← Coffee N° 5 with Lara Schmoisman
Coffee N° 5 with Lara Schmoisman
Inside SXSW: 35 Years of Community, Creativity, and Constant Reinvention with Hugh Forrest
00:27:06
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Transcript49 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. This is Coffee Number Five. I'm your host, Lara Schmoisman. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Coffee Number Five. So I have to tell you, like a few years ago, even before I started doing so much of the beauty and wellness event circuit, I was at a little event in Austin, Texas. But it was so little that I felt overwhelmed of everything that was happening there. And by now you probably know that I'm talking about Southwest by Southwest and. But I want, I mean, we having people from different events coming to the show. But Southwest by Southwest is more than a show. I don't even know how to explain it. So I invited someone much better equipped to do it than me. So welcome Hugh Forest. Thank you so much for being here.
- [01:02]
B
Hi, Laura. It's great to be here. I am excited to talk to you for the next few minutes.
- [01:07]
A
Okay, so tell me, I mean, first of all, I want to know how someone end up leading such a big event. How was your trajectory? How did you get there?
- [01:19]
B
Well, I joined, I came on the south by Southwest team way back in the dark ages of 1989.
- [01:29]
A
Wow. That's where the dark age is. And I was around.
- [01:32]
B
So it really did exist. He was hired. The funny story I always tell about my how I got south by Southwest. I was hired because I had a computer and they didn't. Having a computer in 1989 was, I guess, a little bit rare. But didn't ever think I would stay there for 35 years. But it was a heck of a ride. Really cool to be a part of something that grew from a relatively small, music focused event to something that was much bigger and covered all kinds of different verticals.
- [02:11]
A
I really want to understand the evolution because this was a citywide event when I was there like three, four years ago and maybe was right after. Before COVID or. Yeah, before COVID And it was honestly so overwhelming that I didn't know what to do first. We have from music to technology, film, stand up comedians. It was absolutely everything. So how do you identify today? What is the event? How was the transformation? Is that an event is a festival? What is it anymore? How can you explain it because you were the one who created it?
- [02:56]
B
Well, it is hard to explain. It is hard to. For people to understand what it is without being there. I will also say that I'm a firm, firm, firm believer in the power of community. So I was lucky enough to be driving the boat for some of the time. But it was very much the community, in all the many senses of that word that built this event. So again, south by Southwest started in 1987 as a small music focused event. In 1994, we added technology and film. That was the first of many, many pivots where we added new elements to the event.
- [03:43]
A
And I have a question. When you start adding a new element, how do you decide what element to bring? And how was. How do you drive people? You drive them by the content. But the guests, what are the key elements that you feel like will bring or that, you know, that brought the audiences?
- [04:02]
B
Well, for what we did with south by Southwest, and this may be different for other event organizers or experienced organizers, the elements that we added to the event always or almost always paralleled what elements were hot and trending in Austin, Texas. So the fact that we started as a music event in 1987, there's a very strong music scene here in the 80s, there's still a strong music scene in Austin, but maybe doesn't punch quite as much above its weight as it did in the 80s. And in the early 90s, film scene here was beginning to emerge. You had these two young directors coming out of ut University of Texas at would be Rick Glinkletter and Robert Rodriguez. We're starting to make it on national scene. You also had this guy who was selling computers out of his dorm room in Austin, Texas, that would be Michael Dell. So you could see that the city was beginning to emerge as a ecosystem of technology. More recently, he say, 15 years ago, we started doing a lot more health and med tech stuff. And that was very much because the University of Texas was building a medical school here in Austin, Texas. So. And the content that we added almost always reflected what was hot and trending in Austin, Texas. While I'm no longer with south by Southwest, when, when, when I was people would always ask, would often ask me, well, what will south by Southwest look like in 2030? And I would usually say, I don't know, but it will look a lot like whatever Austin, Texas looks like.
- [05:52]
A
Over time, as we got the Internet and as we became more global and that, I'm sure that the event grew and it started taking over the city. Do you feel like you had to bring other parts of the cultures of the country in order to being able to drive that traffic and drive also your sponsors, because this is an event that people, of course they pay for their ticket, but you are heavily needed in sponsorship, correct?
