South By Southwest has successfully taken over the streets of Austin, Texas.
With model activations spilling out of bars, eating places, parking tons and venues, and tons of of celebrated founders, entrepreneurs and tech savants talking on panels in and across the metropolis’s downtown motels and conference middle, the excited buzz of the pageant is palpable all through town.
Main advertisers have descended upon town in tandem with SXSW, each as pageant sponsors and as individuals. C4 Power, Itaú Financial institution, Porsche, Showtime, Slack, Volkswagen, White Claw are the occasion’s main sponsors, with differing ranges and codecs of brand name presence all through the pageant.
Dozens of different manufacturers are concerned in several capacities, from merely paying to have an SXSW-branded collection of occasions, contributing to panel discussions or sponsoring particular parts of the pageant, like music, movie or comedy.
Entrepreneurs instructed Adweek that the pageant’s cross-section of attendees—starting from music and comedy to movie and rising tech—affords a novel proposition for model sponsors.
“South By is only a massive, broad, cultural, revolutionary tent,” Puja Vohra, evp of brand name advertising and technique for Showtime, instructed Adweek. “You simply must be there.”
Showtime exhibits up once more
Along with its standing as an excellent sponsor for SXSW, Showtime additionally sponsors the SXSW Go app. Every time attendees open the app, they see an advert for Showtime’s model activation centered on the thriller/horror collection Yellowjackets, which is open to the general public on March 11 and 12. The model’s brand can also be on half of SXSW’s iconic tote luggage—HBO Max has its brand on the opposite half of the branded stock.
Showtime declined to share how a lot it paid for its sponsorship deal, citing aggressive causes.
Whereas attendance numbers received’t be finalized and out there till after SXSW wraps, Peter Lewis, chief partnerships officer for the occasion, instructed Adweek that it expects this 12 months to be “on par” with the type of participation they noticed previous to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Partnership costs for 2023 had been larger than final 12 months, when Covid-related uncertainty stored costs a bit decrease, famous Micky Ogando, CEO and chief inventive officer at Austin-based indie company Bakery. Final 12 months, Bakery consumer and Texas-based beer model Shiner was the official craft beer sponsor of the pageant. This 12 months, the brewer’s diverting these funds to different partnerships, Ogando stated—partly as a result of elevated price of sponsoring SXSW.
Bringing Slack to life
Slack, one other SXSW tremendous sponsor, is bringing its personal immersive expertise to the Texas capital this 12 months. Whereas the communication platform additionally activated at SXSW final 12 months, its 2023 presence has a a lot larger footprint and a broader mission—to indicate of us that Slack can do much more than simply ship messages to your colleagues.
“We’ve got an enterprise viewers, which is extra of these software program determination makers, C-suite people, after which now we have our self-serve viewers, that are staff influencers and normal inhabitants,” Colin McRae, head of brand name and inventive at Slack, instructed Adweek.
The activation itself, which sits alongside Congress Avenue in downtown Austin between March 11-14, brings to life a few of Slack’s newer and lesser identified options. That features issues like automating rote duties or connecting by way of huddles and clips, McRae defined.
Celebrating 50 years
For Patagonia, bringing the model to Austin served a special objective. The corporate at this time launched its fiftieth anniversary marketing campaign, coinciding with the primary day of SXSW.
The marketing campaign focuses on “activism, aware consumption and connection” as a manner of “connecting folks to motion and serving to meaningfully change folks’s habits,” defined Aileen Ottenweller, head of brand name and enterprise affect at Patagonia.
“To kick off at South By, we deliberate a collection of occasions that assist catalyze that for the Austin group,” she stated. That features internet hosting runs, completely happy hours and path cleanups in addition to offering areas for grassroots environmental teams like PODER, City Roots and Austin Youth River Watch to attach with folks. Patagonia’s restore truck will even be out there to assist folks preserve their gear in play for longer.
The corporate paid a price of round $5,000 to co-brand its SXSW-related programming and to make sure that its occasions can be found to attendees by way of SXSW’s on-line and in-app schedule, Ottenweller stated. Whereas it’s not an official sponsor, Patagonia’s CEO Ryan Gellert will probably be onstage with Katie Couric for a keynote on March 12.
