensive for them to travel, it's difficult for them necessarily to afford accommodation. So busing people in is a very practical way of doing it. So yes, you are looking at the barriers from an audience perspective. So a sort of customer journey style, which I think is very, very interesting and very practical.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (12:47):
Exactly. And one of the current challenges that we're sort of dealing with really right now is that we know our brand awareness is incredibly high, particularly regionally. So 77% of people in Wales and the Midlands have heard of Hay Festival. Our kind of associations are really around sort of inspiration ideas, all super positive. And we know of that 70% there is a fair proportion that would like to experience hay festival products. Now we absolutely do not sell tickets to 77% of people in those areas. So you've got this audience and now we're in this stage of right, how can we form projects, products that really meet that demand for inspiration in our locality further afield, but in a way that's sort of meaningful and is sort of doing something within our charitable objectives. So yeah, it's where we've started looking at things. We've just launched a series called After Hours Hay Festival After Hours, which is about taking the festival to cities across the UK for sort of one-off nights of inspiration.

(13:48):
And the first one we trialled in Cardiff last year at the Welsh Millennium Centre. Again, working with a regional partner was a great success. We've got our next one in Bristol coming up at the Bristol Beacon. But I think there's an interesting example I want to give there that talks to this intentionality in comms, which is to say we developed that as something for new audiences and we made a sort of error really in our comms around it, which is that we sort of first put it out to our newsletter, we put it on our socials and it sold out instantly, therefore really just reaching an audience that we already have. And immediately we sort of thought why did we do that? So with the next one we've got coming up in Birmingham, we're going to work really through partners. Initially we will not be putting up on our platforms from the get go and just to see if that makes a difference in terms of the split, which of course it will.

Kiran Kapur (14:42):
That's fascinating. Yes, you did a classic marketing thing, you tell your current customers because that's what you do and when you're doing something new, you don't want to risk not having an So you go to the audience.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (14:53):
Exactly. And so much. We're a tiny team in the uk. We're a comms team of two. We've got me the comms director, me, myself, and a marketing manager Max, who's fantastic. And we have so much to do that sometimes you just look for the easy wins and those events when you can sell them out. It's quite tempting just to sell it out, but again, it sort of misses the intention of what that project is for. So we'll learn from it.

Kiran Kapur (15:17):
We've talked a lot about your customers, what about your other stakeholders? Because obviously you need to attract authors, you need to attract publishers, and presumably you need to keep on the right side of your local community as well who get a bit swamped by people arriving. So how do you manage and communicate with all of those stakeholders?

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (15:33):
This is where comms is the responsibility of everyone in an organisation really. And I think a comms team can only take on so much of that responsibility and we're there to really advise and support. I sit on our executive team really for this reason, which is to say these relationships which we are managing every single day, need to be managed and need to fit within the brand, fit within our values. And they're crucial to everything we do. Every festival and project is a community effort for us no matter where we're doing it. So built into the model that we have is that stakeholder engagement from the beginning. So if we say we're going to start a festival in France, we've never done one there before, we would immediately start thinking about, okay, who are our partners? Where could we be? Where's the need most? What can we learn about the audience there who can help us do that?

(16:28):
Bringing people on from the beginning, building a team in the location to really then set that up for success from the outset in terms of, Hay-on-Wye it's such an established event. It's really easy to assume that so much of that is taken care of, that people love the festival, but we have daily reminders of the challenges that having a giant event on your doorstep really brings. And so if we just sort of break down those groups, I mean community is very important to us. We host open forums every year where our CEO Julie answers questions from anybody that wants to come along in free events. We try and pair her up with the sort of toughest journalists we can find so that if the audience is too scared, they'll ask them. And largely those questions, as you might imagine if you lived in a place like that, they come down to things like when the festival's on, I can't park anywhere.

