Metro backs Edinburgh Fringe event

Free newspaper Metro is sponsoring the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a six-figure sum, as part of its strategy to build awareness among a young urban audience.

The Fringe Festival runs alongside the official Edinburgh Festival from August 4 to 26. The sponsorship will be used to raise the profile of the newspaper’s Metro Life listings and review section.

The package will see Metro’s logo appear on the Fringe Programme’s “How to buy tickets” section and on the sponsors’ page. The programme has a distribution of 375,000 editions. In addition, Metro branding will feature on the booking page of the website, on ticket wallets, envelopes and ticket backs and on box-office advertising. The newspaper’s name will also be heard on the ticket order phone line’s call-queuing system.

Metro’s logo will appear on the “two-for-one” promotional ticket offer which runs on August 4 and 5 and which the paper also sponsored last year. Branding will feature on 20,000 A5-format programmes posted to local addresses, on e-mail bulletins to 40,000 registered users and on advertising for the promotion. The newspaper will also receive a mention in the Fringe’s radio advertising.

Metro managing director Mike Anderson says: “We are becoming a national product and want to do something significant outside London.”

Metro had an average distribution of 117,824 in Scotland for April, up 0.41 per cent on March (ABC).