By Bryan Keplesky, Door Number 3 art director
It’s been a week since the 2010 South by Southwest Interactive, Film and Music Conference came to a close. The taped-up posters and trash on the streets of downtown Austin have been swept away. All the free schwag has been itemized and tossed or stowed. And every brand that came into town to promote itself has packed up and gone home. In fact, right now, from Door Number 3’s Austin perch, it doesn’t look like one of the largest annual conferences in the country even took place. So, with another SXSW gone, the question remains: What is there to take away from a branding, marketing and advertising perspective?
Twitter Still Reigns
SXSW Interactive (SXSWi) only reinforces how cyclical these new social-media technologies can be. MySpace, a huge presence a few years ago, was never really mentioned at all, although it continued to partner with Spin during the Music portion by hosting a daily lounge. Facebook’s face time has diminished as well, unless it was spoken about in the context of user privacy.
Twitter continues to be the dominant social-media brand discussed at SXSWi. This year, Twitter CEO Evan Williams, in his keynote interview, unveiled a new platform called @Anywhere (there was no new advertising platform, as was wildly gossiped about leading up to his keynote). So, what exactly is @Anywhere? The official descriptions and explanations have been pretty vague so far, only going as far as saying that partner Web sites (e.g. NYTimes.com, YouTube, Yahoo! and others) can integrate the Twitter experience through Javascript on their respective sites. The overall public reaction has been tepid. It’s a "wait and see" moment.
Location, Location, Location
@Anywhere may not be the technological Second Coming, but has anything else filled the void? Well, location-based applications (Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, etc.) were the subject of more panels at SXSWi than anything else. But none of them have been able to grab the spotlight from Twitter. There’s one big reason for this. No one—and that includes developers, users and advertisers—knows what, exactly, to do with them. Are they games? Are they another way for people to keep in touch with each other or explore the cities in which they live? Are they just to keep a record of where you’ve been? There’s a lot of interest in how adding location to the social-media mix will change the way we all interact. There’s just no definitive answer, and no definitive application. Yet.
But brands are especially interested in location-based apps. Brands were way late to Twitter, and don’t want to miss an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. But the same dilemmas we’ve seen in the past are coming up again when figuring out how to integrate brands and social media. The people who use these apps don’t want to be overwhelmed with ads, or with inauthentic messaging. Also, there still aren’t tons of people using location-based apps, which makes large-scale ad campaigns a tough sell.
If no one figures out a way to advertise in these apps (although the campaign Foursquare did with Pepsi was successful), there is no question that brands can still get immense value from the data of the apps. In fact, Foursquare just announced a new suite of free analytic tools that will allow businesses to keep track of visitors to their establishments. There’s a world of data that location-based apps are capturing—essentially, the daily habits of their users. What brand wouldn’t want access to that?
Take It to the Streets
Downtown Austin was flooded with a variety of street marketing, and all the usual vehicles were there: posters, attractive street teams, branded cars, Segways (yeah), aerial banners and eco-friendly sidewalk graffiti. The problem is that most of this was nothing more than noise. One brand that did a good job of street marketing, though, was ESET, a maker of anti-virus software. Utilizing branded vehicles, street-team schwag and a sprawling interactive billboard, ESET (with a campaign created with Monster Media and BBDO West) was able to capture attention multiple times and in various locations.
It was creatively executed, especially the way old tech and new tech were used together. This simply reinforces that when new technology comes into the public space, brands should look at it as another tool in the ever-expanding tool kit. In the case of ESET, a lone interactive billboard (albeit a really cool one) wouldn’t have been enough to get people talking. But combined with the traditional ways of getting eyeballs on logos and promotional scwhag in hands, ESET and its creative partners demonstrated that all the newest flashes and bangs are cool, but are most effective when worked into a solid overall strategy.
Cue the Music
The SXSW Music festival brings in a whole new wave of street marketing. The reality that brands at SXSW have to face is that people on the streets are moving quickly from one show to another. Brands that can successfully integrate into events are much more successful. Even Mountain Dew has its own record label, Green Label Sound. They had an official showcase with buzz-worthy bands like Neon Indian. People were there, as were Mountain Dew-branded ephemera and photo booths.
There’s no better team creating a branded event for a captive audience than Levi’s + Fader Fort. Combining Fader magazine’s access to cool bands and Levi’s cash, the Fader Fort (as it’s casually called, though once inside the branding is all Levi’s) was a four-day free event. There’s a Levi’s store, tons of imagery from Levi’s "Americana hipster" ad campaign, and free alcohol (courtesy of Budweiser and Southern Comfort). It’s a marketer’s playground. Why try to take your brand to the streets when, for the right cost, you can create an event within SXSW? It was free to RSVP, and the lines were long to get in, perfecting the delicate balancing act of being inclusive yet exclusive.
SXSW continues to attract the big bands, the big thinkers and the big tastemakers. That will keep the big brands (and the small brands) making the annual trek to Austin. The brands that leave an impression on people, as opposed to getting tossed into the trash the day after SXSW, are the ones that focus on the experience. They can filter out the noise and the chatter. SXSW is one of the greatest things about Austin, and the brands that can enhance that experience come out in the win column. Door Number 3 will be back at it again next year, keeping tabs and keeping score for you.
About Door Number 3 (www.dn3austin.com)
Since its beginning in 1994, indie shop Door Number 3 has unlocked and unleashed its unique style of advertising and branding for clients from coast to coast. While respecting standard practices and appreciating proven methods, the maverick boutique shop goes far beyond causing consumer reaction. Instead, Door Number 3 influences behavior. Based in culturally and creatively rich Austin, Texas, the award-winning advertising, media and interactive agency represents a diverse stable of clients including the Alamo, Dallas Stars Hockey, Aramco, Habitat for Humanity, the Austin Film Festival, the University of Wyoming, Dallas/Fort Worth Area Tourism Council and CEDRA Corporation. Door Number 3 has been named one of 50 Central Texas Businesses to be named "Best Places to Work" by the Austin Business Journal.
