Orchestrating success through Meta Advertising

Driving ticket sales for Queensland Symphony Orchestra's unmissable events

Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO) is a world-class, full-scale symphony orchestra that delivers more than 80 annual performances.

Aruga was engaged in September 2025 to drive single ticket sales for the remaining shows in the calendar year, including Maestro Series events like Mahler Nine, Cinematic celebrating the music of the Oscars, and their live-orchestra performances of Christmas staple Home Alone.

Across seven shows Aruga developed and implemented Meta Advertising campaigns that aimed to identify, reach, and develop new audiences (beyond their season-ticket holders), while re-engaging their core audience who were yet to purchase tickets for recently released events.

Across the project period we generated an attributable 7,462 ticket sales, representing 40% of total annual revenue for the advertised shows.

Results

5,994,763

Total Impressions

60,112

Unique Outbound Clicks

$0.51

Average Cost Per Unique Outbound Click

7,462

Tickets Sold In Campaign Period

Winning Tactics

Audience development

Central to our campaign approach is audience nurturing and development. With a high-volume of events in a short period of time it was important we drove sales for 2025 events, while nurturing our audience and building brand-love for 2026 and beyond. Through adjustments at an ad-set level, we were able to ensure the right audiences saw the right ads at the right time.

Creative testing

Aligned with our approach to nurture and grow audiences over time, we focussed on creative testing to understand what assets drove the best results across the individual campaign periods. Asset types (videos, carousels and statics) were deployed and tested, along with video styles, to identify the best creative collection.

Campaign phasing

Total campaign length was tested throughout the project to identify the impacts of burst-activity versus long-lead campaigns for our target audiences. Results identified a clear benefit in long-lead marketing which influenced the 2026 approach for QSO.