The famous SXSW Festival in Austin which incorporates Film, Music and Interactive, is getting bigger and better with each year. And rightly so, with technology advancing, it only makes sense that it progresses. SXSW has become a world stage for marketers to showcase their products in a playground of immersive brand activations.
Here are a few brands that knocked some players out of the park.
UNIVERSAL PICTURES JUMPING FROM A NEW HEIGHT
Universal pictures and the releasing of the new blockbuster The Mummy starring Tom Cruise, of course, took this opportunity to take their fans on a journey.
This VR (Virtual Reality) Experience was a brand activation like no other. The room filled with fans sitting on the new Positron Voyager Chair which hopes to fill movie theatres soon. The fans got to experience the feeling of an aeroplane crash from one of the scenes. The chair and the VR headset allowed the fans to feel zero gravity as the plane fell from the sky. This brand activation brought VR experiences to a new height (no pun intended).
HBO: LETTING YOU ESCAPE IN THE SERIES
This year HBO took it to another level. They have a knack for creating environments that make you feel like you’re in the series. This year at SXSW, HBO turned famous sets into escape rooms in which participants were given clues to escape within five minutes.
Sets from Silicon Valley, Game of Thrones and Veep with intricately designed. The Oval Office contained the President’s desk as well as other perfectly placed decorations. The Game of Thrones set took you to cold Castle Black and Silicon Valley’s hacker den was as chaotic as you’d expect filled with take-out containers with real food if you needed some energy to get out of there.
SEE EINSTEIN’S EXPERIMENTS BROUGHT TO LIFE
National Geographic’s brand activation at SXSW took the viewers into the mind of Albert Einstein. Nat Geo promoting their new series Genius celebrated how the exploration and creativity relate to geniuses. Further: Base Camp brought Einstein’s experiments to life through holograms of trains and a digital chalkboard with robotic arms drawing people’s faces with Einstein’s math formulas in his handwriting.
Each of these brand activations has one thing in common – Using technology to give consumers an experience. An experience that they can’t get elsewhere and one that will leave a lasting impression.
This is how we gave Lindt consumers an experience to remember at the Hello product launch.
