How Untold Festival Turned Blood Donation Into a Festival Ticket
Untold Festival's 'Pay with Blood' is a 2015 ambient campaign created by McCann Romania that invited festivalgoers to donate blood in exchange for free or discounted tickets to Romania's inaugural Untold electronic music festival, directly addressing the country's severe blood shortage while generating mass public participation.
The campaign launched publicly on 17 July 2015, approximately two weeks before Untold Festival opened its gates in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, from 30 July to 2 August. The mechanic was precise and transparent. Donors visiting any of Romania's 42 blood centres received approximately a 30% discount on a four-day festival pass, with a donation deadline of 24 July 2015. Those donating at mobile units operating in Bucharest, or at the Cluj-Napoca transfusion centre, received a free one-day ticket. The campaign was developed in direct collaboration with Romania's National Institute for Blood Transfusion, giving it institutional credibility alongside its creative ambition.
Untold Festival was itself a debut event in 2015, making 'Pay with Blood' not a sequel to an established advertising platform but a launch-era, purpose-built campaign designed to introduce both the festival and a civic idea simultaneously. The choice to anchor the campaign in Romania's blood shortage gave it a dimension that straightforward festival promotion could not achieve. By placing donation centres — including mobile units across Bucharest — at the centre of the ticket acquisition journey, McCann Romania transformed a public health imperative into a culturally resonant exchange, one that the Romanian public and international media received as genuinely novel. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 71 out of 100.
Romania faced a documented and severe blood shortage at the time 'Pay with Blood' was conceived. McCann Romania built the entire strategic architecture of the campaign on this public health reality, recognising that a festival audience — typically young, healthy, and responsive to participatory ideas — represented an untapped donor pool. The creative strategy did not treat blood donation as a charitable footnote; it made donation the literal price of admission, restructuring the relationship between civic responsibility and leisure reward.
Untold Festival director Bogdan Buta, quoted by BBC, stated that using Transylvanian myths to address Romania's blood shortage was a welcome approach, signalling that the festival's leadership understood the cultural and geographic resonance of the concept. Transylvania's association with blood in popular mythology gave the campaign a layer of wit that made it shareable without trivialising the medical need it addressed. This tonal balance — earnest in purpose, clever in framing — is central to why the campaign travelled beyond Romania's borders.
The Romanian festival market in 2015 was expanding rapidly. Untold itself reported 240,000 spectators at its inaugural edition, according to sources including adhugger.net and Businessdays Ro, making it the largest festival in the documented competitive set that year. Electric Castle, another Romanian festival, grew its attendance from 32,000 in 2013 to 97,000 in 2015, as reported by Stec Univ-Ovidius Ro, illustrating the appetite for large-scale live events in the country during this period. Within this environment, 'Pay with Blood' gave Untold an identity that transcended ticketing — positioning the festival as a civic actor from its very first edition.
McCann Romania developed 'Pay with Blood' as an ambient campaign, meaning the campaign's primary medium was the experience of participation itself rather than a conventional broadcast or print advertisement. The on-screen and in-world execution centred on blood donation centres and mobile collection units placed across Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, where donors completed the transaction that the campaign's name described literally. A person walked in, gave blood, and walked out with a festival ticket or a discount code — the act of donation was the creative event.
The campaign's title does the heaviest creative lifting. 'Pay with Blood' is a phrase that operates simultaneously as a commercial proposition, a horror-genre allusion, and a Transylvanian cultural reference — geography that the festival's Cluj-Napoca location made entirely authentic. This layering of meaning into a single four-word line is the craft at the core of the campaign, and it required no elaborate production apparatus to land. The ambient format, containing a single media asset as documented in campaign records, relied on the concept's clarity rather than production scale.
The creative team at McCann Romania, based in Bucharest, included Creative Chairman Adrian Botan, Executive Creative Director Cătălin Dobre, Group Creative Director Sebastian Olar, Copywriter Alexandru Vasile, Senior Art Director Arpad Rezi, and Art Director Lia Bira. Account leadership was provided by Group Account Director Gabriela Alexandrescu, Senior Account Manager Simona Geacă, and Senior Account Executive Oana Grigore. PR was handled by Account Managers Alexandra Crivăț and Anca Bărbulescu, alongside PR Senior Account Executive Laura Stoica. The collaboration with Romania's National Institute for Blood Transfusion was integral to the campaign's operational delivery, providing the institutional infrastructure through which the ticket exchange was made possible.
Nearly 2,000 people donated blood as a direct result of the 'Pay with Blood' campaign, according to reporting by Iqads Ro and phdmedia.com — a figure that represents a measurable public health outcome, not merely a creative metric. For a country experiencing a documented blood shortage, this volume of donations constitutes a tangible civic result tied directly to a festival marketing initiative.
The campaign's media reach extended well beyond Romania. It received primetime broadcast coverage on BBC, CNBC, and Euronews, and appeared in print and online editions of TIME and The Guardian, as reported by phdmedia.com. It generated more than 1,000 pieces of national and international news coverage, according to iqads.ro. The earned media value, as reported by iqads.ro, reached €1,431,571 — a figure that places the campaign's communications impact in quantifiable terms relative to its production scale as a single-asset ambient execution.
The campaign's structural effectiveness rests on the alignment between mechanic and message. By making donation the literal transaction for a festival ticket, McCann Romania ensured that every participant became a living proof point, and every piece of media coverage reinforced the same simple idea. The earned media scale reflects how well the concept translated across cultural contexts, from Romanian national broadcasters to global outlets covering it as a human-interest story. For Untold's debut year in Cluj-Napoca, 'Pay with Blood' delivered audience awareness, civic credibility, and international brand recognition simultaneously — outcomes that conventional festival advertising rarely achieves from a single campaign.
'Pay with Blood' was a 2015 ambient campaign by McCann Romania for Untold Festival. It offered blood donors free or discounted festival tickets in response to Romania's severe blood shortage. Donors at Romania's 42 blood centres received approximately a 30% discount, while those at mobile units in Bucharest or the Cluj-Napoca transfusion centre received a free one-day ticket.
Nearly 2,000 people donated blood as a direct result of the campaign, according to iqads.ro and phdmedia.com. The campaign ran in Romania in July 2015, with a donation deadline of 24 July, approximately two weeks before Untold Festival opened in Cluj-Napoca on 30 July 2015.
McCann Romania, based in Bucharest, created the campaign. The creative team was led by Creative Chairman Adrian Botan and Executive Creative Director Cătălin Dobre. The campaign was developed in collaboration with Romania's National Institute for Blood Transfusion, which provided the operational infrastructure for the ticket-for-donation exchange.
The campaign received primetime broadcast coverage on BBC, CNBC, and Euronews, and appeared in TIME and The Guardian, as reported by phdmedia.com. It generated more than 1,000 pieces of national and international news coverage according to iqads.ro, with earned media value reaching €1,431,571, also per iqads.ro.
Romania faced a severe blood shortage in 2015. McCann Romania recognised that Untold's young, healthy festival audience represented an untapped donor pool. The Transylvanian setting of Cluj-Napoca gave the concept cultural resonance, and festival director Bogdan Buta confirmed, as quoted by BBC, that addressing the shortage through the campaign was a welcome approach.
The Untold 'Pay with Blood' campaign received a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The 2015 McCann Romania campaign earned this rating based on its creative concept, civic impact, and international earned media performance, which included coverage across BBC, CNBC, Euronews, TIME, and The Guardian following its Romania launch.
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