Spanning all 5 days of the SXSW Music Festival, Hype Hotel was the unofficial flagship party of the festival. From 2014-2015 I had the great privilege of working with the Hype Machine team to sell in and execute various brand activations for Mazda, Taco Bell, Samsung and more.
In 2015 we moved the Hype Hotel to a larger venue with more outdoor space. This opened up opportunities to program in larger-scale and indoor/outdoor activations. Including a larger version of the Taco Bell Feed the Beat pop-up that had been a staple of the event year over year, as well as an onsite activation featuring a Mazda vehicle.
As an official sponsor of SXSW, Mazda had a large footprint across the 2015 festival. Hype Hotel stepped beyond the banner to create an interactive music experience for fans. We covered a Mazda vehicle with hundreds of sound enabling sensors that turned the car surface into a playable instrument. Each sensor played a different sound allowing event patrons to tap on various parts of the car to create their own music experience. For added measure, we invited 2-time Grammy-nominated artists ODEZA to use the car to create a custom track which was then released as branded video content.
Taco Bell had an ongoing relationship with Hype Hotel when Townsquare Media began representing Hype Hotel, however our teams were able to grow that relationship year over year throughout the life of the Townsquare partnership with Hype Hotel promoters Hype Machine. Onsite Taco Bell had a strong presence in the form of a pop-up location that served as the launching point for new products like the Doritos Locos Tacos. Taco Bell, alongside a suite of partners served as the Presenting Sponsor for post-event video, editorial and social content. During my time at Townsquare Media, I managed sponsored campaigns and acted as chief liaison between the company and our external publisher network. In this capacity it was my responsibility to build sales facing materials, and execute programs post-sale.
The Townsquare Media network was home to a number of highly respected music blogs across genre. This allowed us to build branded content campaigns that had vast distribution across the network. Throughout my tenure, I worked with editors and content managers to drive synergies across our ecosystem. Consequence of Sound (COS) was already a part of the Hype Machine algorithm, which made for seamless cross-promotional opportunities like COS programming a day of Hype Hotel and promoting SXSW artist content. This was one example of many, where I worked tightly with publishers to manage cross-promotional efforts.