Sundance Film Festival 2020 — Takeaways For Event Planners & Event Marketers

If you haven’t had the chance to experience the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, we highly recommend that you put it on your travel wish list for 2021! Sundance is the perfect event to enjoy some personal time and to spark innovative ideas for your upcoming events.

It’s an incredibly inspiring event full of creative talent at the top of their game making it a great place for meeting and event planners and event marketers to discover new elements to incorporate into their own events.

OUR FIRST HAUTE HOUSE EVENT WAS A COLLABORATIVE GATHERING SUCCESS

We held our inaugural Haute House event at Sundance, which presented the opportunity for event organizers to relax and take in an event as attendees.  In partnership with Proxfinity, Haute Companies, and Cambio we created a collaborative gathering space empowering human to human connection.  We were thrilled to meet event marketers and event planners from Dell Technologies, Warner Brothers, Adobe, Amazon, and many more, who joined to relax and connect.

Proxfinity launched the CUE 2.0 at the event enabling some interesting networking opportunities.  Attendees wore the new smart badges and were alerted when they had things in common with other participants like biggest strength & challenges, things that make you uncomfortable, and to shake it up a bit, their spirit animals!

If you’re an event marketer or event planner, we’d like to share some of the most valuable things we learned at Sundance!

SHARING A COMPELLING BRAND STORY

In today’s world, people are always looking for meaning. They want to make authentic connections with the brands they support. In order to build lasting relationships, brands need to tell a compelling story that resonates with their audience. The story needs to be told over and over again, through everything a brand does, including brand funded content and product placements.

We loved the concept of the Sundance sanctioned event, Brand Storytelling, which focused on the practice of telling an effective brand story and how to communicate that story to a wider audience. This four-day experience celebrated the rise of brand-funded content, which savvy brands frequently use to relay their message through various marketing channels.

The Brand Storytelling event included multiple presentations, panel discussions and networking opportunities for top brands, agencies, media companies and content studios. This event brought together some of the most creative minds and thought leaders from all corners of the industry to discuss the crucial aspects of brand storytelling.

We walked away considering how meeting planners can incorporate the concept of brand storytelling into events. Perhaps organic product placement is a sponsorship you can offer to boost your events? Or, maybe you can gather short brand videos from your sponsors that connect with your conference theme and tell the story of their brand? 

“The most successful brands today are those who are invested in content that entertains, informs and inspires their target audience and retains customers,” said Brand Storytelling’s Rick Parkhill to Vanity Fair.

CREATING MEMORABLE BRAND EXPERIENCES

Much like brand storytelling, brand experiences are an important aspect of creating a lasting connection with targeted audiences. Experiential activations increase brand awareness and brand loyalty through memorable experiences.  Our Haute House partners Haute Rock Creative are pros at this.

This year at Sundance, Amazon’s Audible created an activation called Audible Speakeasy, where festival attendees could meet and relax between film screenings. The activation also featured panel presentations by celebrities like Ron Howard, Rufus Wainwright and Belinda Carlisle.

Ongoing events took place at the Audible Speakeasy, including three days of panels and fireside chats which were curated by the Los Angeles Times. This brand experience gave attendees immediate insight into the Audible brand through a fully immersive experience.

Another memorable activation was Chase Sapphire’s concert featuring Mark Ronson. In Chase’s 10th year as a festival sponsor, they took the opportunity to tie multiple experiences together, including announcing Ronson as their brand supervisor for 2020 and their partnership with the ridesharing company, Lyft. Chase emulates the future of marketing, which is focused on immersive activations sponsored by the brand, which lead to memories tied to those experiences.

ACTIVISM AT YOUR EVENT

At a celebrity filled event like Sundance, it’s not surprising that many celebrities took center stage at sponsored events. Julia Louis-Dreyfus used her celebrity stature at the EW x NRDC Sundance Film Festival Panel series to talk about climate change. Hillary Clinton took the stage to discuss feminism in the lead up to the premier of the docuseries “Hillary” which will debut on Hulu in March.

Addressing world issues doesn’t have to be reserved for conferences like WORLDZ, SXSW or TED. In fact, we can do this at any of our events. Activism doesn’t necessarily have to be driven by a celebrity with a huge platform and social media following. Chances are, there’s someone within every organization that has a cause they’re passionate about who would be willing to guest speak and authentically relate to others.

All of this is to say that even celebrities with incredible reach choose to use events as opportunities to drive activism. For event planners, conferences present amazing opportunities to reach more people, educate audiences and give back to causes and communities in need of support, regardless of the scale of the event.

PLANNING YOUR NEXT BIG EVENT?

Our talent pool of event innovators are here to help!  Event planners, event marketers, and event sponsorship sales managers are just a few of the specialists ready to support you!   Let’s schedule a time to chat about how we can assist you with elevating and executing your events!