- [06:23]
B
Well, we were fortunate, yes. Sponsors were a huge part or are a huge part of the revenue model of south by Southwest as well as other big events. We were big enough that we could do a whole lot of content and cover a lot of different industries, a lot of different verticals. The unifying principle here was that we always thought that creative people, no matter what industry they're in, can learn from other creative people in other industries. So maybe you're a filmmaker, but maybe seeing a chef talk about what they are doing and how they came up with their concept of a restaurant, maybe that unlocks a window of thinking in your approach. So again, it was always this idea of putting many different industries together, putting all these creative people together in a city that's always celebrated and cultivated creativity, doing it at a time of the year, March, when spring is happening and there's that literal rebirth metaphor. And lots of good things would happen when we mixed all those different elements together.
- [07:40]
A
So I'm curious, so how the life of an event Planner changed from 1980s to 2000s?
- [07:54]
B
Great question. And I think that things have changed radically. As an example, when we. When south by Southwest started In the late 80s, you didn't have. Certainly didn't have the kind of social media that we have now. So you're you that in some way that or that didn't. You couldn't market the same way. But you're also. Your mistakes were not amplified in the same way.
- [08:22]
A
Right. But something doesn't go wrong now. We can hide. We could hide it.
- [08:28]
B
Yeah, we couldn't hide it certainly as well. There were not any kind of off the shelf event organizing tools in the late 80s as there are now. Something like an eventbrite or any other ticket platform that you can essentially be up and running with your tickets sales and your website for an event and in literally half an hour. And for us, the scale of the event grew considerably and that increased the complications of the event and also made it brought lots of different kinds of concerns to the forefront, most notably safety. When you have that many people. Let me also say, Laura, that I was lucky enough to be involved with this event that brought somewhere between somewhere around 50,000 ticket holders to Austin every spring, plus 100,000 others who were just coming here for the free parties. But I also am strongly believe that scale is kind of the enemy of community that you often have. You often have much better experiences in a much smaller setting. And you said it when we started, you said that you came to Austin for South by Southwest and you were overwhelmed. And I don't think you said that in a negative, negative way. But you don't want your.
- [10:14]
A
I mean, I never expected so much going on that it was Hard to decide where to go. I. Because everything was happening at the same time and a lot of things looked really interesting and I wanted to do all being me, being mean. But I have a question. Because creating. I seen something in an event world in the last. I've been around for a while too, so. But now everything became a lot more about experiences. What's the difference that you seen and as generations? Because when you started this, the young generation were like. And now you've had to go through all the generations. How that change and what each generation. How do you have to pivot to keep attracting? Mostly because you are this festival. I mean, there's a lot of business going on too, but attracts a lot of youth.
- [11:08]
B
Sure. Well, I think you hit it on the nose there. I mean, I don't think most people are all that excited about going to events. They're much more excited about being part of an experience. So how can you create something that is absolutely unique, that is memorable, that doesn't happen regularly. And we were lucky enough to be able to do that a lot at south by Southwest. Often those experiences were sponsor driven, where one of the sponsors would do something.
- [11:49]
A
When was the point in time that you said, we need to pivot. We cannot just put shows, we need to do something else?
- [11:56]
B
I think it was always a gradual pivot. I mean, there was never a night and day of one year we followed a formula and the next year we pivoted. We always prided ourselves at south by Southwest about reinventing the experience every year, trying to rethink what was good and put even more emphasis on that. Trying to identify what didn't work so well and trying to minimize that in the future and. And again, trying to find new ways that attendees could have a unique experience by coming to this event.
- [12:47]
A
I know a lot of people and I would love to understand the process behind it that you make people to pitch to be a speaker at Southwest by Southwest. So, so how that idea came from and what did you find about why people apply and how is the selection made?
