March 10, 2025 we hosted our second annual Club Ichi Experience Crawl at that famous Austin springtime festival.
About 30 people joined us throughout the day to go Behind the Brands and learn why each company chose to activate at SXSW, how they were measuring success, and what they intended to do with the leads.
Though our logistics were spot on (David T. Stevens®, PMED ran our event like a freaking master), and Kendall Kerr and the PRA Business Events Austin team made sure we rode around Austin in the nicest bus we've ever been in, the overall experience around the first weekend interactive portion of the event was... Meh.
Not at all a reflection of the festival itself. Programming continues to be top notch. speakers and celebrities are always a draw.
But last year, we were wowed by Sharpie house, La Croix house, UHG and so many incredible consumer activations.
This year, the Museum of the Future from Dubai and the Rivian activation were beautiful and well-executed!
And we made lots of other stops, too; Torchy's Tacos's was at the top of the list of awesome sauce because Club Ichi pulled the ultimate power move. One of our Insiders loves Torchy's and tattoos so much, she got a real tatt!!
But beyond that, what we learned was a reflection of this year's economy and the way companies are spending money.
There were far fewer top of funnel consumer activations this year.
The ones that were there knew why they wanted to be there... Which was different from last year.
More of our conversations revealed that brands had dialed in their goals.
Rivian targeted test drives and qualified conversations and had a goal to hit.
The Dubai Museum of the Future drove a cultural and economic development conversation, and also ran their own hosted buyer program. (The Czarnowski team CRUSHED IT with that activation! Mind-blowing execution!)
But from a top of funnel perspective, the "wow" activations were only around for a couple of days. By the time our group did our experience crawl on Monday, most of them had closed.
A far cry from last year where most were open for four full days. This year they were mostly 2-day activations. Cost cutting?
Last night, Club Ichi hosted our own beautiful 26-person private dinner in partnership with Jennifer York, CMP and the MGM Resorts International.
And it seems THAT is what most brands did this year at SXSW:
Private, bottom of the funnel, deeply intimate, invitation-only experiences.
No pouring un-trackable money into top of funnel brand awareness.
Companies doubled down on ROI, bottom of the funnel, moving and accelerating deals... true conversion or deep relationship-building.
So while our experience crawl did not result in the same "fun" footage as last year, we learned a lot about what's happening in our world right now.
Prediction: more Bottom of the Funnel experiences at festivals in 2025 - Which makes for less fun festivals...but potentially higher ROI for brands activating there.
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