(17:17):
What are you doing about that? What happens on the road, A 1 43 when it's clogged with traffic to the festival? And these are things that really sit outside of our control and yet they're absolutely our responsibility to engage with. So then we move to our next level of local stakeholders, which is local government, the local organisations that work on tourism. And we play a really active role with our local council, with our local mps, with regular meetings to what these issues are, what we think the solutions might be, what they think they might be, and trying to come to some sort of positive arrangements around all of that. So much of our festival success relies on that community, welcoming people from all around the world, both our artists and the ticket holders. And so if that doesn't work, the festival really doesn't work at all.

(18:12):
And that's where those kind of relationships become really important. So yeah, we have sort of various year round moments when we'll communicate with the community. But I hope, and I think that that fact that we have our headquarters there with an open door, people can walk in and talk to us whenever is important, and that has then informed how we work in each location. So as I said, we sort of have a team on the ground that are really producing the festival, working with important local partners, local government to make them successful from the af. In terms of other stakeholders, artists are incredibly important. We at Hay Festival do not pay enormous fees. We don't have these sort of big commercial arrangements with the headliners that we have. It is about them wanting to come to the festival to engage in this idea cultural exchange.

(19:02):
And so really sort of basing their experience on that is really important. And by that I mean creating an experience for each artist at our events that is tailored to them. They have their big stage event, but maybe they also go and visit a local community group in the local library or maybe they do one of our sessions with our Hay Festival Academy of Young Volunteers. It's sort of working out what does each artist want from their experience, what are their objectives? And then forming it for that. And then I would say from a comms perspective, with a limited budget, your artists are so important as ambassadors and advocates for your event. So if we have a headliner like a Dua Lipa or Hillary Clinton out in the world saying, I'm at Hay Festival, come and see me, but also come and see all of this other great stuff, it's such a great sort of platform for us to benefit from and a huge part of our success.

(20:00):
And then after artists, we've got our funders, we've got our supporters. Again, that's about sort of working out what each partner, funder, sponsor trust, what are they coming to us for, where's their investment going? And making sure that we're really proactive in communicating those benefits to them and the impact that their support is having in our work. And that's where our annual report is really important. Individualised reports for funders, but also bringing them to our events and showing them with Hay Festival, it's such an all round immersive experience that on paper it's sometimes hard to believe the impact that it can have. So when you bring people to the site and they really see it, it's quite a magical thing. And the final thing I would just say on stakeholders is, sorry, just quickly that the team, we have a global team all around the world in pockets, and I think making that feel like a cohesive thing is also a responsibility in our communications. So we were sort of fortnightly bulletin regular meetings, but that is a big challenge, keeping everyone on brand

Kiran Kapur (21:04):
Hugely, I should imagine. Yes. And of course your other big partnership, I assume it's partnership, is with the BBC because quite often b BBC programmes, cultural programmes come from the Hay Festival. And for many of us, certainly for me, that was how you first heard about it. There was, I dunno, a radio four or Radio three programme and it came from there and you thought, oh, it's a festival. Yes. So you've got other sort of event, a partnerships that are also raising your

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (21:24):
Profile. Absolutely. Media partnerships is a huge part of our marketing strategy. Again, small budgets. We don't have a huge spend for placement. So we really work through partners to get share of voice, to get awareness, to build that feeling that Hay Festival is the place to be. And there are two main reasons for that. One is the kind of year round promotion, bringing people back each year to the festival buying tickets. But also it goes to our artists, our funders, all the other stakeholders we just talked about. When an artist comes to the festival, that's a huge chunk of time out of their diary. And if your high profile and you are doing it as part of a book tour or whatever it might be, there are probably other places that you could go that you're going to reach more people in the physical space.