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B
Well, one of the things that we. Referencing what you said, one of the things, Lara, that we did over the last roughly 15 years is we had a speaker application process that was called the panel picker and people applied to speak at the event, which is not different than a lot of events, but how we made it a little bit different is that we partner posted all the speaker applications on a interface, on a votable interface so the community could upvote or downvote their favorite speaking proposals and that very much aligned with our belief in the power of community. It aligned with kind of a belief in open source. It aligned with this idea that we wanted to find new speakers, new people with new ideas, as opposed to trying to simply showcase the same kinds of speakers that were appearing on a lot of these kinds of events. And this turned out to be a very successful element in our. In the growth of south by Southwest. Doing the speaker process this way, I'm not sure how it will be for 2026, but for the last 10 years, roughly 70% of the conference content I.e. panels and presentations at the event came from UGC. You just generated content that was entered via this panel picker process.
- [14:36]
A
So there is anything that you say, I tried and it didn't work that well, but we tried.
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B
I don't think we have have that long in the show to talk about all the things that we tried.
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A
I love to hear that. Because even success, successful events, or everything we do, every. Everyone that is successful in something fails in other things. Is the only way that you balance it and you learn from those things. The learnings. When you fail, I think that you learn more than when you win.
- [15:08]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Failures are just one step closer to a success. Right. So some of the things that didn't. Didn't work quite so well is. Or that we pivoted from and weren't learned better is. I mean, for instance, we used to. Or for many years we would follow the traditional conference model of doing our keynote speaker as the first presentation of the day. And you know, we eventually wised up and realized that a lot of the attendees were still sleeping at the first.
- [15:47]
A
Oh, don't tell me about it. Sometimes when I'm a speaker in events and you have like the last spot of the day, I say, oh my God, that's gonna be tough because people are really tired right then.
- [15:58]
B
Well, last spot of the day is. Can be tough as can be the first spot of the day. We ended up pivoting the keynote to middle of the day, which seemed to work a lot better. More people there and that's when they're most energetic. We tried, you know, we tried doing, for instance, given my belief, given our belief in the power of community, we would try doing town halls during the event, which were kind of like open, you know, an open forum where registrants could come in and talk to us, ask questions, give suggestions. It was always a great idea, but we would never get that many. You know, the room would not be that full. So that was something we pivoted away from. I also think that, you know, the more we did this event, the more we realized did this experience. Ding, ding, ding. Experience, not events. We would realize just the importance of those three words that businesses often talk about. Location, location, location. Meaning that the things that were that often or that almost always were the best attended were the things that were easiest for people to go to. If you're forcing your, your attendees to walk a block or two blocks or three blocks or something that was often going to be, attendance would often suffer on that. So again, those are some of the lessons that we learned. But you know, always trying to, to be as open as possible to pivoting and changing year after year and nothing be set in stone. I think that becomes harder to pivot and change the longer you do something and the bigger crowd you have coming. Scale makes that difficult. But again, the more you can be responsive to your community, can listen to your community, can interact with your community, can engage with your community, I think the stronger your event, your organization, whatever you're doing becomes.
- [18:11]
A
Walk me through a year from let's say that you just finish a show and let's not go to the post show, but then say, okay, we take a few days off and then we need to start planning the next year. How is a year in the planning or six months? How do you work in the planning or such a big event? How is your team? Because I'm sure over the years it was growing and then you have someone for the film and someone. So I want to know the whole process of creating an event like this. This is fascinating.
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B
Well, my experience doing this was as follows that as an event organizer, you're working really hard for the last three months. Going to the event, you're exhausted. Going to the event, if things go well, you kind of, you ride the adrenaline of the crowd, you get energized again and you're excited when the event is over and then the adrenaline wears out and you're really tired.
- [19:16]
A
You need vacation after that.
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B
So.
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A
And also an event that's a finish when it finished for the public, it finish after because you need to close up stuff.
