Concerts Have Always Left Hidden Wastelands. This Music Festival Puts Sustainability on the Main Stage

Since the dawn of the modern music festival, environmental sustainability has been a challenge for the sprawling events. At the iconic Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, attendees left mountains of trash—the impacts of which are still visible at the site of the festival, decades later. So when experiential marketing firm Superfly launched its first music festival, Bonnaroo, in 2002, the founders wanted to ensure that its environmental legacy would be a positive one. From the beginning, they partnered with Clean Vibes, a company that specializes in responsibly handling waste from big events. As waste management and packaging technology evolved, Superfly and Clean Vibes eventually teamed up with Eco-Products to build a composting facility at The Bonnaroo Farm in Manchester, Tennessee. That operation handles all the food waste, bioplastic cups and other compostable waste generated during the four-day summer event. At Outside Lands, a 15-year-old festival held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, Superfly worked to expand beyond its exceptional waste management capabilities and into the brand activations, experience and landscape of the festival itself. Its agency arm developed an interactive activation for Intel at Outside Lands, demonstrating Superfly's taste for integration and utility when it comes to brand partnerships at its events. "We don't do stage signage," Rick Farman, co-founder of Superfly, told Adweek. "Everything is some kind of integrated experience where we really work with brands to create something that wouldn't be there if they weren't there." The iconic windmill structure was redesigned this year to create a lighted, moving structure powered by solar energy. Enhanced experiences Superfly, which was born out of a passion for live music events in the 1990s, has evolved beyond a company that just puts on concerts. In addition to the music festival part of the business, it also houses a licensing business that builds out events based on film, TV or music properties. That arm, called Superfly X, creates spectacles like The Friends Experience, The Prince Experience and Harry Potter: Magic at Play. Some of those shows tour around the country, while others are more permanent. The one that's based on Friends, for example, stays close to its roots in New York City. The third arm of the Superfly business offers experiential marketing agency services for brands like Citi, Intel, Bose and AT&T. At Outside Lands, that arm of the business helped bring to life Intel's new tagline, "How Wonderful Is That?" It was part of an interactive experience featuring a comfortable lounge stocked with bean bags and phone charging stations. QR codes placed around the tent led to augmented reality games on Instagram. In the center, fans were challenged to a Dance Dance Revolution-style video game. The activation design was led by Superfly vp and head of strategy Meghan Taylor and creative director Mathew Dillman. The Wonderful by Intel activation was designed by Superfly's agency arm. "The fan is getting really direct value out of the fact that a brand is there, rather than just looking at an advertisement," explained Farman. "They're actually interacting with the brand in some capacity—the brand's bringing some experience to the event and that's enhancing the event, enhancing that experience." But beyond just giving festival-goers a calming respite from the constant stimulation and excitement of the event, Intel's tent also offered a plethora of information about its sustainability initiatives. Visitors could find out things like how to support sustainable fisheries in Norway and how Intel is funding water restoration projects in the Western U.S. and India. "Our idea was to create this digital pond as a setting to tell all of the stories of sustainability and tech for good that Intel has," Dillman explained. The inside of the activation featured a DDR-style video game. Connecting with Gen Z Outside of the tent, Intel also helped to power the newly redesigned Outside Lands windmill—an iconic landmark of the festival—using solar power. Along the pathway from the windmill to the solar panels was a series of informational panels explaining its renewable energy projects around the world. "Sustainability is at the heart of everything we're doing, but we haven't been getting that message out in a way that's speaks to and is relevant to these younger audiences," John Coyne, vp and general manager of brand, creative and media at Intel, told Adweek. "We've not done a great job in the last five years of staying connected to and relevant with younger millennials and Gen Z." The activation served as something of a "soft launch" for Intel's first global brand campaign in more than five years, said Coyne. And given its location in the heart of a tech and sustainability-obsessed city, Outside Lands felt like a perfect place for Intel to introduce (or reintroduce) itself to a younger fanbase, Coyne said. Working with Superfly allowed the brand to do that in an interactive and tactile way, too. By scanning QR codes inside the activation tent, fans discovered an AR fishing game where they could win