Festival International's Indigenous Peoples
The characters represented in BBR Creative’s Festival Field Guide poster are familiar.
If you’ve been to a Louisiana festival, doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter what time of year, the characters represented in BBR Creative’s Festival Field Guide poster are familiar. In fact, one (or more) of them is likely to be you.
BBR Creative, a Lafayette-based advertising agency, was named the Agency of Record for Lafayette’s Festival International de Louisiane last year, in charge of the festival’s graphic design and branding. In addition to the standard branding, the agency wanted to “do something memorable and interactive” for the festival, something that would capture the essence of the event and would “translate that experience to a wider audience via social media,” according to Senior Art Director Burt Durand. So they sat in a room, put on their “ethnographer” hats, and distilled the variety of festival goers into one of fourteen hilarious characters who are utterly familiar if you’ve attended Festival International in particular, or any number of other Louisiana festivals in general.
Durand explained: “We did a lot of brainstorming as a team, talking about the various types of people who attend festivals. Our goal was to create eccentric, but relatable, characters that would capture the unique festival crowd. We started with a lot of different ideas, but ultimately narrowed it down to the ones we felt would resonate with the most people.”
The characters became so popular that BBR ended up printing posters, which are still for sale at their website (bbrcreative.com) for $10.
Rodney Hess, online marketing strategist, explained that this year, BBR is upping the ante. They will be developing a festival “survival pack”—a kit with everything needed to have a great festival experience—that they’ll be giving away each week in April.
Louisiana’s festival season is on full display in Country Roads’ April calendar of events; and you’ll find these indigenous festival goers scattered throughout. We’re sure you know a couple of them personally. To view the characters online, visit bbrfest.com.