- [19:26]
B
Well, you're trying to balance that with how tired your staff is. And we, I think that when I was at south by Southwest, we were pretty good at spending a lot of time post event, reading attendee feedback. It's great to read feedback from an attendee that they had a great experience, that they had a wonderful experience. It was life changing. They, you know, their startup got funded, their movie got picked up their band got signed. But it's also really important to read the feedback of people who did not have a stellar experience and try to understand what went wrong there. So we would typically spend about two months going through the positive and the negative feedback. We would have teams that divided this up into, you know, different sectors and do reports on this. And then that would culminate in some kind of big day long meeting retreat to discuss the positives and the negatives of what went right. But then by say June we were, we turned the page on the event from three months ago and we're working on the event for next March. And that's certainly one of my big beliefs that it really takes a year round planning cycle or at least a nine month planning cycle to put on a successful event. So in June that's, that would be when we would start taking speaking proposals for the next year, start thinking about the themes we wanted to do. And on the band and the band.
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A
Side, every year you had this theme.
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B
There was never one single theme, but there would be, you know, like what's the big hot and trending hot, hot trends that we think are going to be, that our community is going to want to explore at next year's event. And let's, and how do we emphasize that? Trying to think of strategies there. So again, you've got a long time, a long Runway to put the event together with the concept here that events, experiences are all about details. And the more details that you can have handled, the better the end product is going to be. I also, I'm also intensely cognizant that your audience is not on a nine month cycle. Usually they're on a two or three month cycle. And so what often happens is any.
- [22:21]
A
Situation that you feel like you were planning something for nine months and then you realized like right before show this is not going to work.
- [22:30]
B
Not so much that, but we would try to build in flexibility such that if something amazing fell into our laps two weeks before the show started, a month before the show started, you would have the flexibility, the capability to make room for that. So that, and that was one of the reasons that, that I always thought it was important to start planning nine months early. So get the, you know, get the nuts and bolts stuff out of the way and let us have, give us a lot of capability to absorb the last minute surprises, positive or negative, when they inevitably occur, occur.
- [23:12]
A
So that's in the past. What's in the future for you?
- [23:18]
B
Well, I left south by Southwest at the end of April. I'm now doing a now involved with.
- [23:25]
A
35 years very long time vacation after 35 years of work. And then what's going on with you? What can we expect from you?
- [23:37]
B
Not a long enough vacation. Now I'm doing a thing called Gather and grow experiences. And the idea is that using the lessons learned, mistakes made for my time at south by Southwest, advising other conferences, other festivals, other organizations, how they can do the best at creating a community. And I'm firmly again I've said this a few times in the podcast and we'll see it even more as I'm firmly, firmly firm, firm, firm believer in the power of community. And that means the power of bringing people together face to face. I think that while the virtual world, while we have so many tools that are so important in our life, witness the riverside studio on which we're recording this and we can do this and different parts of the country and it can be almost like we're sitting together talking. But in fact it's not like we're sitting together talking because there is something intrinsically special about people being together. The same room, the same place, the same time. I think that you bring people together. Many more people realize that we have a lot more in common than we have different. That there are a lot more ways that we can help each other, that we can hurt each other. Absolutely.
- [25:09]
A
A face to face event, it's so important in anything you do in life. And I think that Covid take that away from us a little because a lot of people start working only and interacting online and there is nothing than connecting with others in in a live event.
- [25:31]
B
Yeah. So again what we're doing with Gather and Grow is trying to preach that gospel to anyone who will listen, help them create community focused events. Events that events and experiences experience that will bring people together. And in my mind there is nothing more important in 2025 and 2026 than bringing people together face to face and helping them realize that we're much better when we're together as opposed to when we're divided and throwing sticks and stones at each other.
- [26:05]
A
Amazing. So before we go, my last question, and you know what it is, how do you drink your coffee black. Oh, I want someone to be a little more entertaining with the coffee order. Well, thank you for sharing though.
- [26:21]
B
My coffee black. Although I actually more prefer a skim milk latte as my morning drink. So there a little more.
- [26:35]
A
Thank you for sharing to you guys, was so great to have you and thank you so much for sharing all this knowledge about event planning and to you guys. We'll see you next week with more Coffee, number five.
- [26:50]
B
Thank you, Laura.
- [26:51]
A
Find everything you need@larashmoisman.com or in the episode notes right below. Don't forget to subscribe. Was so good to have you here today. See you next time. Catch you on the flip side. Ciao. Ciao.