SXSW: IT'S NO SUNDACE, BUT IT'S MAKING STRIDES

Brands Flood Festival, but Confab Has Yet to Hit the Over-Commercialized Saturation Point

If you were worried about South by Southwest becoming the next Sundance, think again. Record attendance and more sponsors and brand activations than ever would suggest the leading indie music and tech summit in Austin, Texas, reached its over-commercialized saturation point this year, with badges to get into the interactive portion alone up 40% to 10,000-plus attendees and 11 lead sponsors. But those at the festival think SXSW has a ways to go before it reaches the Paris Hilton/nightclub/guerrilla-marketing lows of Park City, Utah's annual movie and celeb summit.

Digital Privacy Among Top Issues Discussed at SXSWi Conference

Creativity's Teressa Iezzi Explains Why Foursquare Was a Winner and Why Facebook, Google is not a natural (or as I like to say "Organic") place for non-media consumer brands to congregate, so marketers such as Pepsi, General Motors' Chevrolet and Levi's focused more on improving the show's utility and navigation rather than pushing their products (though a fair share of product sampling and branded tents could be found, too). Far from complaining, fans were rewarding many of the sponsors with positive tweets, check-ins to branded accounts on Foursquare and Gowalla, and joining Facebook fan pages. The only brands that suffered were the ones whose marketing efforts seemed too blatant or forced.

Microsoft's Bing, for example, offered attendees free taxi rides within a certain radius of downtown Austin -- on the condition that riders must first download the Bing mobile app.

Such force-fed marketing flew in the face of what many attendees deemed to be the ultimate place for viral, self-selecting marketing and applications. After all, this was the same place where Foursquare launched just one year ago.

"The bar's pretty high for authenticity," said Tony Weisman, president of Digitas, Chicago, whose client Miller Lite was a lead sponsor and hosted a contest for independent web producers to have their own short films sponsored by the beer. "It's not overrun by brands yet; it's still principally about ideas, not about posing."

Having purpose

"You have to create an emotional connection back to the brand. It's a micro-audience that's going to be savvy and very finicky -- a super-consumer that's hard to win over," said Doug Aken, chief engagement officer of digital-marketing agency Mr Youth, who has worked with Pepsi on previous campaigns but was not involved with any SXSW efforts. "You would need to really do something unique to stand out -- it's not just creating noise for the sake of creating noise."

Yet as blogs continued to decry the death of SXSWi as an idea platform and the abundance of corporate sponsorship at what has become the country's leading technology summit, brands emerged largely unscathed.

GM's Chevrolet, for example, provided Volt-branded power strips for attendees to charge their laptops and phones, and also partnered with location-based social media app Gowalla to provide free rides in Chevy Equinox crossovers to the conference for attendees who checked in at the airport. Considered late to the social-media party two years after Ford found early success with its Fiesta efforts in 2008, Chevy was declared the festival's biggest marketing winner by blogs, Twitter users and local outlets like the Austin Statesman.

The Chevy Volt, which will have a soft launch in late 2010 before a full rollout in early 2011, is also actively trying to reach the under-34 set, an age group whose failure to embrace GM's other vehicles contributed to GM's bankruptcy. So Chevy activated its on-site vehicles with QR codes to drive users to a microsite, as well as a strong Twitter presence to engage viewers on site.

Pepsi also ramped up its second annual sponsorship of SXSW to activate branded experiences around SoBe Life Water, Mtn Dew and Pepsi. PepsiCo sponsored a Podcast Playground for podcasters to host quiet broadcasts and conduct interviews with key thinkers at the show, as well as a webcam appearance by LL Cool J to announce his new music-based social media project, Boomdizzle. SoBe hosted a "re-skinning" photo booth to promote the drink's new label, and Mtn Dew's Green Label Sound record label hosted several music showcases.

"As a lead partner, we want to be asking attendees, 'What's the issue? How can we make the event better?'" said Bonin Bough, Pepsi's director-social and digital media. "We want to add value and make ourselves more integrated into the experience, and in turn we get to learn early how to use these new technologies to transform retail purchase behavior."

CHEVY USES SXSW AS A PLATFORM TO KICK-OFF SOCIAL MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY PUSH

Program Is Part of Automaker's Plan to Spend 30% of Marketing Money on Digital in 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Chevrolet's making a big splash at South by Southwest Interactive this year, and it's just the beginning of the automaker's planned 30% commitment to digital this year.

"This is not a nine-day one-off," said Christopher Barger, General Motor's director of social media. "Everything we're doing here needs to have applications we can build on beyond Austin."

Returning from nosedive

This program is one of the first major social-media and technology campaigns from a Big Three automaker other than Ford Motor since the industry took a nosedive in 2008. But Mr. Barger said Chevy's social media, augmented reality and mobile programs at SXSW are not intended to steal the digital-savvy spotlight from Ford. Instead, they're test pilots for the embattled automaker, which Mr. Barger said plans to commit about 30% of its marketing money to digital this year.

Chevrolet is launching an extensive digital campaign at the music, film and interactive festival, including a tie-in with Austin, Texas-based Gowalla, where users check in from their phones around the city to get messages and SXSW offers from the General Motors brand. For example, those flying into Austin can check in at the airport for a free ride downtown in an Equinox.

"The reason we're doing this here is so really smart tech people can make suggestions," Mr. Barger said of the swarms of digital agency and technology people that descend on Austin every March. "This is a place for us to learn. How do we apply this to the rest of the marketing we'll be doing moving forward?"

Strides in digital innovation

Chevrolet has also affixed QR codes on the hoods of cars that, when photographed with a camera phone, will launch microsites with features info. Chevy's also released the iReveal app to view three-dimensional, augmented reality models of cars on the streets of Austin. While none of these programs -- save free rides from the airport, of course -- sound revolutionary, it's a good start for an automaker that has fallen behind Ford on digital innovation. Mr. Barger said that while GM has kept its eye on Ford like any company does with a competitor, it's not looking to emulate what Ford has done in social or digital media.

"If really all you're doing when building a strategy is looking to what others have done, you're not going to be successful," he said of GM's plans for digital vis-a-vis Ford. "You need to draw attention to your own brand and find something unique to you."

Chevy has also handed out eight cars for teams to road trip to Austin from all corners of the country, while completing missions determined by Twitter followers along the way and tracking their progress through OnStar and Facebook, though the idea to put people in a car and have them document their experience through social media bears some resemblance to Ford's Fiesta Movement.