Looking Ahead to 2022, SXSW Is Drawing on the Lessons of the Pandemic Years

Venues, restaurants and event centers around Austin, Texas, endured an unheard of and eerily silent Spring Break in 2020. Then, when South by Southwest (SXSW) announced on October 6, 2020 that it would be all virtual in 2021, hopes of a reprieve from Covid-19's devastating effects on the hospitality industry were soundly dashed—and some of the venues central to the festival's yearly takeover of the city weren’t able to weather the silence. SXSW laid off around a third of its 175-person staff days after the 2020 festival was canceled. Usually held over two weekends in March, the 34-year-old conglomeration of film, tech, music, education and gaming festivals draws more than 400,000 people to the Texas capital. Instead of taking over every inch of empty space in Austin’s downtown area, the 2021 event was piped across the internet for a fraction of the price. Rather than walkup badges priced at $1,395 to $1,725 for the scrapped 2020 event (with early bird prices at $825), a walkup SXSW Online registration was $399 this year, and just $149 for those who bought at the starting price. The amount of content diminished, with around 1,400 sessions this year according to Swapcard, SXSW’s event platform partner. Two years ago, SXSW hosted 2,128 total sessions. Attendance followed an even more drastic pattern; the virtual event hosted 31,313 registrants—less than half of 2019’s 73,716 attendees. Brands like Audible, Wisconsin Cheese, White Claw, High Grade Hemp Seed and newly launched social audio app Swell all ran sponsorships at SXSW Online in 2021. Still, total number of brands sponsoring the festival was about half of that in 2019. That year, brands like Bud Light, Capital One, Mercedes-Benz and Uber Eats occupied the top line—just a few of the 750 brands who participated as clients or sponsors during the event. As marketers and organizers look to 2022, they’re figuring out what to keep from SXSW Online and what juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Two buzzwords, hybrid and VR, combine Organizers had a whirlwind three months to figure out a VR component for SXSW 2021 after greenlighting it in late December 2020. With more time to plan this time around, SXSW director of special projects Brad Spies said the team is hoping for a much more robust virtual reality experience in 2022. “We knew we couldn't provide just a desktop experience,” Spies told Adweek. “Our film and music festival participants would expect to be able to watch on the best screen in their house.” Digital marketing opportunities via the festival's virtual platform also allowed sponsors to more easily track and measure participation from attendees—and a more geographically diverse audience. More bang for each sponsorship buck The economic model of hosting in-person events and virtual events are poles apart. Marketers have a broader audience, but they can be distracted. Paying lower sponsorship costs could lead to less of a return. A broader, more global audience meant that some smaller brands bought wider reach on a tighter budget. High Grade Hemp Seed, a three-year-old Colorado-based company now owned by Santa Fe Farms, estimates that a comparable top-level sponsorship placement for an in-person year cost roughly eight to 10 times more than it did in 2021. The brand planned to sponsor just one category of SXSW in 2020 but expanded it into an across-the-board, top-level sponsorship for 2021 after the festival went virtual for the same price—though they declined to say how much that cost. “We had the opportunity to move to become their top level sponsor,” Jonathan Mackintosh, marketing director for High Grade Hemp Seed, told Adweek. “That brought the potential exposure into a much broader definition.” As a result, High Grade shifted its strategy from niche cannabis industry messaging to a broader narrative about hemp overall. “We were trying to elevate the industry, not just elevate High Grade Hemp Seed,” Mackintosh explained. “A lot of people were willing and interested in partnering with us and helping us achieve that, which we super appreciate.” Mackintosh said he expects the brand to participate in SXSW 2022, but the scope and nature of that involvement will depend on what’s happening in the rapidly changing industry at that time. “Ultimately our story of sustainability, our story of carbon sequestration, our story of indigenous people groups, that's really at the core of who we are.” Shipping cheese to your house Not everyone cut back spending for virtual SXSW 2021. Wisconsin Cheese blew away 2,021 attendees with a cheese mailer that was customized based on a cheese preference survey and then shipped to their homes ahead of a 30-minute virtual event session with Parks and Rec actor and comedian Nick Offerman. “This year’s investment was about 5% less than that of last year’s in-person activation and we experienced a comparable return on investment,” Suzanne Fanning, CMO for Wisconsin Cheese and svp at Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, told Adweek. Fanning wouldn't share the brand’s SXSW budget, explaining that by swapping “hard costs” like event materials and catering for shipping and talent, Wisconsin Cheese reached “the same amount of SXSW attendees” in 2021 as it did in 2019 at a limited capacity venue. It marked the brand’s third appearance at the festival. Based on its net promoter scores, social media engagement measurement and participation through chat rooms and message boards during the event itself, Fanning said Wisconsin Cheese considered the event a success. Audible, Amazon’s subscription-based audiobook platform, also adapted for the virtual SXSW. Rather than occupying a venue on Austin’s Rainey Street, it produced audiobook collections based on panels and events from SXSW Online, and launched a podcast highlighting some of the big names from the festival. “The vibe was certainly different,” Rachel Ghiazza, evp and U.S. head of content for Audible, told Adweek. “But it still allowed for opportunities to share our content collection and in turn, bring more eyes and ears to Audible. Tech platforms still launched with some brouhaha Social audio app Swell, a Clubhouse competitor that allows users to participate in asynchronous conversations rather than live rooms, debuted at SXSW this year—following in the footsteps of tech startups that used the festival as a launching pad, like Twitter and Foursquare. “[SXSW], ironically, being a virtual event, kind of led into some of our strengths,” Phil Spade, vp of account growth and management at Swell, told Adweek. The platform hosted discussions before and after panels involving speakers and attendees, and offered a space for festival-goers to talk about the films and music they were experiencing. It was “almost like a lounge to have discussions,” Spade said—something many global SXSW attendees were hungry for. “South by [Southwest] is a marketplace, and has always been a trade show,” Ben Hindman, executive chairman and head of event strategy for event marketing platform Splash, told Adweek. “If you look at that side of the equation, you have to expect that they had much more data and much more understanding of the connections that were being made inside of there so I would say trackability went up in a big way on the b-to-b side.” What Austin Looks Like Today as the All-Virtual SXSW 2021 Gets Underway