The Challenge
Sing Out Loud Festival is one of the largest music festivals in the Southeast, drawing tens of thousands of attendees to St. Augustine, Florida over two days. As the 2025 title sponsor, Live Wildly Foundation had a rare opportunity and a specific challenge:
How do you meaningfully communicate conservation values to a music-first audience without interrupting the energy of a festival weekend?
The goal? Use every available branding touchpoint to inspire curiosity, build awareness, and connect concertgoers to the importance of Florida’s wild landscapes.
25,000+ Festival Attendees Reached
10M+ Digital Impressions
20+ Local & National Media Outlets
Conservation Integrated Into a Music-First Experience
photo by Melissa Marcarelli
photo by Roz Zekavat
The Insight
Festival audiences aren’t there to be lectured — they are there for a sensory experience. Which means they are highly receptive to beauty, emotion, and shared experience.
We recognized that conservation messaging would resonate best not as education delivered head-on, but as immersion: letting people encounter Florida’s wild places repeatedly and organically throughout the weekend.
By becoming part of the atmosphere rather than an interruption, conservation reinforced the festival experience instead of competing with it.
The Strategy
Rickel Jones Creative led a multidisciplinary team of designers, photographers, and filmmakers to design a distributed creative system across the festival grounds —culminating in a 90-second brand film that played immediately before the headliner each night and echoed the conservation narratives embedded across:
Entry points
Stages and IMAG screens
Cooling and VIP spaces
Social and photo-driven moments
Digital pre-festival content
The strategy focused on three objectives:
Inspiration: Showcase the beauty of wild Florida at concert scale.
Education: Translate complex conservation ideas into short, digestible moments.
Engagement: Invite interaction through visual storytelling, interactive displays, and shareable experiences.
The Creative Idea
Bring Florida’s wildest places to the big stage—literally.
We transformed the festival environment into an immersive nature experience, blending cinematic wildlife imagery, playful educational moments, and bold physical installations. Conservation wasn’t framed as an abstract issue, but as something immediate, vibrant, and inseparable from Florida’s cultural identity.
The Flagship Moment
While the work lived across the full festival footprint, the closest thing to a singular focal point came just before the headliner took the stage each night.
As the lights went dark, a 45-second Live Wildly brand film played across the festival’s IMAG screens—creating a rare moment of collective attention. Narrated by Florida native musician JJ Grey, the film wove together imagery from the activations throughout the grounds: wildlife, springs, working lands, and people experiencing Florida’s outdoors.
Rather than introducing new information, the piece reinforced a simple idea already present throughout the weekend, closing with a clear call to action:
If you love it, you will protect it. That’s how it works.
– JJ Grey
The moment connected the energy of the festival with the values behind the sponsorship—placing conservation directly into the emotional peak of the event.
The Execution
Rickel Jones Creative led a multidisciplinary team of designers, photographers, and filmmakers to produce 150+ unique assets across digital, print, experiential, and video formats.
Key activations included:
- A giant inflatable Florida panther marking the festival entrance
- On-stage IMAG programming featuring 15-second video spots highlighting Florida wildlife, freshwater springs, agricultural lands, and the mental health benefits of time outdoors
- A multimedia Freshwater Springs experience inside a cooling tent, combining large-format graphics, immersive sound, and dynamic lighting with environmental storytelling and education.
- Branded photo booths and social moments designed for organic sharing
- Local adventure-map lead generators connecting attendees to nearby outdoor experiences
- A VIP gallery featuring eight large-format prints from leading Florida photographers
- A three-screen centerpiece cycling conservation trivia, animal identification prompts, fun nature facts, and scenic landscapes.
From pre- and post-festival social content to email and PR campaign support, all culminating in an immersive on-site experiential design, Rickel Jones Creative embedded Live Wildly branding throughout the rhythm of the festival.
The Impact
- 25,000 attendees encountered Live Wildly messaging repeatedly across two festival days
- Live Wildly experienced a 73% increase in website traffic over the festival weekend
- The partnership generated 20+ regional and national news pickups
Live Wildly hosted leaders from state and county government, along with conservation organizations from across the Southeast, using the VIP space as a setting for relationship-building and dialogue
Beyond metrics, the activation demonstrated how large-scale entertainment can function as a platform for conservation storytelling—reaching broad audiences while maintaining clarity, focus, and mission.
Our Role
Rickel Jones Creative served as creative lead and production partner, overseeing overall creative direction, content development, asset production, and experiential storytelling across the festival.
Credits
Creative Director: Aaron Rickel Jones
Experiential Producer: Michelle Yepez
Print Graphic Design: John Foster
Digital Graphic Design: Johanna Pryor
Video Production: Aaron Rickel Jones
Photography: Sara Sheehy, Jenny Adler, George McKenzie Jr., F-Stop Foundation, Drew McDougall
Event Support: SJC Cultural Events, Inc.