Locarno Film Festival strengthens customer bond by unifying the digital experience

Before the transformation, Locarno Film Festival struggled with a fragmented digital landscape. The central challenge was the disconnect between the festival’s specific CRM—which houses all crucial information regarding films and scheduling—and the public-facing website. This gap forced staff to engage in labor-intensive manual processes to publish data, increasing the risk of errors and delays. Furthermore, the existing platform lacked the scalability required to handle the massive surge in traffic during the festival, posing a constant risk of system slowdowns or crashes at the most critical moments of the year.

SEIDOR, Magnolia Platinum Partner, re-engineered the festival’s digital platform by positioning Magnolia CMS as the central orchestration hub. The technical solution focused on integrating Magnolia with the festival’s specialized CRM and ticketing systems to automate the ingestion of film metadata and programming. This architectural shift allowed the festival to move away from its legacy monolith to an integrated environment. Within this new framework, Magnolia was used to build and manage a redesigned personal area for attendees and a modernized public voting system, ensuring that all content and user interactions were managed through a single interface.

The implementation has successfully transformed a complex operational problem into a strategic asset. By automating the sync between the CRM and the web, the festival eliminated manual publishing risks and ensured the public always sees real-time, accurate information. Even during peak high-risk periods, the new infrastructure handled traffic flawlessly without performance drops, providing a stable platform for the festival's prestigious global audience.