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Case Study — Brand & Digital
Edinburgh Fringe
A complete ad-revenue infrastructure for the website of the world's largest performing arts festival. CMP integration, consent fallback, dynamic slot handling, sold-first inventory with programmatic backfill, GDPR + TCF v2.2 audited end to end. Built, documented, handed over.
CLIENT
Edinburgh Fringe
Sector
Global Destination
Services
Website, Cloud Infrastructure
STARTING YEAR
2024
The Challenge
Millions through the door. No infrastructure under the floor.
Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest performing arts festival. Every August, edfringe.com becomes the route into the entire programme: 3,000+ shows, 50,000+ performances, 2.4M+ ticket sales — moved through one digital surface in a single month.
Underneath it: no ad-revenue infrastructure. No prioritised inventory layer, no programmatic backfill, no compliant consent stack, no fallback for race-condition rendering, no documentation for the team taking it forward. A revenue stream sitting on top of no platform.
The Approach
The whole stack, engineered end to end.
We built the ad-revenue infrastructure for edfringe.com as a complete stack, not a patch.
At the consent layer: Usercentrics CMP integration with TCF v2.2, plus override scripts for race-condition pre-consent rendering. Compliant by default, audit-ready at all times.
At the delivery layer: dynamic ad-slot handling on a modern React stack — slots defined cleanly without depending on live DOM, surviving framework conflicts and GTM timing issues. Cloudflare firewall debugging to unblock the Google ad crawlers that were being suppressed before the build. A prioritisation system that serves sold inventory first — direct partnerships and private sponsors taking precedence — then backfills the remaining space programmatically to maximise revenue across every page view.
At the handover layer: full technical documentation, diagnostics tooling, future-proofing guidance. The team that inherited the platform after us got a working stack, not a black box.
10m+
Festival-season impressions served end to end
Sold-first → Backfilled
Inventory layer with programmatic backfill
#1
Performing arts festival in the world
TCF v2.2 + GDPR
Compliance audited end to end
The REsults
The Outcome
Built once. Handed over clean. Running every August.
The platform went live in time for festival season. Sold inventory served first, programmatic backfill running underneath, every consent signal compliant, every slot defined cleanly, every audit defensible.
The ad revenue backbone of the world's largest arts festival — engineered, documented, handed over.
The team built us something we'd been trying to get done for years. Quietly, properly, with the patience to fix every issue before handing it over. We've not had to think about the ad layer since — and the revenue speaks for itself.
Stefano Ragusa
—
Digital Marketing Lead