(22:12):
So why do they come to Hay Festival? It's because we create this moment where the words they speak in this Welsh field resonate globally thanks to our partnerships. The BBC have been incredible with us over the years. It is not a commercial deal. It's built on this shared mission that we both have. Our objectives really align as organisations. It's an incredibly collaborative experience working with them. So each year we have a steering group of producers who we talk to about this sort of schedule of live recordings that they do in our marquee in the centre of the site. So these are free live recordings of BBC events commercially for us, I'll be really candid, there's this question of like, well, that's events that you're not ticketing that your audience don't enjoying for free, that's not covering its costs for you as a space. How does that work? But clearly the benefits both in terms of offering an accessible route into the festival on the BBC's platforms, but also that alignment, that programming is so great for those spaces. It really adds to the audience experience overall. And the reach is incredible for us. So as you said, I mean it's often what people that they're sort of way into the festival, that kind of top entry to that pipeline for us is through those partner editorials. So yeah, it's incredibly important.

Kiran Kapur (23:34):
It's really interesting listening to how you're sort of balancing all the various things and all marketers have to do it, but you are really sort of on the frontline trying to do this. So the other thing that interests me was your wider product range. And again, I was looking at your website and I was absolutely stunned by just how much you had. Obviously there's membership. Well, I expected that you have a book club and you can see that this is logical, but it all takes time to look after you have an award and you have a shop with your own branded products in. So again, from a marketing point of view, how do you keep all that together, supporting your brand, supporting your mission, and not diluting things?

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (24:12):
Yeah, I mean I think if I can be really honest, I would say at the moment we maybe are doing too much. And I think it's important that your listeners really kind of think about it. This is the reality of working in an organisation that's alive and changing and we have a degree of control over what we're doing. But then sometimes something comes along and it really fits that charitable mission. You say, okay, well we can't not do this. So then how do you engineer your brand to encompass that as well as everything else? And I think the reality of where we are today is we're in this period of change of looking at all the things that we do and trying to work out what could be streamlined and simplified and also where the gaps are so that some of these products, let's call them or projects could actually be engineered to do something a bit different that fits one of those gaps.

(25:04):
We're kind of constantly in flux and never living in a perfect world, I would just say in terms of the sort of volume of what we have, but informing anything we do, everything comes back to this. Our charitable objects, what we exist in the world for, what our purpose is, and it is about creating these platforms of exchange. And so where something like the book club comes along post Covid, we built this big digital audience, a huge mailing list, social platforms that are sort of there and waiting. And yet our schedule of events in person was quite limited. It was sort of fewer days of activity than we'd probably like. So the book club was really born out of this idea of we have an audience there that's curious, that wants festival content, that want connection and not really the products that are offering that year round.

(25:59):
So a monthly book club was a really logical next step for that. It allows us to flex editorially, so artists that maybe can't come to our physical events, we can work with 'em online. A good example of that was Wendy Cope at the start of last year. So she wrote the viral poem Orange, which I think, I can't remember, I think it went viral on TikTok because some sort of gorgeous Irish actor read it with an incredible voice and it was just the perfect audio to overlay on things. And it's also an incredible poem, but she couldn't come to our physical events. So we made it our book club pick for January last year and it just opened a new kind of angle element to our work. So it felt really exciting. But at the same time, these projects, as you say, all come with this potential to be as big as you can make them. And I think this is one of the challenges of the festival, which is that we could pour time in all of these things and make them huge, but we're a small team, limited resource. We always have to ask why, what's the purpose, what are the priorities? And again, that's why I sort of sit in our exec team and sort of help the team work through that and decide what our priority projects are going to be each.

Kiran Kapur (27:09):
Yes. And I think so many marketers struggle with this because you look at something and think, well, it could be an extra income stream or it could be a great way of raising our brand awareness. And there's always this fear of missing out if I've not done something that I should have done. But it can just pull you in so many different directions all the time. And I think what you said was it's never perfect. No, it's never perfect in any organisation. It's always a balancing act.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (27:32):
And I think there's that great saying is that don't let perfection be the enemy of the good. I think if whoever you work for, even outside of charities, most organisations should really have that sort of anchor of mission why they exist in the world. And I think marketers, comms, people need to really use that as their guiding principle always and never indecision can obviously be very blocking as a sort of day-to-day challenge. And I think if you keep that steering mission in mind, it will allow you sometimes to see those decisions a bit more clear mindedly.