VIP upgrades. "We have stories to tell in spaces that are really interesting to this audience," Coyne said. "We're going to challenge ourselves to think about how can we do more things that are just more surprising and more relevant." Intel also hosted an e-waste donation program at a civic center in downtown San Francisco, the site where attendees picked up their wristbands ahead of the festival. In exchange for their donation of an old laptop, phone or tablet, people were entered into a raffle for general admission tickets for their friends or VIP upgrades to their current passes. (That potential upgrade not have been enough of an incentive, as just 43 devices were donated in the end.) The inside of the activation aimed to act as a resting place in the midst of the busy, sometimes chaotic, festival. Standing inside the Wonderful by Intel activation at Outside Lands on the festival's first day, around a dozen young people lounged on the bean bags, charging their phones and quietly talking in the cool, dark space. It was a stark contrast to the bright sunshine, loud chatter and booming music outside the tent. A small crowd waited their turn for a shot at a high score on the DDR machine. Compared to some of the more stunt-driven experiential campaigns that Taylor has worked on in her career, she noted that "this just feels like it has a little bit more permanence in the world. There's a lot more interaction and emotion going on." Around 5,500 people attended the activation over the three-day event, Intel said. The AR filter got limited engagement, with just 10 stories on Instagram and 1,900 impressions. The DDR game was a hit, though—it was played more than 1,500 times during the festival. Fans stomped on those arrows more than 70,000 times. Nearly all the cutlery, plates and cups sold at food vendors could either be recycled or composted. Innovating away from single-use plastic In some ways, addressing waste at a music festival is much easier than it is out in the real world. A whopping 225,000 people attended Outside Lands this year, but Superfly and its event production partner Another Planet were able to control—for the most part—what was brought in by attendees and vendors. Large-scale events like this one allow the organizers to experiment with how best to handle waste in a controlled environment. Volunteers from Clean Vibes help sort trash into the appropriate containers. In the two decades since Bonnaroo launched, significant innovations have made it easier to find greener ways to handle waste during these festivals. Thanks to a robust industrial composting system within the city of San Francisco, all the single-use utensils, cups and plates are able to be composted. The festival estimates that 90% of its waste from the 2021 event was redirected from landfill, instead finding its way into a recycling or composting system. (At press time, data from this year was still being compiled.) That's thanks in part to completely eliminating single-use plastic water bottles during the festival. Instead, fans could use free water refill stations, encouraging them to bring their own bottles. Water refill stations around the festival eliminate the need for single-use plastic bottles. When asked what packaging innovations have made the biggest impact on improving landfill diversion at Superfly's festivals, Farman pointed to composting. "Composting is huge, no doubt about it," he said. Outside Lands has also changed the game on refillable cups for the entire city. Working with San Francisco's Department of the Environment, the festival developed new health and safety measures that would meet the required standards while allowing for cups to be reused and refilled at their wine and beer tents—something that was previously impossible under the city's regulations. Wine Lands, a tent within Outside Lands featuring wine booths from dozens of California vineyards, sells its reusable cups for $2. San Francisco then adopted those new health and safety measures for refillable cups for all events citywide, awarding Outside Lands with an Environmental Service Award in 2019 for its work on the project. But there's still more work to be done. "We've been trying to adopt a reusable cup program—where you can wash [cups] onsite—for a long time, and we have not been able to figure it out quite yet. The numbers haven't added up," said Annie Farman, executive member of the board for the Plastic Pollution Coalition, of which Outside Lands is a member. (She is also married to Outside Lands co-founder Rick Farman.) San Francisco's composting system makes compostable cups a simple solution to plastic waste. Getting to 100% reusable cups is the goal, Annie Farman said. And given the success the festival has had with compostable cups in partnership with the city, it would help to have a broader range of compostable cup options at Outside Lands—like more sizes and styles of cups for holding wine and cocktails. The festival's continued progress is one of the draws for brands like Intel, too. "That sustainability story wouldn't have happened without the understanding of the Superfly team, creatively, and what they're doing at [Outside Lands] more broadly," Coyne said. Pitchfork Music Festival Sees Revenue Rise 112% Thanks to Custom Campaigns