SXSW: More Marketing and Less Fest?

According to Wikipedia, SXSW – South by Southwest – is three things.

  • SXSW Music is the largest music festival of its kind in the world, with more than 2,500 official performers/bands playing in more than 100 venues

 

  • SXSW Film is a film festival, focusing on new directing talent.

 

  • SXSW Interactive is focused on emerging technology, a focus which has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies.

 

Having grown from 700 registrants in 1987 to nearly 12,000 registrants, SXSW is unquestionably popular and, by most measures, extremely successful.  It is reportedly the highest revenue-producing event for the Austin, Texas economy, with an estimated economic impact of $167 million in 2011.

Music, film and technology all coming together in one ridiculously successful 10-day fest?  Perhaps.  From my perspective, however, at least judging by the content of my online news feeds, SXSW has also grown to be one of our country’s most highly targeted marketing events.

 And some of it is pretty clever:

  • The SyFy television channel opened a bunch of pop-up hotel rooms made from shipping containers to address the housing shortage – and not so coincidentally promote a new SyFy network program.

 

  • A company called Swarmly introduced a new app that knows where you and others are gathering or “swarming.”  Naturally, the SXSW version tells you which are the hottest bars, theaters and restaurants at SXSW at any given time.

 

  • The folks at Google, hoping to show how different technologies and objects can be successfully connected, unveiled a pair of sneakers (which they ultimately will never market) that tells you when you’ve been sitting too long and chides you about it via built-in sneaker speakers.

 

And, if you, too, are hoping to leap into the SXSW marketing business, other marketers are eagerly marketing their methods for marketing at SXSW:

 

  • How can you effectively market without a daily marketing analysis of the top marketing tweets, trends and photos from SXSW?

 

  • And if you are actively marketing yourself or something you have created via strategic networking at SXSW, you’ll want to make sure you don’t fall prey to the ravages of SXSW Networking Syndrome!

 

  • Even the very people behind SXSW are willing to step up and help you more successfully market at SXSW.

 

All of this is highly educational for those of us who market for a living; however, it leaves me with one SXSW question that remains unanswered:  How’s the music?

 

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