Kiran Kapur (28:13):
Fantastic. Thank you. The last thing I wanted to ask was about your career, because I know I'm sitting here feeling terribly envious of what you do and I'm sure some of my listeners are as well.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (28:23):
Don't, it's awful.

Kiran Kapur (28:26):
How did you get into being the communications director of the Hay Festival Global?

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (28:33):
Yeah, no, I feel super lucky. My interaction with the festival came, I was doing my first job after Union Glasgow. I was looking at a PR agency, which just as a side note for anyone entering any industry, I think agencies are a really good route in because of that ability to just test and feel your way. And the chaos that a lot of them have, or at least most of the ones I worked for have is a really great learning experience overall. But I was working in, I'd started in public relations working at an agency representing a huge range of brands from lots of different sectors. And aside from that, outside of that, I just loved books. So my personal passion has always been literature. I always loved reading. I studied literature at university, but it was very separate from my working life. And I was reading The Guardian one weekend, probably looking for some sort of client coverage or something, and out dropped this supplement that was all about Hay Festival, which I'd never heard of.

(29:37):
And I asked all my friends like, oh, do you want to go to this festival in the middle of Wales with me? No, no, no, it's too expensive or it's too far, or all those barriers we've talked about for young people. So I just thought, well, I'll go by myself and see what it's about. And I think David Milliman was speaking that year. Nigel Lawson was speaking that year. There were people that I thought, oh, it'd be amazing to hear what they've got to say about the world and see them in real life. So I took the train camped by myself and fell in love with Hay Festival as a festival goer first and foremost. And I said to myself as I was sort of walking away after that trip back to Glasgow one day, I want to work for that organisation and one day I want my work in the day-to-day to align with this love I have for culture overall.

(30:26):
And that's not to say I didn't love all the other brands I was working with. And in a way I sort of think over the years, some of the jobs I've enjoyed the most have been the ones that actually have been the least cultural, representing a soup brand or a bottled water brand or something. There's something really interesting in working with that, largely often down to the people you get to be with. Yeah. And so I carried on my career working at agencies, moved to London, and when I was looking for work in London, I was really drawn to the cultural sector. I think London as a centre has more agencies that specialise in culture, so looking for roles, I was more drawn to those. And I happened upon an agency that at the time was working for the festival, doing their PR largely took that job, pushed for that job because they were working with Hay Festival.

(31:15):
And so I worked as a consultant for two years with the festival before seeing an opening to go full time. And then in terms of my festival journey, I started really leading on the public relations as the publicity director. But through Covid and all the changes that brought, it made sense to sort of centralise all of our functions in one role. And so I now sit across all of the marketing brand pr. Obviously, our teams grow significantly when festivals come through, so it's a circuitous route to the job, but I feel very lucky. Yeah, was persistent, I guess.

Kiran Kapur (31:52):
Persistence is always good and I think that you're absolutely right. Sometimes getting agency experience or starting an agency is really, really valuable. We can't possibly finish without you giving a plug for the festival. So please go over the dates and where people can find things.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (32:06):
So 22nd of May to the 1st of June, hay Festival is back in Hay on y offering a world of different perspectives. If you are living in a disinformation bubble, as Elon Musk would say, you need to be there. It's going to blow your mind at all. The other ideas you could know in life tickets around 11th of March for all of our events, but you can see some early birds online now and there's a whole range of something for everyone. So hayfestival.org is where you can find it, but you will always find on the Hay Festival website some free fun upcoming that are going to inspire you.

Kiran Kapur (32:40):
Fantastic. Chris Bone from the Hay Festival Global, thank you so much. That was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for your time.

Christopher Bone, Hay Festival (32:48):
Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.