We created a viral Event Activation with a piano on the beach
When you've worked on the Noosa Festival of Surfing for as long as I have, you get to know its rhythms. Ten days of world-class surfing, community spirit and coastal culture, all built on more than three decades of history. And every festival has its quiet nights. For us, that's always been a Thursday.
This year, we decided Thursday didn't have to stay quiet. Say hello to Piano on the Point!
Pianist, Mitch Dormer gets the the crowd going early on. Still only half the ticket holders have shown up at this point. What an afternoon! pic: Melissa Hoareau
A piano, on the sand, sounds fun and unique but as an Event Organiser, you’ve always got a million things going through your head to make an idea a reality.
Then throw in the anxiety of people buying tickets. The reality is, it had never been done before, let alone at this festival. Sure, it seemed like a good idea and maybe there was a reason it had never been done before…? That was daunting from a planning perspective, but it was also exactly the kind of moment I wanted for this milestone in the festival's history.
There were several challenges we had to overcome to achieve our goal. We had to work through instrument protection against salt air and moisture, safe transport and placement on an uneven surface, sound quality in an open-air beach environment, and building an experience around the piano that still felt like a proper bar night rather than a novelty photo opportunity. On top of that, we were doing all of this on the one night of the week that historically had the lowest turnout of the whole festival. Selling that idea internally took as much conviction as building it did.
We set a ticket target of 250 for the night, already an optimistic number for a Thursday. (The beach bar has a capacity of 700 people) so a fairly conservative target.
The result started us! We sold 500 tickets in 3 weeks and sold out completely a full week before the event. Demand kept coming, so we released another 100 tickets on the door to meet it. A night that had quietly underperformed for years became one of the hardest tickets to get across the entire festival.
Beyond the ticket numbers, what stayed with me was the atmosphere on the night itself. Locals and visitors standing shoulder to shoulder on the sand, live piano music drifting across one of the most recognisable stretches of coastline in Australia, and a genuine sense of the community coming together to share something none of them had experienced before.
That's ultimately what a festival like this is for. Not just the competition heats and the comraderie, but the moments that give the whole community something to talk about, and something to be proud of.
This festival has spent 35 years celebrating surf culture in all its forms, from the WSL Qualifying Series (Noosa Longboard Pro) through to the Old Mal division, which honours the sport's earliest roots. Surf culture has never just been about the competition. It's about creativity, community and consistently innovating new and engaging ideas that reach people far and wide.
Piano on the Point sat naturally inside that story. It took a beach that has shaped Australian surfing history and gave it a new kind of moment, one built on the same spirit of experimentation and connection that surf culture has always championed. It didn't replace what this Festival has always meant to this community. It added a new chapter to it. We hope to see you at the next Piano on the Point (Noosa Festival of Surfing Save the Date: Feb 26 - Mar 7, 2027)
